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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2025

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  • Kind of meta, but does anybody remember garage door openers back in the day? My family had one for which the “security” consisted of an 8-bit “key,” as in, the remote had 8 jumpers, and the lift unit had 8 DIP switches. You’d cut jumpers in a certain pattern, and flip the switches to match. What was fun was seeing how many garage doors around town we could open using the default pattern.

    Smart locks have got to be at least a slight improvent, right?











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    That very well could be!

    Connections often throws in red herrings, so I thought that no way could Javert and Clouseau could be connected. Then I saw Gadget, but simply could not find another Inspector. (OTOH, Clouseau, hootenanny, Moscow, and dioxide all have two O’s.)

    It does occur to me that I know a nannygoat, but never would’ve thought of it. Oh well.




  • At the risk of oversimplifying, the experimental branch of a field tries things to see what happens, while the theoretical branch takes those observations about the world and tries to explain why it’s like that. They don’t call it theoretical geology, because there’s essentially no such thing as experimental geology, so it’s redundant. (Ain’t nobody got time to run an experiment that lasts a few million years, or funding to buy a test planet.) Geologists can mostly only try to explain what we can see about the Earth. In physics, it’s the difference between bashing particles together to measure what flies off, versus figuring out why those particular things flew off.

    They properly ought to be complementary, with the theorists coming up with new hypotheses for the experimentalists to test.