I can read UPC, ISBN, and EAN bar codes. Tear the numbers off the bottom, hand me the lines, and I can tell you the numbers you tore off. Also, if you give me any specific date on the Gregorian calendar (on or after October 15, 1582), I can tell you the day of the week it was or will be on.
Finally…way less interesting…but I have a Master’s degree in math and have taught elementary, middle school, high school, dual credit, and college math classes.
You’ve memorised the Doomsday algorithm?
Indeed.
July 26, 6.000.002.024
It’s a Friday. Because all that matters in any date with a year greater than four digits is the last four digits, and July 26, 2024 is today, and today is a Friday. 😊
But, if I didn’t know July 26, 2024 were a Friday…
Step 1)
Starting numbers:
- Century is a multiple of 400: 2
- Century is 100 more than multiple of 400: 0
- Century is 200 more than multiple of 400: 5
- Century is 300 more than a multiple of 400: 3
2024 is in the century of the 2000s. 2000 is a perfect multiple of 400, so the starting number there is 2.
Step 2) 24 is a multiple of 12, specifically 12 x 2. Thus we add 2.
Step 3) 24 is a perfect multiple of 12 with zero years in excess, so we can add 0.
Step 4) There are no leap years in the 0 extra years beyond the closest multiple of 24, so we can add another 0.
Step 5) The Doomsday for July is 7/11. July 26th is 15 days after July 11th. 15 mod 7 is 1, so we add 1.
Step 6) 2 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 5
Step 7)
- 0 = Sunday (Noneday)
- 1 = Monday (Oneday)
- 2 = Tuesday (Twoday)
- 3 = Wednesday (Threesday)
- 4 = Thursday (Thorsday Foursday)
- 5 = Friday (Fiveday)
- 6 = Saturday (Sixaday)
Our total was 5, so the date July 26th, 2024 (or any year with the last four digits 2024) is a Friday.
What should also probably matter though is the existence of the sun 😉 Otherwise, how can it be a day?
To be fair though, I gave that point in time a day-like notation
I edited my response to show the math behind it. And well played with the astronomy fun, didn’t even notice it. I am a math teacher with autism IRL, so I hyperfixated on the numbers!
Compared to people around me I seem to know a lot about fashion history, textiles and clothing in general.
Hot tip, like literally a hot tip, if you’re having trouble being miserable in the hot weather this summer, try wearing 100% cotton, loose fitting clothes that cover your skin. 100% Linen or a linen/rayon blend is even better but pricey. Wear a hat. Polyester, acrylic, spandex, microfiber, they’re all plastics that not only insulate you but don’t absorb your sweat. That “moisture wicking technology” athletic clothing is always going on about is total bullshit. Wear a linen shirt in the sun with a breeze and marvel at the magic of evaporative cooling. Covering your skin with a hat and sleeves not only helps prevent sunburn, but is also your own portable shade. You know how much cooler it is in the shade, right?
You might look at pictures of old timey people all dressed in big dresses and long sleeve shirts and waistcoats in the old west and think “wow they must have been so uncomfortable!” but I bet you they were more comfortable than you in your polyester. Just ask a reenactor!
Acoustic propagation. I design large format PA systems and as a result need to know both how to make sound and stop sound at a large scale. It is entirely possible and actually relatively easy to be super precise with where sound goes or doesn’t go. The problem is cost.
Noticed you haven’t been getting any feedback on this. That’s probably a good thing right? ;)
How do I subscribe to acoustic propagation facts?
Just message me, you’ll get some!
So a lot of people are aware of active noise cancellation that you find in headphones nowadays, that works in large scale as well. The first time that type of technology was used was in the greatful dead’s wall of sound. The problem is it’s expensive to do large scale.
Just say it out loud. He’ll find you.
Confirmed they are a bat.
I’ve always agreed with that saying “jack of all trades, master of none, but better than master of one” … but I didn’t expect to feel so frustrated that I don’t have any fun niche knowledge.
This was a great question, and I’ve loved reading all the answers!
yea you and me both. Let’s sit in the audience and have fun
Imagine a Venn Diagram with three circles:
Ships and their electronics
Linux servers
Industrial roboticsI’m in the middle where all of those intersect. Pays well.
A ship, a Linux server, and an industrial robot enter a bar.
…and the bartender asks: “Is my geophysical survey data ready yet?”
And the industrial robot asks: “Why does a bartender need geophysical survey data?”
Not my question to ask. Whoever pays for the survey gets the data.
Sounds like this man is about to hack a Gibson
Have you read how to avoid huge ships?
I want that book! But gods, I’m not paying that.
Each one of these recommendations raises more questions that previous one.
Kind of hard in my line of work.
Found the guy who blocked the Suez canal
Its a sea-men-al work in the business
I’m a professional fire/sideshow performer and certified freak. I know a lot about things that are weird, morbid, or dangerous. I also have a split tongue and love to show it off. I’m fun at parties :)
Ask me anything I guess?
I also have a split tongue and love to show it off. I’m fun at parties :)
Is this your way of flirting?
I have a partner so not really? If anything it made dating harder because people are scared of it and I was always upfront about it. Other freaks love it however, as do dentists lol
Why do dentists love it?
It’s unusual but rather harmless. They see the same shit day after day, so they’re fascinated by it.
Who certifies freaks and what does the certificate entitle you to?
That was a joke, there’s no certification. But I’m part of the longest running permanent sideshow in the US and have a forked tongue
How dangerous are these fire shows for the performers?
Incredibly, but good fire performers are insured professionals for a reason. In addition to the obvious dangers of burns and fire spreading, fire eaters and breathers risk chemical pneumonia. Sword swallowers risk permeated stomachs.
I’ve always wanted a split tongue. Does it make a difference when it comes to eating ass/lickin clits/penii?
Hard to say since I’ve had it since 2017. It still functions the same as a regular tongue but has additional features so make of that what you will. Fwiw I’m a gay woman.
I once worked for a company that designed “educational” programs that turned out to be little more than glorified corporate propaganda!
Ask me what the appropriate level of cynicism should be when it comes to anything related to “corporate culture.”
Go on… ask me.
I’ll bite. What is the appropriate level of cynicism when it comes to anything related to “corporate culture”?
Kill all corporations.
I can read and write using the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the Commander Keen series
If you need an expert on the long-discontinued Motorola 96002 digital signal processor, I’m your guy! I wrote an entire graphical operating system in its assembly language and still need to maintain it from time to time, so my skills remain sharp.
thats insane and really cool! what got you interested in that specifically?
Well we built some instrumentation around it at work back in the 90s and still use it today. It was ahead of its time. It had hardware loops, a hardware call stack, hardware circular buffer addressing, and a DMA controller. In one instruction, you could do 2 FPU operations and a memory move with a DMA transfer going on in the background. It was an insane architecture. And it could handle 3 separate memory spaces, so even though it’s a 32-bit chip, you could access well over 4 GB of RAM.
The best thing about chips of that era though is you could tell ahead of time exactly how long your code will take to execute. Like you just type numbers into a spreadsheet and add up the instruction cycle counts. That kind of analysis is hopeless these days, but it informed the design of the instrument. More recently, we’ve been looking at RISC-V for a newer generation, but it’s harder to predict ahead of time how it will perform?
I know how you feel, I once made the Kessler run in under twelve parsecs myself.
Whatcha coding that needs to be so precisely timed? Something nuclear? I heard once that nuclear plants have something called real time operating systems that allow for that type of timing prediction.
I can’t say too much about it but we’re in the mining sector.
And yeah, if I had to do it all over again from scratch, I’d definitely be looking at a real-time OS. There just weren’t many options back in the day besides coding it all yourself. Even now, I’d have to benchmark the OS to see what its latency is actually like? We had it down in the microseconds range with our custom OS but if it’s more like milliseconds with an off-the-shelf OS, for example, that would change the whole ball game.
super interesting read. thanks for your time!
A really painful type of coordinate transformation I once had to develop to try and shed some insight on Hawking radiation near black holes.
Unfortunately the results were fucking ugly and I gave up trying to understand them, largely due to the fact that except under very specific circumstances they’re basically impossible to calculate (you get something similar to divide by zero errors).
Nice case:
Not nice case:
There was a ton more related stuff I could have spent a PhD working on, but life didn’t really allow it (and frankly I’m okay with that, I’m actually doing enjoyable stuff for the first time in my life instead of fighting my brain).
Are you a post-doc now? If so, congrats! If you dont mind me asking, what exactly was your research about (not a physics/mathy person so ELI5 would be appreciated)
Nah, I never even started a PhD mostly due to financial circumstances. But I’ve since realised I kinda hated academia because of untreated ADHD lol. I may go back to it one day after I’ve got treatment sorted but I really doubt it, I found my passion in music instead.
I’ll try and ELI5 haha. Think of a black hole like a battery, stuff falls in to charge it and then it discharges by tickling empty space into creating particles. The problem is that the particles it creates seem to be random, which means it acts like a big delete button for the stuff that fell inside. Due to quantum stuff, this shouldn’t be possible, so some process could exist to encode the information about the original stuff onto the particles that leave the black hole. Importantly this doesn’t actually mean the particles that leave have to be the same as what fell in, you just need to able to look at them and then reconstruct it. Kinda like if you scrambled a book in a way which makes it look random, but is actually a secret code that still has the whole story contained inside.
My research was to look for that information being written on the particles leaving the black hole, basically by comparing how space and time outside the black hole changes over time and seeing what it does to the tickling.
Holy shit that’s insanely cool actually. But yea academia does get kinda ridiculous sometimes, I’m glad you found your passion for music instead!
Assuming you meant ticking , but that is a great insight and perspective to research from!
Nah, I absolutely meant tickling. Black holes make empty space wiggle a bit and it produces particles.
The actual process is much more complicated ofc but that’s the picture in my head of the quantum field theory, if you tickle the surface of a still pond it’ll make ripples which is sorta the same thing.
I’ve been learning about air quality consultation as a backup business plan over the past few years. Buying commercial-grade sensors, researching various aspects of air quality, monitoring, and purification techniques. Nothing crazy but feels pretty niche to me.
For some reason I remember a lot of ANSI terminal escape codes. They were used all the time on DOS machines, and work in a similar way on Unix terminals.
I like the bell one. It’s useful to print a few of those at the end of what you expect will be a long program run to get your attention when it’s done.
It’s a good idea, although some terminals will pause output when they play the sound. I always disable any sound from my terminal anyway, because computers should be seen and not heard. 😆
Oh interesting. I tried turning off sound and now ctl-g flashes the terminal instead. (Fwiw I’m using the built-in terminal on a Mac.)
Alt + 0232 to 0234 for my French fam.
They don’t work on windows terminals?? I only use the color ones but I will be devastated if it turns out they only work in Linux.
I’m not sure since I haven’t really used Windows for 20 years or so. I don’t think though, since there are separate CURSES libraries for Windows which don’t operate using escape sequences.
I know how RuneScape’s bot detection works, and currently have an OSRS account that’s nearly maxed from nonstop botting over the last 6 months
Edit: I’m so confident (or maybe stupid) I’ll even share my progress: https://secure.runescape.com/m=hiscore_oldschool/hiscorepersonal?user1=nk best k
I can look at a blueprint (top, front, and side views) and imagine the object in 3D. This is probably why I find topo maps easy to read as well.
I didn’t know this skill was that niche until pretty recently
I managed a blue print shop for 7 years. I have no idea how your brain can do this. Blows my mind.
I suspected this was unusual. LOL
Hey me too! Luckily, I went into architecture.
Nice. Have you meet other Architectures that can do this?
A few, yes. Intuitive spatial understanding is what I’d call it.
I want to learn how to read blueprint. Not to be professional, just to add it in my général knowledge toolbox. Do you know some online ressources I could start on?
I do not know of any resources. This isn’t something I practiced, it’s just something I can do.
Good for you. I can’t read a blue print, let alone imagine the 3D object out of it.
I am a steadicam operator and have been making power cables for cameras. I get calls from around the USA and the world from people trying to troubleshoot their electrical systems on their Steadicam and cinema cameras.
