palordrolap

Henrietta Lacks hasn’t managed it yet. Look her up. It’s at least as bad as this if not more so.

“Yet” being the operative word here. There’s a disease in dogs that started in some very similar circumstances (although happening in nature rather than from a science accident). One slip-up from an immunocompromised tech with just the right genetic make-up and it begins.

There was a post on a similar subject not too long ago, and it seems the landscape shifted about 10 years ago. A whole load of alt-lifestyle folks got into Linux and sysadmin, and maybe a few previously straight-laced sysadmins came out as alt too.

Vive les différences

True. I think of it more as a semantic shift. In the old days, processes would actually quit and some other process would resurrect it as necessary, but then someone had the idea of having some processes catch the HUP and do all that itself without actually bothering any other processes.

And the implementation might actually involve an exec of the process’ own executable, meaning that it actually does self-terminate, but it leaves a child in its place.

In order of decreasing politeness: 1, 2, 15, 9 = HUP, INT, TERM, KILL = “Please stop”, “Quit it”, “I’m warning you” and “BANG”

Well, yes, but actually no. It’s an old analogue “portable” 14" CRT TV with push button channel controls. Haven’t had it switched on in probably a decade at this point, and even if I did, all TV is digital here now, so it wouldn’t be able to show anything without a lot of outside help.

There’s a VCR under it that used to serve some of that purpose, but that’s also analogue only, doesn’t play tapes any more and the remote control is busted, so yeah, no TV.

That said, I adopted the philosophy of the bedroom only being for the main bedroom activities a while ago. You know. Dressing, undressing, testing the mattress and sleeping. This may be your husband’s line of thinking.

I moved the computer out of there for that reason too. The TV and the trolley it’s on only remained because it’s in use as a clothes horse.

If you approach people and tell them you’re normal, they won’t believe you. Something similar applies to saying you’re human on the Internet.

Hello, yes, I am a human.

Suspicious, isn’t it?

The cynic in me wants to know: Once purchased, will it, and any media it might contain at any time, be under the sole control of the purchaser?

If not, it’s definitely not worth buying.

For most intents and purposes, they’re no more dangerous than a star of the same mass in the same place.

There’s also the theory that our universe could be the inside of a black hole in a higher-order universe.

Of course, trying to imagine the size of our universe, let alone an entire hierarchy of them where ours may just be itself an insignificant speck, might cause more doom sensation than less. Do with this information what you will.

OK, I’ll bite. Pedant time.

“BSD” isn’t an acronym. It’s an initialism.

Acronyms are pronounced as a words rather than reading the letters, and, well, you’d be beatboxing if you pronounced BSD as a word.

Those of a vintage beyond even my own will know that it stands for “Broken Biscuit Company”, which I believe originated on BBC radio with The Goon Show. Now that’s not an acronym, but it is another word that’s picked up an unfortunate extra meaning in recent years.

For a certain set of inputs, yes. Good luck guessing what that comprises that set even if 1) there’s documentation and 2) you read it.

Worse, for all we know, double actually adds a thing to itself, which might accidentally or deliberately act on strings. Dividing by two has no such magic.

Perl was originally designed to carry on regardless, and that remains its blessing and curse, a bit like JavaScript which came later.

Unlike JavaScript, if you really want it to throw a warning or even bail out completely at compiling such constructs (at least some of the time, like this one) it’s pretty easy to turn that on rather than resort to an entirely different language.

use warnings; at the top of a program and it will punt a warning to STDERR as it carries merrily along.

Make that use warnings FATAL => "syntax"; and things that are technically valid but semantically weird like this will throw the error early and also prevent the program from running in the first place.

Well, you see, Perl’s length is only for strings and if you want the length of an array, you use @arrayname itself in scalar context.

Now, length happens to provide scalar context to its right hand side, so @arrayname already returns the required length. Unfortunately, at that point it hasn’t been processed by length yet, and length requires a string. And so, the length of the array is coerced to be a string and then the length of that string is returned.

A case of “don’t order fries if your meal already comes with them or you’ll end up with too many fries”.

As a Perl fossil I recognise this syntax as equivalent to if(not @myarray) which does the same thing. And here I was thinking Guido had deliberately aimed to avoid Perlisms in Python.

That said, the Perlism in question is the right* way to do it in Perl. The length operator does not do the expected thing on an array variable. (You get the length of the stringified length of the array. And a warning if those are enabled.)

* You can start a fight with modern Perl hackers with whether unless(@myarray) is better or just plain wrong, even if it works and is equivalent.

Hold your breath. I mean really hold it. Keep holding. If you’re the sort of person who can do this until you pass out, do try not to do that. Try for a minute. Minute and a half. Stop before you keel over anyway.

When you finally release your breath, is it steady or do you gasp? Either way, do you feel the relief as you begin to breathe normally again?

Some of what you might feel before that relief, that discomfort, that urge to breathe, that’s a deep set reflex that is about as close as people like yourself can get to feeling panic or fear.

If you do pass out, remember that loss of control. Empathic response is not easily controllable.

Have you ever been really hungry? I mean over 24 hours without food kind of hungry. There’s a bit more of it in there. That yearning. That need.

Ever had an electric shock? The anguished scream of another person in physical or emotional pain has a little something of that to it as well. As blinding or searing as any physical pain.

An empathic response is like being hit in the gut suddenly with pain, panic, hunger and shock all at the same time. Right to the very centre of the being. Like the strong urge to breathe, the urge to be able to do something to ease the other person’s pain and thus ease your own pain is incredibly strong.

And in that last sentence you can see, from a detached perspective, why the empathic response evolved, even if you can’t feel it yourself. Humans are a pack animal and those in your pack carry your genes. The empathic response preserves the self, just indirectly. And for most people it has the “unintended” side-effect of extending to everyone, not just relatives.

Finally, there’s a joke about wishing that someone unpleasant would put a toothpick under their big toenail and then kick a door.

Put yourself in the, uh, shoes of that person - I’m not saying you’re necessarily unpleasant, only to imagine yourself doing that. What would stop you from doing so in real life? Any discomfort from thinking about doing that? Explore that feeling.

That’d be self-preservation. Imagine that, outside of your control, extending to other people.

I have no idea if any of this helps as my own empathic response is often crippling, but I hope it does.

Nerd here. That’s soft-light Rimmer. He didn’t get the hard-light drive until they met Legion in season 6.

The only things he could physically interact until then were other holographic things provided by Holly or whatever his light bee was programmed to supply.

E-e-except where the script writers made a mistake. At one point he was able to smell something burning which definitely shouldn’t have been possible. Unless Holly simulated it for him anyway. That sort of shenanigan would be right up Holly’s alley now that I think about it.

(For the uninitiated, Holly is the sarcastic and dry witted AI in charge of supervising all ship computer operations. And he’s allegedly senile after 3 million years in deep space. Allegedly.)

You can’t tell me there isn’t a coprophilia / coprophagia forum out there somewhere.

I seem to recall liking the Doctor and the Medics cover of that, even if my age could be counted on one hand when it was released.

The oft-stated did-you-know question being “Did you know the guy who originally wrote and sung it was Jewish?”. Quite the surprise when I learned that one.

But to simultaneously bring this back around and buck the trend a little, Shine, Jesus, Shine used to slap as a hymn back when I dabbled in God-bothering.

And to buck things even more, Hava Negila kind of slaps too.

Per screenshots of the “skeet” = As can be understood from screenshots of the post, also known as a “skeet”

as folks on the butterfly app = (a name that) users of Bluesky

are wont to call their posts… = like to call their posts…

“Skeet” being a combination of “sky” and “tweet”, which I hope you can figure out the origins of, and also a somewhat dirty word that the owners of Bluesky would really prefer people didn’t use as the non-generic name for posts on their platform, but is also disturbingly accurate if you compare the conceptually similar word “disseminate” for the spreading of information.

I should probably have separated the above into two sentences somewhere.

Interesting. Any sufficiently powerful magic erases all conventional weapons, so the magic of the fantasy world can’t be all that powerful in the first place.