K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@pganssle Here are fiction recommendations based on what I enjoyed when I was in that age range. Both are starts to longer series in case they're well received.

Relativistic effects are used in Ender's Game to allow characters to age at different rates, and it was my assigned summer reading for freshman year at my all-boys high school, so that's my recommendation for your nephew.

Sabriel has a competent female protagonist, but her enemies are so powerful that she has to outthink them more than outfight them. I read it in sixth grade, so that's my recommendation for your niece.

For nonfiction you could consider Randall Munroe's books (Thing Explainer, What If?, and How To) for your nephew. I don't have much idea here for your niece, so I'll offer the Golden Compass as a second fiction choice for her.

@garyackerman I think this derives from the educational presentation of science as detective work. In fiction, the sleuth finds clues, but not enough to publicly accuse a suspect, and declares, "I've got a *theory*, but I need more proof!" As a scientist, I try to set a good example by preferring the word "hypothesis" in these contexts.

@nationsblind any suggestions?

@mitch fair enough, I guess - it just annoys me because it's *plain text content*. Why do I need to turn on javascript to make the scrollbar work? Why is it lazy-loading the content so that I can't ctrl-F to find the one that starts with "The time cometh"? The plain text of all the Hidden Words clocks in at <45kB, which is less than the *compressed* size of the first javascript file they send me. I feel like they could've just slapped their CSS (and I'm not denying the styling is pretty) on the plain text and had a lighter-weight, more-useful, more-compatible version for less effort.

@mitch what do you like better about that version? I find it much harder to use than the old site. It's very frustrating.

@NunavutBirder the Toronto/Montreal feed is telecined horribly on CFL.ca - I hope you're having a more pleasant viewing experience.

@ShadSterling for positive reals, which is my use case, I'm going with e^abs(ln(x)) for the sake of convenience - using the exponents and logarithms to map from multiplication to addition and back. It's a bit more cumbersome to discuss for lack of a recognized name, but handy enough for doing math on.

I'm not sure that the complex extension should be real-valued everywhere. I can see why that makes a nice symmetry with the additive case, but it seems more elegant to let the function take complex values for complex arguments. So: undefined at zero, 1/z on the rest of the unit disk, and z elsewhere. It does come out odd over the reals in this case.

Is there a well-known name for the multiplicative equivalent to the absolute value function?

The absolute value function f(x), for real x, is the identity operation f(x) = x for x greater than the additive identity (zero), but it's the additive inverse f(x) = -x for x less than the additive identity.

I'm interested in the function g(x) over the positive reals that is the identity operation for x greater than the *multiplicative* identity (one), but the *multiplicative* inverse x⁻¹ for x less than the multiplicative identity.

I don't need g to take on any particular value for negative x, much less complex x, but I think the most natural extension would be that the function's rotationally symmetrical about the origin (an odd function, so g(-x) = -g(x)).

@mitch I'm of the opposite opinion. It's an entire continent's worth of cultures - it's a daunting task and *should* be hard to learn. We've made it artificially easy by speaking of "the Great Spirit", as if we could talk about "the thunder god" while mashing together stories of Thor, Zeus, and Jupiter to say anything intelligent about pre-Christian European religion.

@mitch Good luck! I made the Ubuntu -> Debian change a while back, but I found being that far behind the bleeding edge to be difficult in its own way - it was hard to find documentation and support for such old versions of the software. Couldn't make it stick.

@Clementulus good insight, thanks! To my mind, it's actually *fewer* moving parts to worry about, on account of the fridge not needing a compressor/refrigeration circuit, plus you'd get the benefits of having the heat pump on your water heater without adding another set of moving parts. That cuts most of the complexity out of the fridge, which I'd think would partly offset the costs of installation.

Taking the current fad for heat pumps one step further, is there a reason we couldn't have other appliances hooked into circuits of cold/hot/return pipes carrying a refrigerant or coolant throughout the house? For example, your refrigerator or water heater would be just a passive heat exchanger with a thermostat to open and close a valve when necessary.

In the case of a refrigerator, this would mean that in summer, the heat gets pumped to the water heater or directly outdoors, rather than getting pumped into your kitchen by the refrigerator and then pumped outdoors by the A/C. And in winter, the waste heat gets pumped into your HVAC to heat the whole house and not just the kitchen.

In the case of the water heater, this would mean that in summer, you're scavenging heat into your water that would be dumped outdoors by a traditional A/C. In winter, you'd be sucking heat in from the outdoors and from your fridge, and only having to run a heating element to make up the difference when necessary.

Diagrams to illustrate are mine. Yes I know the heat exchangers would be counter-current, but I tried to draw them as simply as possible.

@mitch good luck man

@mitch been getting worse as I get older honestly. I feel like the hot head of a teenager is supposed to cool off and leave you more cerebral as you age, but I think I experienced the reverse.

@pemensik thanks, that seems to have the options I need. I'll have to plan this out to minimise the risk of knocking myself off the internet and the disruption/downtime of the change and possible outage.

Anyone know if it's possible to generate #DNS64 entries locally on #OpenWRT? The service I use (at 2606:4700:4700::64) seems to be misbehaving, but DNS is reported to be fully functional on the Cloudflare status page. It seems like #dnsmasq ought to have all the information it needs to generate an AAAA record corresponding to the A record, so I could just use standard #DNS upstream, but I can't figure out how to do it.

@mitch huh. I thought I knew about the Web of Trust, but the thing I remembered was completely different and mostly related to PGP keys.

@mitch Here's an ACK from qoto.org at 2111 UTC. At time of writing it says the post was 35 minutes old. I voted a couple minutes ago.

@mitch I remember "dancing" to this at maybe five years old - essentially just flailing around as fast as I could to keep up with the extremely rapid pace of the syllables.