robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
What's the mechanism that creates these apparent horizontal lines in the cloud? #meteorology
I'm curious if this is some common writing system that I'm unfamiliar with. Anyone recognizes it? (A person from my city's road construction office signs announcements like this.)
I realized today that this is a good alternate way of looking at what voltage dividers hanging off a power rail do: they are like a voltage source of the expected voltage with an internal resistance equivalent to a parallel connection of the divider's resistors.
I wonder how much time will pass until I get the rest of the setup for problem 17 from https://www.iypt.org/problems/problems-iypt-2024/
And there's one more eruption near Grindavik (this time closer to the town).
Source of the image: https://en.vedur.is/media/uncategorized/Kort_StadsetningGoss2.jpg
#physics riddle
My parents have a garden ornament that contains a "vertical spiral thingy" that can freely[^] rotate. When wine blows, it sometimes rotates clockwise and sometimes counterclockwise. What gives? When it has rotated by 180 deg it should be in the same position as if the wind was blowing in the opposite direction (the cage around it nonwithstanding), so I'd expect it to always rotate in the same direction, or to oscillate.
Some videos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CQWvBBggW4jXQPKZ9
[^] there might be some weird hysteresis there, because it's basically a wire that slips in a hole
Manual plotter for drawing clothing patterns (string with distance graduations, passed through holes in fixed LEGO bricks).
Surprisingly (for general competence level of authorities in managing typical situations) nonsensical traffic sign combination.
When you don't realize that you've bought disks with quite high vibrations at seek time:
(The doohickeys are from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1774380. All in all works surprisingly well; apparently ~all the audible seek noise was coming via the case due to impedance matching.)
So, apparently not all dessicants are safeish to eat: CaO is apparently used as a dessicant (the reason it's not safe to eat is that it generated a surprisingly large amount of heat when reacting with water).
I'm curious why are dessicants from lime preferred (ever). The pictured bag is from a package of seaweed, which makes me doubly surprised: one might e.g. not notice that the dessicant bag has ruptured.
I would really like for more of my devices to come with this kind of documentation.
This in particular is a multimeter that belongs to my father; it was produced sometime in the late 80s in the Soviet block.
Qoto's web UI stopped working for me. Attached screenshot is all I get, the stacktrace the error message gives me (hooray for JS minimization /s) can be found at https://pastebin.com/XGFmNtUN. My browser is Firefox 92.0.1 on Linux.
@freemo MathJax issue: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/107122108820756990 renders as lots of whitespace and broken text in 3 column view for me. Screenshot attached.
When I look at the DOM, I see lots of spans with font size of 800%~900%.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
