Detour is one of a handful of apps whose demise really tears me up. A great idea with great execution.
Rick Steves had audio tours on his app, but without the GPS initiated cue. I had no idea the original Detour podcasts were preserved, thanks for sharing!
22) Turn the AC wayyyyyyy down when the party starts
23) Buy frozen finger food and put into oven in staggered batches. When a batch is ready, immediately transfer to serving tray and walk through party offering people food. Great task to delegate to that one attendee who doesn't know anyone!
24) Polaroids/Disposable cameras are cheap and seem to be universally adored. Get a few and scatter them throughout the party.
25) Sharpies/labels for marking solo cups, drastically cuts down on clutter as the night goes on.
26) If someone brings a bottle of wine or a bottle of liquor as a gift, just crack it open and ask them to share it with other attendees. Same with food. Makes for a good conversation starter.
If you give people glasses instead of solo cups, I find that partygoers will tend to treat your house with a lot more care and respect. We have a set of glasses that have little black stickers on them that are a material that works well with chalk, so people can label them.
Yes, there's a risk of breakage & having to clean up, but overall I think it sets a better tone.
> Polaroids/Disposable cameras are cheap and seem to be universally adored.
I do this on my parties! Also sometimes people ask me to bring my gear to their parties.
The guests can either keep the photo and take home some memories or gift it to the host.
My more advanced version is that I take photos with my "good" mirrorless camera, transfer the photos to my phone, and then send them to the polaroid (Instax mini) for print. Too much work as a host, but as a gift when I'm a guest I might do it :)
The polaroids is a good idea; some more expensive / corporate parties I've been at had photo booths with random silly accessories as well. I mean it's not for me because I have no whimsy but other people appreciate it.
Not being a USian: what does turning the AC down mean? Set the thermostat to a lower temperature or make it less active (i.e. set it to a higher temperature)?
As someone who's been in a room with many people: I'm confident it means that the temperature should be low, because the room will quickly heat up otherwise.
(This is also the reason I'm hesitant about the oven tip, given that the kitchen is where the true party is.)
Right, it means to turn down the Air Conditioning to reduce the temperature of the hosting space first. The reason being that as people arrive, temps will climb into something more comfortable.
"Both spent their lives measuring the stress in stone. Both used scientific methods to answer questions that had seemed to everyone else beyond the reach of science."
Nothing, I repeat NOTHING is beyond the reach of science!
Go and investigate something that no-one investigated before, and you will find something that no-one found before.
Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Now whether [what you find] is worth the trouble of investigating (or: where one's efforts are best spent), that is another matter.
Especially the part where improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety: regulatory dysfunction at its finest. Interestingly, in other regulated areas (such as toxic emissions into the environmental), there are clear echelons regarding what is required such as BPT vs BAT (best practicable vs achievable technology). For the coal mining case, if BAT had been the requirement (and the regulating body had enough teeth to enforce it), Chris's work might have been easier to fund.
> improved safety tooling (bolts) were used to increase efficiency rather than safety
"And so, amazingly, for the first 20 years of its use, the main effect of the most important lifesaving technology in the history of coal mining was to increase the efficiency of the mines while preserving existing probabilities of death and injury."
To me, this is the hardest-hitting sentence of the entire article.
Be sure to remember this whenever a new achievement in efficiency (power or otherwise) is announced, be it in computing, industry, or transportation. Such advances are rarely aimed at lessening the load on the environment; not at first, anyway. Instead, they are used for extracting more profits, while burdening the environment just the same -- I think "more profits" is the incentive for such research and advances in the first place. I think the EU does it right, by demanding progress via regulations. Whether those directives are issued after the technological advances are reported, or the directives are the motivation for the research, I cannot say; either way, advances can be steered toward public benefits only via regulations.
Wow, what an amazing story. Fascinating from an engineering perspective. Quoting a few of my favorite bits:
>Mark began by taking a vertical slice of, say, Chartres and replicating it in a special kind of plastic. He’d then hang fishing weights from various points on the plastic replica, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, to simulate the actual external forces acting upon various parts of the cathedral. There was the direct load of the overhead stone, of course, but also the winds. (To estimate the winds in the 12th century, he found anemometer readings in rural France going back a century. Not perfect, but good enough.) He placed his fully loaded plastic model in an oven, where it was subjected not just to heat but also light. Warmed, the plastic model revealed its stresses, sort of like the way an MRI reveals damage to soft human tissue.
>“The very words ‘statistical analysis’ seem foreign to many in rock engineering. Engineers are trained to see the world in terms of load and deformation, where failure is simply a matter of stress exceeding strength. Statistics are generally given short shrift in engineering curriculums, and so the entire language of statistics is unfamiliar. Yet statistics are the tools that science has developed to deal with uncertainty and probability, which are both at the heart of mining ground control.”
>Real-life American workers were different from his mental model of them. “I had thought if they only knew what I thought, they’d see things how I do,” he said. That idea now struck him as so obviously nuts that he didn’t bother to let them know what he thought. His fellow coal miners were less concerned with his ideas about the economy and their rightful place in it than in simply making a living. Their morale, at that moment, was actually sky-high. “Coal was booming,” said Chris. “We were going to save the world. Thank god we have all this coal so we’re not reliant on Arab oil. People felt good about themselves.”
>“A mine is unlike any man-made structure,” said Chris. “It’s not a designed environment. Most of the material the structure is made from is kind of unknown. With rock you don’t know what the engineering properties are — what the loads are. You have a problem that is really not an engineering problem, but people were insisting on using an engineering mindset to solve it.”
>Again, he found work done by others and repurposed it for his uses. Back in the 1940s, geologists working for the Agriculture Department in national forests created a crude method for work crews to determine if some rock would work as a road: whacking it with a ball-peen hammer. Oddly, it didn’t matter how hard you whacked it. There were just a handful of ways the rock might react, and its specific reaction revealed its strength. Chris started whacking mine roofs with ball-peen hammers. “It’s not precise,” he said, “but it does get you in the ballpark.”
That article touched on so many facets of a person's career: the pursuit of meaning, grit, familial context... It should be required reading for all young engineers.
I'm looking to hire an expert in web animations to help me build a specific UI for a static site. I've been tackling the problem with SVGs and CSS animations but if you think another approach would work (e.g. HTML Canvas), I'm open to hearing you out. Note this is a one-off project and there is no possibility of converting to full-time.
If you are interested, please email me some past projects that demonstrate past work in this space along with your hourly rate. Looking forward to working together!
Launch HNs for YC startups get placed on HN's front page automatically - this is one of the things that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. It's in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Since the purpose of voting rings is to try to get on the front page, that construct doesn't really apply here, unless you want to call "automatic placement" a "ring".
Rick Steves had audio tours on his app, but without the GPS initiated cue. I had no idea the original Detour podcasts were preserved, thanks for sharing!