I remember hearing years ago that real cheeseburgers could only happen after industrialisation, greenhouses and freezing as the ingredients. On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. This is also a tale of Malthusian constraints for example you would have killed cattle after they fattened over the summer. You could kill them anytime but hunger was so common the best time was nearly always picked. And because of that rennet to make cheese was only practically available then also.
I made a graph for cheeseburgers and put it on reddit where people shouted at me. We do not realise the time constraints (and malthusian ones) on food until very recently. And I think a Gantt chart is a good way to show them. That and just making a visualisation out of a Gantt chart I thought was an interesting idea.
If you know of someone else who made a visualisation out of a Gantt chart let me know as I doubt it is a new idea.
I also made one of Club Sandwiches and I think thats also an interesting story about nature and our food. The code and data are here
I made a graph of when people in "We didn't start the fire" were born, did the act referenced in the song and died. Because Bridget Bardot died people found it interesting that only three people. Chubby checker, Bob Dylan and Bernie Goetz remain alive of those mentioned in the song.
Bonus points for a tabloid including my argument about Popperian epistemology in their quotes.
There were a few weird things I found out in this process. None of the journalists messaged me. My handle was in the image and you can message the creator of a post on reddit but none did. The poke messaged me when I was one of their 25 funny tweets of the week 4 years ago, so not doing that now about an entire article is a change.
I found a few of the authors of articles email addresses. This is hard now as how to contact a journalist now seems to be hidden. I messaged them a new version of the graph with some fixes in case they want to use that one instead, but none replied.
A fair few of the Articles using my picture I can't see as they are geo-blocked. It is a bit odd that they can take something I made and not talk to me and not let me see they thing they made from it.
and
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My silly picture is not important. But on a bigger scale huge numbers of silly pictures and jokes have made the internet fun for the last several decades. And in my experience when one of these was yours in the past some amount of credit came back to you. It didn't pay any bills or anything. But it did feel in some way that you putting in an effort was recognised and at least part of a very large group of people making silly stuff to entertain people. If the incentives are now one way, where a news organisation can use something and you can't even see it that seems like the general internet bargain has become skewed.
An Irish woman named Emma invented an the Animaniacs song listing the Countries of the World and jumped whenever a country that hasn't been invaded by Britain is mentioned.
Below is the lyrics with the countries she jumps for marked in RED.
United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama Haiti, Jamaica, Peru, Republic Dominican, Cuba, Carribean Greenland, El Salvador too. Puerto Rico, Columbia, Venezuela Honduras, Guyana, and still, Guatemala, Bolivia, then Argentina And Ecuador, Chile, Brazil. Costa Rica, Belize, Nicaragua, Bermuda Bahamas, Tobago, San Juan, Paraguay, Uruguay, Surinam And French Guiana, Barbados, and Guam.
Norway, and Sweden, and Iceland, and Finland And Germany now one piece, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia Italy, Turkey, and Greece. Poland, Romania, Scotland, Albania Ireland, Russia, Oman, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia Hungary, Cyprus, Iraq, and Iran. There's Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan Both Yemens, Kuwait, and Bahrain, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Portugal France, England, Denmark, and Spain.
India, Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan Thailand, Nepal, and Bhutan, Kampuchea, Malaysia, then Bangladesh (Asia) And China, Korea, Japan. Mongolia, Laos, and Tibet, Indonesia The Philippine Islands, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, New Guinea, Sumatra, New Zealand Then Borneo, and Vietnam. Tunisia, Morocco, Uganda, Angola Zimbabwe, Djibouti, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Swaziland, Gambia Guinea, Algeria, Ghana.
Burundi, Lesotho, and Malawi, Togo The Spanish Sahara is gone, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Liberia Egypt, Benin, and Gabon. Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, and Mali Sierra Leone, and Algiers, Dahomey, Namibia, Senegal, Libya Cameroon, Congo, Zaire. Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar Rwanda, Mahore, and Cayman, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Yugoslavia... Crete, Mauritania Then Transylviania, Monaco, Liechtenstein Malta, and Palestine, Fiji, Australia, Sudan.
list of not invaded places. All these sorts of things are arguable as the borders of countries and such change over time.Not in the song but not invaded areAndora, Belarus, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Marshall Islands, Sao Tome and Principe, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Vatican City
Theres a rule of thumb in AI agents where they should only be able to call 40 apis. After that confusion between different systems becomes a problem. Cursor has a hard limit of 40 in its MCP setup for example.
This i think could be a cognitive limit (like Dunbars number). The documentary The Price of Everything describes how Stefan Edlis an art collector only collects 40 artists (and 200 works of art). And how a hedge fund manager says that 40 is the limit on the number of stocks an analyst can follow.
It could be that there is a 40 limit on the number of complex things you can track and possible 200 individual abilities is the limit.
By having parameters,
my life is a lot easier.
- Which parameters?
- Well, 200 works, 40 artists.
-I mentioned that to a very important hedge fund guy about
I believe coal usage for electricity by China will be lower in 2025 than it was in 2024. Using Ember Energy as a data source. And I will take a $10 bet on that at 50:50 odds.
and one on world coal usage. I think this year 2025 will have lower coal usage for electricity in the entire world than 2024. But if any of the years coming up do I will win this bet.
I am not sure on these bets. I just calculated now The percentage change in coal generation from 2024 to 2025 is: -0.72%
but a lot can change in the remaining months.
Pumped storage has advantages of batteries. It doesn't go on fire. And the turbines last about 50 years not the 15-20 that batteries last. The initial infrastructure costs are high but once built it is cheap.
But just on the face of it how much would a battery version of the Silvermines project cost?
Technology
€/kW (power)
€/kWh (energy)
Notes
Pumped storage hydro (PSH)
~2,000–3,000 €/kW
~100–200 €/kWh
Civil-heavy, very site-dependent; long life (80–100y). Costs stable for decades.
Still pre-commercial; very cheap energy, but low efficiency (~60%) and expensive per kW install (slower response). Life ~30y.
Iron-air batteries are inefficient and not widely used yet but they do get around the fire issue that worries people with lithium ion batteries. Lithium batteries have had a long term trend of more than halving in price every 5 years.
It looks to me that at the moment pumped storage and batteries are about equal. Given how batteries keep getting cheaper though it is probably the case that by the time the Silvermines project completes they will seem to be the better option.
If you pick early words in wordle that have a lot of the commonly used letters you are likely to get to the correct word guess faster.
But say you were lazy and want to use the same 2 or 3 words all the time and then look at what letters hit or nearly hit to find the next word to guess.
the best pair of words is 'raise' and 'clout' which leaves an expected remaining 5.1 words that could be the answer given what letters hit and near hit. And the best 3 words are raise clout nymph which leaves 1.75 words on average that could still match the patters you will have seen.
If you want to be super lazy the best 4 words are
These won't be as good as Crane followed by optimal picking of the next word given pattersnt hat were hit. But it will be pretty close and good for the lazy.
