Somewhere in middle school they give up on the “if you have two apples and buy two more apples you have four apples” or “if you have 3 pizzas cut into 8 slices each and your family eats 13 slices how many pizzas do you have left?” and they start trying to teach 11 year olds by making them memorize proofs and phrases like the transitive property of equality.

To a lot of high schools and colleges, the aesthetic of academia is much more important than students actually learning anything useful, so they teach math class with a chalkboard full of squiggles rather than any kind of practical approach.

From Algebra class on up, it’s taught as a rules following exercise. “Okay, now we do this, and then who knows what we do next?” And it is amazing how many of them are set up as trick questions, how often out of the infinite span of numbers there’s often one right answer and one wrong answer. “How many of you got five? Well you’re wrong, it’s negative 3.”

Meanwhile, I was learning how to fly. In flight school, you learn how to navigate by dead reckoning. I want to fly this course on the map, which is x distance and x degrees from true north as measured from the chart. Given a weather brief and the performance characteristics of the plane from the pilot’s operating handbook, calculate: true airspeed given indicated airspeed, altitude and temperature wind correction angle, given true course, true airspeed, wind direction and wind speed ground speed, given true course, true airspeed, wind direction and wind speed true heading given true course and wind correction angle magnetic heading given true heading and local magnetic variation time aloft given distance to travel and ground speed fuel consumed given time aloft and fuel consumption

The tool you’re taught to use to calculate all of this looks like this:

It’s basically a circular slide rule, that has a vector plotter on the back. The trigonometry is done by accurately drawing and measuring the triangle, the ratio problems (anything “per hour”) is done by rubbing a couple of logarithms together, and you’re on your own for the addition and subtraction. Ever used a slide rule? They don’t keep track of the decimal point for you. So you have to do these built-in sanity checks, like “Wait, no, the plane doesn’t even hold 70 gallons of gas, there’s no way I’ll burn that much in ten minutes.”

I learned how to do that before I took physics class, and surprised my physics teacher that I knew how to do “boat crossing a river” problems with a weird piece of cardboard. Later on, when I was teaching flight school, I taught that procedure to “It’s been 30 years since math class” boomers and “Trigonometry is next semester” teenagers. They all picked up on it without much problem, because “the wind is blowing you to the right” is a real thing they’ve felt in their own asses by now.

Soak wood ash in water.

I’m on the Gregorian calendar, 650 years ago is the year 1375. I’m in North Carolina, so if I were to snap back in time at my present location I would be a blue eyed white guy in pre-contact North America. And while I think I’m an above average candidate for the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court scenario I’m not realistically able to start “from scratch.” I’d probably make it the summer on forage and my own body fat. I don’t picture encountering the natives going particularly well, for me or them. I’m not sick and I’m vaccinated against a lot of shit but watch I’ll give them 6 centuries worth of influenza updates.

I don’t think it would help that much being plunked down in 14th century England; we’re talking Geoffrey Chaucer’s lifetime here, to them I’d sound insane. Modern English is a few hundred years off. If they didn’t trepan me to let the demons out of my skull and I didn’t die of smallpox, I’d try to invent the electric motor 500 years early and be burned for heresy or some shit.

How to make soap: Mix a fat or oil with a strong base like potassium hydroxide, resulting in an exothermic reaction called saponification.

It works remarkably well as a ska song.

I find the original Talking Heads version to be too whiny. I don’t find it enjoyable to sit through. The Cardigans/Tom Jones version I have one note, one change I’d make: Nina’s vocals seem to have a band-pass filter applied, it sounds like she’s literally phoning it in. I wouldn’t have done that.

Mental illness isn’t a skin color.

I’ve done that by car, motorcycle and airplane. Did two 3-hour legs on a motorcycle in the same day, out and back.

You know, pigeons probably do have relatively high latency but I bet a carrier pigeon could carry at least three SD cards, meaning a pigeon has hella bandwidth.

The secret is imagery.

Didn’t some Scions come with no radio? The idea being they were targeted at younger folks who were more likely to customize their stereo, so “no stereo, but all the speaker grilles and mount points for one” is a bit like the “no operating system -$211” option on a Laptop. Happy Linux user noises.

You could maybe interest me in a compact pickup truck that has a bed designed to hold plywood flat on a sort of shelf around the perimeter at the height of the top of the wheel wells, maybe with some kind of support that can span the space between the wheel wells, leaving space beneath for studs. But with a 5 foot bed…yeah remember the Geo Tracker?

hahaha okay yeah that’s adorable but they do realize toddlers aren’t allowed to buy road legal vehicles, right? Are they going to make one for adults?

Given the extremely tiny cost of digital distribution, I think this would be reason enough to never even bother talking to “publishers.”

It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood.

That phraseology heavily implies 4 feet between the wheel wells and 8 feet between the bulkhead and tailgate, the definition of a “full size” truck bed.

My S10 is not that large in either direction; the wheel wells are about 6 inches narrower and the bed is 6 feet long. I’ve hauled a bunch of plywood in it… awkwardly resting against the bulkhead, balanced on the wheel wells and tailgate, with about a foot and a half sticking out past the bumper. Can my S10’s bed “hold” a sheet of plywood?

Hell, even in a truck that’s got narrow hips, embrace the tiny and put a lip/shelf around the perimeter that supports plywood sheets from the edges so they sit flat above the wheel wells. You’d have room for studs underneath on the floor. Just make the box long enough to close the fucking tailgate.

Anybody else remember a similar rant by Terry Davis?

I do have a concern about that; a lot of pickup truck missions are go-and-get-it. The best lumber yard in my area just happens to be about 75 miles away. Not a problem for my S10, right on the cusp of what this thing can do.

I’ve seen compact pickups with 8 foot beds. That doesn’t look like an 8 foot bed. I’m strongly doubting that’s what the thing is going to look like.

Not really, no. When one or two of the legs of your daily commute requires bulk cargo handling, the added issue of “hitch up the trailer. Wait, where is the trailer? Okay, drive there, hitch it up, pull it here, then we’ll go there. Maybe get gas before you get the trailer because it’s a pain in the ass to do the gas station with a trailer hitched.” Yeah no.

I’ve never once seen it called that, at least not in American English. It tends to be labelled “cornmeal.” Almost always ground coarser that wheat flour is.