h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's gone awfully quiet around here the past three or four days

BOO!!!
Nowt appening round here either.

Quite chez Gosho, or h2g2 you mean? If the latter, yes - very quiet indeed!

I do mean the latter, yes. Almost no-one's conversations are showing new posts. Even 2legs' journal is quieter than usual

Circling the drain...

It's not the most cheerful thought, but the comparison between researchers and passenger pigeons popped into my head the other day, in the sense that once population dips below a certain threshold, it becomes very difficult to sustain.

Yeah... I feel we've passed that threshold. I still love this place, but I just don't see anything to indicate that things will improve. Silence from TPTB regarding any progress, technical or otherwise, has been worrying me for over a year. It's been a year since Pastey showed me some designs for the a new skin. Now there doesn't appear to be any expectation of it seeing the light of day.

I could be wrong, but the mere fact that we've seen precisely zero progress reports in well over a year isn't heartening. It should be no surprise to anyone that so many dedicated researchers have drifted away in recent years.

I'll go down with the ship, but that doesn't mean I want it to sink.

Color me sympatico.

Ditto - if Gosho and 2legs weren't here we'd have nothing to talk about at all.

Isn't lock-picking one of the skills Richard Feinman taught himself? Or was that safe-cracking? I think it was safe-cracking.

Oh gawd, I've done it again
F50359?thread=8313731?thread=&post=110942278#p110942240

Yes, safe-cracking. Although I'm sure he probably had a go at lock-picking too.

It would actually be a great skill to have - not for any shady reason, but just for all those times you find yourself locked out of somewhere by mistake. And indeed, all those times people ask you for help because they've done the same.

Both lock picking and safe cracking, though he did have some help from an Italian kid getting started on lock picking.

I learned my own lock picking technique from a "Hardy Boys" mystery.

The one occasion I ever had to hire a locksmith (I didn't have my tools handy), he used exactly the same technique I'd learned from the "Hardy Boys" mystery.




Later, in junior high school I noticed that the combination locks on the lockers had a little slop zone, so that one could miss any one of the numbers by as much as two digits and the lock would still open.

Then, one day, I accidentally opened my neighbor's locker and realized that the combinations in that bank of lockers had been set systematically, so that each differed in only one digit by the amount of one from the previous and successive numbers.

Experimenting, I found that the system held over the entire bank and that I needed only do a little arithmetic to get the combination of any one of those lockers.

The point was one of purely academic interest to me

I wasn't interested into getting into anyone's things.

This same problem with combination lock security was one Richard Feynman was constantly striving for improvement on.




Personal glimpse, when mother divorced her second husband, he left behind a jewellry box on thr floor of a closet.

I picked it up, shook it, something rattled inside.

I tried to pick the lock, found that I could not turn the lock, finally gave up and broke open the box, to find that there was a key inside.

It was the wrong key.

Further, the working of the lock had been packed with dental cement and that was the reason the workings would not turn when I had tried to pick the lock.

I cleaned it, put it back together unlocked, on the off chance a more suitable key might be found.

My ISP seems to have decided that I'm Hispanic, bearing in mind that all the bumph I've had from them this past month or so is in Spanish.

Well, if you're going to make up words like bumph, I can understand why they may believe English isn't your native language.

It's a perfectly good English colloquialism

Bumph is not a made-up word. I first heard it back in the 60s when my parents were collecting ferry time-tables, guide books and camping guides for a trip to France. Which constitutes bumph.

Several of the people on my bus home tonight were talking to someone, but not to anyone who was actually there. Nor were they on the phone. But I suppose that's what happens when the state (with a small s) spends very little on mental health care.

Oh... I can't remember which comedian it was... back in the 80s... talking about the strange folks on the streets of New York apparently having conversations with their selves... Dana Gould maybe.


Yep.

"They only seem to be talking to themselves. What if they're not? What if they're actually synchronized? What if for every guy walking by himself going, 'Nobody tells a navy man when he's had enough to drink 'cause only a navy man knows when he's had enough to drink,' maybe there's another guy, 30 miles away, walking by himself going, 'Shut up! You weren't in the navy. Kiss my butt. I don't need this.'"

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/fad7iy/the-a-list-synchronized-lunatics