If you're interested in this, read Dava Sobel's book, "Longitude". Harrison was the archetype of the stubborn, self-educated genius that stuck to his ideas, fought the system for most of his life, and then changed the way the world worked. Seriously entertaining read. You'll walk away with an appreciation for timekeeping and knowing how to find your latitude and longitude with an accurate watch, a chart of times at high noon in Greenwich, and a few odds and ends (like a stick, a nail, and a clouded view of the sun).
Paul Nahin's biography of Oliver Heaviside is a find, too. Nahin and Sobel between them have sewn up the historical science biography field. Heaviside's own books are available to buy, and are filled with neglected gems.
While I'm here, Don Eyles's account of the Apollo program and his role programming the moon landing, "Sunburst and Luminary" is notable. Ordered directly from his website https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html , it was delivered with gratifying alacrity.
I liked Longitude and would recommend Galileo's Daughter, also by Dava Sibel. It's a biography of Galileo supplemented with letters he exchanged with his daughter, who was a Catholic nun.
My wife and I listened to that on a road trip and enjoyed it as well! The part that really sticks with me is how people were trying to drop weights off of the Tower of Pizza and use classical philosophy to figure out why the balls wanted to accelerate. Galileo pointed out that the reason why doesn't matter in experiments, it's the outcome that comes first and everything else follows. I was shocked that something like that was a huge breakthrough at the time.
As an aside, if you're ever in Florence, Italy, pay a visit to the Galileo museum. You'll get to see his desiccated fingers and a huge collection of medieval astronomical instruments that were as much art as science. Galileo's experimental devices looked a lot like things you'd see in a high school today, except made from beautiful wood and brass. It really blew me away.
His thought experiment was eye-opening, for me: what should happen if you drop a light and heavy ball connected together? Should the light ball hold back the heavy one? But the two together weigh more than either.
I read that book 20 years ago and absolutely loved it. When I went to visit relatives near London I went to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (where the Prime Meridian is) to see Harrison's clocks.
I won't go into details but I'm dealing with a somewhat similar situation. If you love your family and want them to make decisions for you when you're incapacitated instead of strangers who will likely be trying to take advantage of the situation, GET AN ESTATE ATTORNEY. One at a large and respected firm with a solid track record. You will be making a minuscule investment compared to the cost of things going sideways. So much trouble for you and your family will be saved during an already difficult time.
Key word: ESTATE attorney. Preferably belonging to a large and well respected firm. Don't get just any attorney willing to do it, they won't be equipped for it and shit will go wrong, and things going wrong in the legal world is potentially catastrophic. For you, your family and anyone within a 1000 feet of you.
This is a bit extreme. An estate-planning attorney at any sized firm can do a good job, and using an attorney is good. But wills, trusts, etc. are well-established areas of law, to the extent that in the U.S. at least, anyone can scratch out a perfectly legal will on a piece of notebook paper.
I'm not sure if it's named for what it isn't or rather named to make it clear that no reasonable or virtues person could disagree with it. Another, more harmless example for me is "natural scroll direction" in macOS.
Unrelated to the main thread, but I would content “Natural” scrolling is a different epistemological process. There is/was a lot of user research on this topic. Inverting the scroll direction on a trackpad relative to the display is more in line with how people expect it should move. This configuration was determined to be the better configuration through a rigorous program of experimentation.
Calling the default “inverted” or “reversed” sends the wrong message. The term “natural” is just trying make people feel comfortable with the default configuration. It is trying to convince people of the results of an experiment. Naming a law that is not passed is trying to bias the results of the experiment itself.
My point exactly was that the thing being named is not necessarily bad. I use the "natural scrolling" every day with my trackpad. It's the same pattern though where you couldn't possibly want the other thing (which btw. with a mouse is a reasonable option)
Only really using macOS, so I wouldn't know. But that's great to hear! Maybe they will also catch up with trackpad technology at some point, the £150 Chromebook I tried was astonishingly good!
I felt the same way trying to use ledger. Apparently there's a way to import your CC charges from online banking CSVs, but I never tried it out. I ended up giving myself a weekly allowance and plugging that into the books at the end of the week. Things got a lot easier when I was dealing with broad budget categories instead of logging transactions for a single cup of coffee.
I use beancount ( a plaintext accounting tool) and yeah, I feel it's a coherency challenge among developers who have different preferences around structure and workflow that makes it a challenge.
The importers have historically erred towards being something the user writes on their own. But there's also some powerful helper tools for importing but they carry a different user experience than the other tool for financial reports & visualization.
Im starting to think a unified experience (think vscode + built-in extensions) for it all might help align intentions and broaden the userbase of plaintext accounting.
Just because someone reading might find use of this, but if you use Bank of America you can export your transactions relatively easily.
1. Login not on mobile (and also extend your browser winder size until the mobile mode is gone. Mobile mode changes how you login, because of course it does...)
2. Click one your bank accounts.
3. Click "Download", "Custom date range", from some time ago to today*.
4. Download as Printable Text Format
This will give you a simple CSV file of all your transactions.
I'm horrible with money, but still try to export all my transactions and merge them onto one spreadsheet so I can plan out money stuff as needed.
* You can only download up to 6 months at a time, but you can go pretty far back in your banking history.
The author misses Rite in the Rain, which makes my favorite notebooks, they're printed with heavy, acid-free, waterproof paper. Pairs great with a Fisher pen cartridge (waterproof, pressurized ink made for writing in almost any condition).
As for dating, I like to do something a little different; it's still ISO8601 but with a slight twist. Each page top has the date in basic form (eg, 20220430) and each note on that page has a timestamp to describe that note and a title for the first line (eg: "T1234 Groceries"), followed by the note body below, a little like a git commit message. This allows me to link between notes by enclosing the date and time stamp in pointy brackets. To save some ink when linking, I use the date at the top of the page for context. If my page top is dated 20220430, and I want to link to a note from the 23rd at T0631, I write it like <23T0631>. Since the year and month are the same as the context I'm in, I don't bother writing those. I don't use page numbers at all.
Some other notebook habits I have: I like to use the first page for my contact info if anyone finds my notebook (and maybe offer a reward). The next page is for goals I'd like to work toward during the anticipated lifespan of that book. I also like to create a weekly index. When I've filled the notebook, I create an index of index pages on the very last page. If I wait to index the entire thing when the book is filled, I usually don't. Also, I use the last few pages to create monthly calendars. I fill in dates on them with letters (A, B, C...) for an event, which I reference on the back side of the page, either with a short description or a link to the timestamp I wrote down event information on. Finally, after filling a book, I write the range of timestamps that book covers in the spine so I can quickly find notes in the future.
If you just do the date at each page header and timestamp each note to enable linking, your notes will get much easier to deal with. I actually started doing this because I'm fairly undisciplined and generally pretty disorganized.
To protect against bit flips in car fly-by-wire systems, each signal is sent three times with the 2/3 majority making the decision. This happened after the runaway Prius fiasco that may have been caused by a gamma ray. Prior to that incident the fly-by-wire system only sent one signal.
This is really inefficient, two bitflips in the same location will result in a bitflip. For 3x the space surely there's a more resilient scheme that can handle more.
If I recall right this depends on the original message length and 1 bit is a bit of an edge case. If you transfer just 1 bit, you're very space constrained and it's hard to do much. 1 bit to 1 bit has nothing, 1 bit to 2 bits has single-bit error detection, and 1 bit to three bits has single bit error correction (--and 2 bit error detection-- (this isn't right, thinking about it for a second)). After this, the minimum required checksum length growth logarithmically, plus 1 or 2 for detection / correction - and that constant factor makes 1 bit so weird.
All error correction and detection are designed with an acceptable probability of error in mind, which depends on the medium. For example, if you know cosmic rays might flip 1 in a million bits, and you want your system to have 1 error per trillion bits, then you need to send every bit twice to be able to detect a one-in-a-million error.
I just wanted to log in and point out that Free Software got started at MIT.