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I gave a spherical cow plushie to a physicist who works for a tech company. It has been on my friend's desk for a month and it has greatly cheered my friend and my friend's colleagues. My friend now wants to learn how to sew. This is for two purposes. Firstly, my friend wants to make a spherical penguin. Secondly, my friend wants to repair clothes. I am extremely willing to help because it has elements of a definitive plan. Specifically:-

1. It has a relatively finite scope.
2. It is a realistic, achievable goal.
3. It has a reward.
4. It has a sensible time-scale.

Admittedly, time-scale is the least constrained. However, I have instigated a plan to make this achievable. I met near my friend's office in the hipster part of London and I introduced my friend to the many haberdashery shops in Ridley Road Market. In particular, Dalston Mill Fabrics has the widest selection of cheap synthetic fur fabric. While in the area, I showed Fassett Square to my friend. The market and the square were used the basis for the BBC's main soap opera and on the second occasion that the set was created, it cost at least £86 million to re-create these unassuming streets in East London.

While wandering around, we made arrangements for a regular sewing session. This is now an open invitation to any member of SoylentNews who wants to meet in Central London.

After the London HackSpace closed for four months and then re-located to the vicinity of a failed makerspace (and midway towards a budding makerspace which failed due to the presumed suicide of one of its founders), many people from the London HackSpace chose to meet in Central London on Tuesday evenings in lieu of the London HackSpace social evenings (also on Tuesdays). This has now settled on the Montagu Pyke Public House in Charing Cross Road, Central London. (Nearest London Underground stations are Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square.)

Some people boycott this venue on principle. The Montagu Pyke Public House is a Wetherspoon Pub and the founder, Tim Martin, is notoriously pro-Brexit and anti-Europe to the extent that he has removed French champagne from the menu, regularly writes about the topic in the pub's magazine, has pro-Brexit slogans on pub menus and even insists that staff place pro-Brexit signs at entrances which lambast the alleged British Prime Minister, Theresa May. Although, to remain competitive, most of the staff at the Montagu Pyke appear to be Spanish. Regardless, Soylentils are typically libertarian and with signatures, such as UID5690's "Secession is the right of all sentient beings", support for Scottish independence, British independence, Catalonian independence and/or Californian independence is more likely than not.

With few exceptions (most notably, Tue 25 Dec 2018 and Tue 1 Jan 2019), Tuesday meetings have continued for almost one year. We meet at 7PM sharp. Sometimes we stay at the pub and eat fish or steak. More often, we go to one of three restaurants in London's Chinatown: the comically named Wong Kei restaurant on the West side of Wardour Street (famously described by churnalist, Zoë Williams, in TimeOut magazine, as "the rudest restaurant in London"), the Kawloon Buffet in Gerrard Street (by the West Chinatown Gate) or the classier Mr. Wu buffet on the South side of Shaftesbury Avenue (on the same block as the Wong Kei). Actually, these restuarants are all within 100 metres of each other. A friend is also keen on McDonald's and so we've occasionally visited the local branches in Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square (on the West side of the square, to the left of the Lego shop).

We now have a standing arrangement to eat at the far end of the basement of the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's from 7:30PM on the first Tuesday of every month because it has the most space and best lighting to teach sewing. Although there are many sewing groups in London, this is best described a Sewing For Physicists. Indeed, after I mentioned De Broglie wavelength, my physicist friend instantly understood that any sewing error smaller than the length of fur would be completely hidden. Indeed, this is part of the reason that I chose spherical plushies to teach sewing. Synthetic fur is the easist material to use and the spherical shape incurs the least sewing for the most reward.

Anyhow, the invitation is as follows:-

• Meet on any Tuesday at 7PM sharp at the Montagu Pyke Public House for general discussion.
• If you want to learn sewing or make a spherical plushie then meet at 7PM sharp at the Montagu Pyke Public House or meet in the basement of the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's from 7:30PM or so on the first Tuesday of any month.
• Bring two car washing sponges to use as the filling of a spherical plushie. Three car washing sponges for £1 are currently available from PoundLand.
• Synthetic fur, cut to size and suitable for one spherical plushie, can be swapped for one McDonald's £0.99 cheeseburger. I will bring sufficient supplies to make three spherical plushies. My friend will bring a similar quantity of supplies. Patterns vary. They may include black and white Holstein cow print, tiger, leopard, ladybug and/or Sulley from Monsters, Inc. Alternatively, source your own fur. This is likely to cost £8 or more and leave you with a considerable surplus of material.
• All other sewing supplies can be borrowed or kept at no cost.
• If you want to do any other sewing project then please keep it very small. This excludes most clothing repair.

We had a practice run on Tue 5 Mar 2019 and we made significantly less progress than expected. I can hand sew and machine sew and I've worn entirely home-made clothes in public. So far, I've also made 19 spherical plushies. The first took me more than 90 minutes to sew by hand. They now take less than 45 minutes - and about the same again if adding ears. Unfortunately, a geek sewing newbie is unlikely to finish a plushie before the third session. Indeed, you can very probably defer plushie filling. Taking into account drinks at the Montagu Pyke Public House, eating and talking about random geek stuff and the basement section of McDonald's closing at 10PM, we may only have 90 minutes for each sewing session. Regardless, we have confirmed empirically that staff are unconcerned about a bunch of geeks sewing after we've eaten.

We're semi-seriously going to make a furry ball pool. After I gave away seven of my 19 spherical critters, the remainder are on my bed. I've slept while hugging three with each arm. From this, I believe that it would be worthwhile to explore a considerably larger quantity. A friend agrees. Unfortunately, cost and effort are issues. Plastic balls are £1 per 10 and considerably cheaper in volume. Each spherical plushie is about 25 times bigger. In small quatities, material and filling are cheaper per cubic unit. However, an expert with a sewing machine may require more than 15 minutes to make each ball.

Some final notes: Firstly, McDonald's in the UK went cashless at some point I don't remember over the last 10 years. Although I'll swap fur for food and a friend swaps food for cash, this works best if you bring cash in small denominations. Secondly, if you don't know us and we don't look geeky enough to approach then look for a black and bright orange tiger stripe furry ball with a six inch (16cm) diameter or a light gray wolf/husky hat. Thirdly, no video recording, no photography and definitely no flash photography.

We hope to see you on:-

• Tue 2 Apr 2019 (on the reasonable assumption that we have electricity four days after Brexit).
• Tue 7 May 2019.
• Tue 4 Jun 2019.
• Tue 2 Jul 2019.

and/or any other Tuesday.

I hoped that I could summurize 10 days of SoylentNews every week. I'll have to be significantly more brutal to achieve this and I'm concerned that the volume of text has doubled from Nov 2017 to Feb 2019. Regardless, this is an attempt at summarizing one day of articles from SoylentNews. I have a further three millions words covering three months. Quotes aren't attributed because I de-duplicate headers and then use text to speech at 300 words per minute. This makes sources indistinguishable with the exception of about three blowhards. The most prominent is UID6614 rôle-played by UID4512. Summaries select for insight, foresight and comedy:-

1. Samsung Galaxy Upcycle Initiative is Needed but Shouldn't Be - Given the energy consumption of cryptographic currencies (see here) this is generally seen as a greenwashing exercise. Concern that re-purposing old phones may reduce stock of old phones, encourage consumerism (and associated environmental cost). Also concern that re-purposing may require restrictive EULA and/or prevent use of radio interface. The latter may be a benefit if it was guaranteed to be disabled. May be preferable to run SETI@Home or Folding@Home on stock hardware.

2. Startup in Desperate Search for Ideas - Start-up repeatedly fails to make money with trivial ideas (slideshow, calendar, location tracking) and then adds block-chain before that also fails due to legal regulation. Comments about failing upward, "Success is when preparation meets opportunity and luck" and lottery winners going broke. For best snark, search for "So, let me get this straight: TMB and khallow, both noted billionaires of tech" and "I HATE you, khallow! I Hate YOU! You are an uncaring conservative ideologue, and I just wish I could just get quit of you! // Signed, your Brokeback Mountain Time Friend. p.s. When you coming home?"

3. RIPE75 Presentations Online - Apparently, Réseaux IP Européens couldn't find a venue in Europe and instead decided to hold a conference in the United Arab Emirates where European practices (such as alcohol, homosexuality and casual sex) are all illegal. RIPE is also incapable of publishing slides in a standard format, unlike NANOG.

4. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Ends, "Follow-On" Launching Soon - GRACE. Catchy gibberish acronym.

5. ESPN Can't Afford Monday Night Football Any More - 108 comments about sportsball! I thought this was going to devolve into partisan politics or the merit of military funding being diverted into corporate sponsorship. However, discussion was on the merit of celebrities raising awareness about matters such as police brutality. "We are talking about justifying moral authority from an industry that is known for its murderers, rapists, abusers, armed robbers, cheaters, drug abusers, and other criminals. For decades, professional sports has turned a blind eye to the moral standards of their employees because the only thing that mattered was winning. As a result, now the public isn't remotely surprised when a player beats his girlfriend on camera, or murders someone." "My gym has ESPN playing on the giant TV in the mens locker room. For a very long time I've been subjected to 5-10 minutes of ESPN at a time. My observations are 40% commercials for old men products, 40% old male sportscaters and occasionally guests yelling nonsense about nothing at each other, and maybe 10% highlight reel commentary the kind of stuff you'd watch a youtube clip for if you weren't watching TV. The other 10% is weird banter, flirting with the elderly yet still hot MILF (GILF?) female hosts who appear to know nothing about sports and their only hiring criteria was affirmative action/hotness. // The commercials are moderately interesting because some day I want to age into being a cranky old man. Assuming I'm not already. So I know all the pills I should be taking in 30 years from watching ESPN ads, all of which have minor side effects like death or my dick falling off. For 5 minutes a day its kind of novel, the commercials I mean, not having my dick fall off." These demographics may explain why 15,000 account per day drop ESPN. Double dipping (or perhaps triple dipping) of subscription, advert breaks (up to 22 minutes per hour) and sponsor logos don't help. Also gives backgound about Rodney King. He was a scumbag.

6. AI and Quantum Algorithms Together Can Compute a Better World - "Fucking 100% marketing drone wankery." "What sort of problems in physics can AI (as we currently understand it) solve? // Look in TFA and you won't find answers to these questions. In fact, you won't even find the questions. // About the closest is the assertion that AI needs a lot of compute power and quantum computers are really fast thus, good for AI. But the big problems in AI are not because of inadequate compute power and it is far from obvious that quantum computers can help AI problems that are related to compute performance." "Current AI amounts to increasingly sophisticated curve fitting."

7. Alexa Can Help You Check Your Credit Score - "sudo make me a credit score sandwich" (Or perhaps, "Can I afford two tonnes of corn?") "where's the eula for when I do not agree to amazon and google saving my voice when I go to a friend of family members house?" "will the Facebook crowd eat this up?" "Of course they will, they've been mind-bleached of any thought about their privacy - they're the perfect product. After they'll eat it, they'll wipe their mouth with the latest advertised toilet paper (assuming their credit is in good enough standing to afford it)" "I agree, the crowd will rush over the cliffs, again. IQs have gone negative, humanity is now at risk." "Black Mirror - Nosedive" "Alexa like most silicon valley shit is made for SV hipsters who have no family or friends and live alone with their cats"

8. Consumer Reports Closes Consumerist - Insecure computing requires Consumer Reports more than ever. However, "Corruption is taking a very firm foothold, talk about the warning signs of a downfall." "There's no need to dream up conspiracy theories. Consumer Reports has been losing readership, subscriptions and therefore money for a while now. I even canceled my subscription." Difficult to use reviews when products are readily re-badged.

9. Set Up Private Blockchain With Ethereum - "I am interested in obtaining some of your Snowcoin, I hear your blockchain is very high-tech! If i get in on the ground floor, can you make me filthy rich? Yours, former Bernie Madoff investor." "If i get in on the ground floor, can you make me filthy rich? Yours, former Enron investor."

10. Bad Rabbit Used NSA "EternalRomance" Exploit to Spread, Researchers Say - "I have a bad feeling about this. Malware, that breeds like rabbits? At least it is not Tribbles, yet."

11. Hubble Observes Titanium Dioxide "Snow" on Hot Jupiter Exoplanet - "Oh, don't thank our taxpayers, thank our military who wants to be sure the whole world knows: A) we can drop whatever size bomb we want, wherever on the planet we want, whenever we want B) we have the optical sensing and data processing capability to see a ladybug on your ass no matter where on the planet you are, including indoors, and C) don't you forget it, thus the continued publication of ever more impressive miraculous feats of putting big things in orbit and bringing back incredible pictures of whatever."

12. We May Not Have Enough Minerals to Even Meet Electric Car Demand - "oh look, one of the electric car makers also has an active space program :D" "What a mess! We need that wall YESTERDAY. Like, the 1950s. To keep American minerals and vitamins in. We make beautiful nickels in this country but THEY won't tell you about it." "We've got plenty of irony. It's nickely, cobalty and lithiumy we need to find." "I had an environmental chemistry professor bring up this point a year or two ago. Our current methods of producing batteries, solar panels, and windmills can often be just as environmentally devastating as their combustible counterparts. NREL and other national labs have been pushing research into improving batteries and utilizing abundant metals, but I personally don't expect any quantum leap in the technology to solve major problems. It will take a multifaceted approach to achieve a sustainable future, all the push about for an electric fleet is pretty ridiculous when there are still many issues with the technology that have to be solved before implemented in scale. But hey, if it convinces snowflakes to re-elect you, set deadlines that you probably can't make, we're going to save the world right? All we need are 'conflict minerals', it's not like they're as bad as blood diamonds..."

13. Aliens May be More Like Us Than We Think - "Homo sapiens will go extinct in this very generation**. It will be replaced by Homo Faecebookensis. // ** We must allow some exception, though. There are fortunate people in this world without access to Internet, they'll last one generation longer." "Thats not blood, you've just popped a zit." Astrobiology? "It's hard science. With a sample size of 0. What could possibly go wrong?" "it could be argued that this is a field with much more grounding in reality than string theory. for instance the predictions are definitely easier to test." "A free and easy way of life is great, up until some other culture comes and destroys it." Dolphin sex. More dolphin sex. The merit of living in the Oort cloud with or without a fusion reactor.

14. Technology Seeks to Preserve Fading Skill: Braille Literacy - Braille literacy in the US has fallen from 30% in 1974 to 13% in 2018. Rely on technology? Cost is a significant issue and this assumes your native language is supported. Speech to text also assumes that you aren't dictating something sensitive. Braille literacy versus sighted literacy?

15. Nurse Who Was Arrested in Utah Receives Half Million Dollar Settlement - Nurse refuses to draw blood without patient consent, false arrest is filmed. Police officer who was being investigated for corruption was initially "counseled" then fired. Blood test was intended to exonerate police officer in coma. "will donate some of the proceeds to a fund that will help people obtain body camera footage and provide free legal aid for open records requests." 'one of the parties paying out the settlement is "the university that owns the hospital." They failed to protect the nurse from police violence, so they're at fault?' "Police officers need to carry their own individual liability insurance. Just as some other professions do. Police departments could subsidize these policies at the rate that ordinary officers would pay. But bad police will either face increased premiums or inability to get any insurance -- which will automatically disqualify them from police work. And without any flack from the union. Furthermore, the insurance underwriters would be motivated to investigate bad police and get to the truth because they are the ones financially on the hook." "Some sort of Federal anti-corruption agency that does undercover secret-shopper encounters with police would also be a good thing. If a cop beats the shit out of the FBI for no reason, I think it'll be taken a lot more seriously than if it happens to the rest of us." "The real award is closer to $300k after taxes" and risks jail if the tax is not paid. "The lawyers get 33%!" "She was pressured into doing something highly illegal to the point of handcuffing her and leaving her in a police car for 20 minutes. If she had buckled under to the pressure, she might have lost her job. And nobody did anything about it until her video ended up on the internet a month later." "Police officers will be barred from patient-care areas at a hospital in Utah that drew widespread notice when an officer handcuffed a nurse, hospital officials said this week." "Police departments and individual officers are still not getting the message after years of being in the public eye and poisoning the public trust." 'I don't get why people are so keen on huge fines to "the group" when they can just throw the culprits in prison. All this "big fines to the org" are the reason why bad CEOs and cops keep doing evil stuff. Nothing really significant happens to them. The more sociopathic or evil they are the less it matters to them that the group suffers. Yeah they get yelled at, or they lose their jobs and end up working for a different Police Department/Company, big fucking deal.'

16. Rylo: A $500 360-Degree Camera With Image Stabilization - "4k is not enough to match good FullHD or even HD if you have to crop a lot out."

17. Q4OS: A Very Flexible Linux Distro - Review - 32 bit support. Five year support. "And then someone mentions that apparently it uses systemd, so there is a limit to the flexibility after all. As in it's no more flexible than any other systemd based system." "This is like saying that the new Windows Creators Update is soooo flexible, it allows you to choose between notepad and wordpad." antiX 17 recommended due to removal of systemd. "If you want new, you should try Windows 12." "No thank you, I prefer being anally probed by a stick wrapped in barbed wire." "You're two revisions back! The new Corporate Motivators Edition comes with standard razor wire stick dipped in salt." "Remember the time you upgraded because you wanted to run the latest games... now you just need it to use the web... *sigh*" "we have web browsers that are an RAM hungry as Crysis. Crysis. Go figure."

18. Microsoft Engineer Installs Google Chrome During Presentation After Edge Freezes - "It wouldn't really surprise me if MS eventually wants to get rid of maintaining windows and concentrate on cloud services and office software. Those are the actual cashcows after all and windows is just a means to an end (selling office). Windows was very useful for keeping their customers locked in as long as it was a near absolute monopoly, but now that so many folks have de facto switched to android/ios as their main OS it might be more important for them to show their software works there too." "There are some shenanigans going on. More and more of their webstack is running in linux. DotNetCore, Visual Studio Code, Kestrel web server, MS SQL, Roslyn compiler (think C#). I think you can host just about everything in linux now. Development still seems partially stuck in windows but there are a lot more cli tools instead of ui. I'm seeing some weird shit in the ms dev world right now." "Nowadays they've stopped making usable GUIs and started telling people to use PowerShell." "The Windows 9x UI was actually quite an improvement over previous stuff. Nowadays you need stuff like Classic Shell to make the newer versions of Windows tolerable." Microsoft Edge was cancelled about one year after this incident.

I just got this email:

"Your satnav has always been there to guide you, now it needs your help. There is an issue that may impact the functionality of your satnav and requires your attention before 6 April 2019.
Please take a moment to check its status and learn if it will be impacted."

It is TomTom.
Does anyone have an idea why this update is needed? I'm worried it may 'update' a forced retirement on my wife's TomTom (it is getting rather old).

Why April 6?

Want to watch a weird ass good show? Umbrella Academy is as weird as it gets, but pretty good!

Kids with special abilities (powers) grow up.
  Fight scenes are done to songs like 'Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows'.

And the one main character is one kid from a pre-teen comedy my son watches, Ricky, Nicky, Dicky and Dawn.
The other kids from that show must be just SHITTING themselves.
One (they weren't given real names), Tom Hopper (Black Sails), is a guy with some gorilla DNA.
Two, can control knives he throws
Three, can control people's minds by saying I Heard A Rumour
Four, a drug addict who communicates with the dead
Five, can jump through space and time

They discover they need to stop the apocalypse...

while hunted by two time travel assassins...

Weird. ass. show.
Can't wait for next season!
(Netflix)

After writing some scripts around espeak, I'm working through a very large backlog of text. I have espeak reading at twice its default rate of 150 words per minute and I sometimes "read" more than 100,000 words per day.

Unfortunately, my backlog includes SoylentNews. For more than one year, I've not been following SoylentNews very closely. Indeed, I've only been skimming SoylentNews since Apr 2018. So, I plan to read articles of interest on SoylentNews from Nov 2017 to present. I also plan to summarize the more thoughtful comments and the wittiest trolling. A digest may be intermittent and may purposefully lag by one year so that it acts as a retrospective.

Would this be useful? Is there anything that I should include or exclude? For example, I find astronomy presentations to be fascinating but I find astronomy articles to be samey. Even when an astronomy article gets my attention there isn't much I can contribute by commenting. I'll also avoid regional politics. To me, US politics seems like an endless procession of people who have escaped my attention. (I think Charlie Brooker and/or Adam Curtis had a similar opinion about political news.)

Dark matter is a sinking ship or a physics oddity?
Can it be both spread out AND clumpy?
Will Dark matter ever die?

Go to the same Bat time, same Bat channel!

https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2019/02/wide-binaries-30.html

How about a 'countdown til next submission births' message: you reload page and a message (near "this page was generated by"...or instead of...) appears that tells you how long til next submission lands?

Why does anyone take dark matter seriously?
There are better models out there,

*cough* http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/ *cough*

and dark matter is CLEARLY a kludge!

Why do people hang onto insanity? (also, string theory? WTF is with that shit?)

Has science gone over to the dark matter side (ie, religion and magic and unicorns)?

EDIT: from a conversation i had with mpc755

Okay, for a second, forget you think I'm a dick/crazy/stupid/whatever,, and take an unbiased look at this:

Curved space time and GR have problems (this is why they came up with dark matter as well as all the fringe theories like MOND, QI, etc):
But if space ISN'T curved, then something ELSE would have to 'appear' to replace it.
QI acts LIKE gravity, except there is a PUSH instead of a pull.

Bear with the dick for another moment.

A planet blocks Unruh waves from one direction and objects are pushed towards the planet by the waves coming from all the other directions.
A beam of light approaches a star and the 'waves' are blocked from hitting the light by the star: the waves from all other directions push it towards the star.
If the light is approaching the star at an angle, as it is passing by the star, the waves that are not blocked push it towards the star JUST as if space was curved.

A planet orbits a sun because it TRIES to follow a straight course but the Unruh waves push on it from all directions EXCEPT where the sun blocks them: it is pushed on from all other directions except the blocked direction and so is pushed TOWARDS the blocked direction!

To me, this is fascinating.
Space not being curved, but matter acting LIKE it is curved without the problems brought in by the curving of space.

And if time does not exist as a part of space/time (Like Julian Barbour, Mach and Einstein suggests (expanding the work of Einstein (AND Mach) BEFORE he decided the math would be too hard and changed to time being a part of space), then there are no worries about the twin paradox and time travel.

To me, the problems introduced by space-time and dark matter are nullified by something like QI.

There are SO many problems solved just by thinking outside the box that I CAN'T HELP but go outside the box and look around: if QI can be proved, it solves SO MANY PROBLEMS.
Am I married to QI? Far more than dark matter, but I am always looking outside that box: give me something BETTER than dark matter or QI and I will take a look at it.
Dark matter, though: I looked at it and it just seems like a fake. A too easy fix.
I need better...we all need better.

I'm staring down at a child in India who is starving to death.
I could feed him, but do not.

I am called a monster by all.

#####
God is staring down at a child in India who is starving to death.
God could feed him, but does not.

God gets a pass with "God works in mysterious ways".

Why are we enabling God to be a monster?
I've heard ridiculous things like "It's God's way of teaching us in the west a lesson, or to be better people.

If there IS a God, why isn't he better than he is? He IS all-powerful, isn't he?

The past couple of days my phone and email have been blowing up w/ irate customers saying they suddenly can't connect to their shared folders anymore. After some investigation, it turns out KB4480970 security patch is breaking networking on Windows 7 machines. There's a good thread on reddit that suggests a registry hack or simply uninstalling the patch as a workaround.

Makes me wonder if Microsoft's Windows update QA is either seriously slacking, or if it's accidentally on-purpose to convince Windows 7 users to upgrade to Windows 10. Grrr.