hattifattener

A near-quine

Last Notes

2026-06-14 04:18:31 UTC

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Imagining an insect playing a set of bagpipes connected to their spiracles with an arrangement of pipes like a fancy exhaust manifold

2026-04-26 19:07:29 UTC

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I think you put the alt text for the wrong image on this.
(Also what's up with the lateen rig on that presumably-scary-Chinese ship? Was the full batten junk-style rig not associated with Chinese boats at the time? I thought the lateen was mostly a mediterranean & arab design.)

2026-04-08 02:02:09 UTC

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I didn't understand this at the time, but the bigger a bomb is, the larger is the penumbral area where the blast/radiation doesn't kill you but the flying debris does. In the 1950s bombs were getting very big. Later, as missile guidance got more precise, they switched to smaller but more numerous bombs. In a full exchange survival may be pointless. But if you do want to survive for a while, even a thin barrier can really increase your odds.

2026-04-07 22:42:53 UTC

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USB2 is about the same as USB1 electrically/mechanically: power+ground+diffpair. The "standard" 9-pin internal usb connector supports two ports, each of which uses 4 pins.
I wonder if your device actually uses both halves of the header? Maybe it's doing the thing that some old devices did where it's using one real USB port plus just the power supply from the other?

2025-08-12 08:44:08 UTC

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I wonder what goes on in that little exclave between Oklahoma and Aphadris. Is it a lawless wasteland where Mel Gibson and Sean Connery compete for least practical leather outfit? A peaceful pocket of utopia, a Shangri-Louisiana? A magic land of fey danger and terrible beauty?

2025-04-27 18:18:36 UTC

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In a Penrose-like tiling, every patch occurs an infinite number of times, but the larger a patch is, the less frequently it occurs.
I think there are tilings where a distant patch is rotated by an amount that doesn't rationally divide the circle, in which case if you can measure the orientation to arbitrary precision you can find your location within an arbitrarily large area.
I think this is tied to the notion of finite local complexity: https://tilings.math.uni-bielefeld.de/glossary/flc/