Jump to content

Madelaine McMasters

Resident
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    22,952

  • Joined

  • Days Won

    19

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Madelaine McMasters

  1. Madelaine McMasters
    I've never seen such a clean wing print in my yard. I've seen both owls and hawks swoop in for lunch, and I've heard an owl eating a bunny on my chimney at 2AM. The prints I've seen in my yard have indicated tussles on the ground rather than the clean sweeps I've seen during daylight. Long ago I saw what I think were eagle prints in the snow on the beach, where I imagine it snatched a seagull. It was a fairly clean print wider than I could reach, with a distinctive tail strike. I've also directly seen an eagle snatch a gull off the water. During alewife die-offs, gulls would crowd the beach and eagles would crash the party. Eagles were rare then, but alewife die-offs were not. Now the alewife populations are (thankfully) way down, and the eagle population is (thankfully) way up. ETA: I agree with your assessment. The arc of the wings favors raptor over owl and the deer was clearly going opposite the hare. I've never seen prey tracks escape an angel of death print, have you?
  2. Madelaine McMasters
    I wonder if he's peeved about that hilarious wayward feather. Have you ever seen "Angel wings of death" out in the snow?... Those will make you think.
  3. Madelaine McMasters
    I grew up without TV, but with the NY Times on the kitchen table every morning and NPR on the radio all day long. When I moved to Milwaukee during graduate school and married into a television set I discovered that local news, print or televised, was day old bread. In the 90s, I became a semi regular contributor of weather/nature photography to one of the local network TV stations. As a thank you, I was invited to tour the station. During the tour, I asked the news anchor how much autonomy the local crew had. I was a little surprised by his response, not because he was irritated by my question, but because he refuted the idea that there was any corporate control. I made things worse by expressing dismay that some nebulous corporation was not responsible for the station's local coverage. Years later, that station's weather man (the channel for my photography) retired into my neighborhood. I've kidded him about the station's breathless reporting of impending doomsday weather. "Yeah, the network made it pretty clear that fear sells. I'm happy to be in retirement, enjoying snow days as much as my grandchildren." I think it's fair for you to accept some blame for the demise of your local paper. I'll take some blame for never contributing to mine. We shouldn't take all the blame, however. Changing technology has allowed large corporations to exploit both economies of scale and human nature to deliver what we didn't know we wanted... dopamine.
  4. Madelaine McMasters
    Be thankful I'm little.
  5. Madelaine McMasters
    I watched this little lady for a half hour this morning. She finally woke enough to determine I'm a devil and darted off after yelling "Ma!!!!"...
  6. Madelaine McMasters
  7. Madelaine McMasters
    Oooh, that shows how far I've fallen behind Intel architectures. I imagine the same is then true of M1, with synchronization happening at the L2 cache/main memory interface.
  8. Madelaine McMasters
    Synchronizing CPUs running at different clock rates takes transistors and time, so you don't want to introduce different clocks unless there's a clear benefit. Since modern CPU cores can pause all or part (like floating point/vector units) of their operation instantaneously, that's the preferred method for reducing power consumption. When system load in a multi-core system does not require all the cores, some can be idled and their portion of the thermal power budget becomes available for those still running, allowing the clock frequency to be increased. Since idling can be done instantaneously, tasks that don't need all their CPU core's ability can "sleep" when they've completed their work, waiting for some event to wake the core again. Though idle cores still dissipate some power, and increasingly so at higher clock speeds, they don't dissipate nearly as much as active cores. From a thermal perspective, idling is indistinguishable from clock scaling. Over the years, it became clear that there are kinds of algorithms that don't ever need all the facilities of high end CPU cores, and the Big/Little or Peformance/Efficiency class split was introduced. My M1 Pro based laptop has eight high performance cores and two efficiency cores. I don't know if both classes share the same clock, but even if they don't, only one synchronizing bridge would be required between the two classes. Finally, synchronous operation doesn't preclude multi-threading. Sync/Async and single/multi-threading are different concepts. https://www.baeldung.com/cs/async-vs-multi-threading
  9. Madelaine McMasters
    Even my slippers wear glasses...
  10. Madelaine McMasters
    There's a difference between the purpose of life and the purpose of my life.
  11. Madelaine McMasters
    You know me, Ceka. The moment you mentioned "amount" you hadda know I might give you the numbers.
  12. Madelaine McMasters
    My favorite Cline knows her life's purpose...
  13. Madelaine McMasters
    Coffee, did you mean Peter Clines?
  14. Madelaine McMasters
    So have placebos and even known placebos... https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/placebo-effect-depression-treatment
  15. Madelaine McMasters
    Though I suffer neither anxiety nor depression, my emergency backup kid has both, as well as ADHD/executive function disorder. He's had some success with various medications, particularly in rotation. Unfortunately, he uses medication as an excuse to not do other things that might help, like keeping his life simple so it requires minimal organization and planning. This is the second edge of pharmaceuticals in general, they sometimes allow us to ignore or avoid preventative and therapeutic behaviors.
  16. Madelaine McMasters
    A typical cigarette contains ~10mg of nicotine, of which ~1-2mg makes it into the bloodstream upon smoking. Eggplant contains ~100ng/g. So, to get 1mg of nicotine from eggplants, you'd have to eat 1mg/100ng or 10,000g. That's 22 pounds. You'd have to eat ~150 lbs of taters or ~300 lbs of maters to get one cigarette's worth of nicotine. You'd probably couldn't eat enough nicotine laden veggies in a day to match what you'd get from second hand smoke. Even thinking about eating that much food would probably cause far more anxiety than the nicotine could counter.
  17. Madelaine McMasters
    L'il, If you decide to go with MacBook Air, wait until after Apple's Worldwide Developer conference opens on June 6. The rumor mill believes a new Air will be announced then. It's expected to be faster, come in a rainbow of colors( with white keyboard rather than the historical black), and a MagSafe connector (which eliminates the potential for yanking the thing off a desk if you trip on the power cord, which happened to me 20+ years ago). It's also possible it will cost more, but the current generation might also drop in price as they phase it out.
  18. Madelaine McMasters
    I think this will do what you want: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/NumberFormat
  19. Madelaine McMasters
    I love watching contrails seed clouds. Here's an example from several weeks ago...
  20. Madelaine McMasters
    TOTALLY this. Looking good, whether that means "elegant," "sexy," or just nicely put-together, empowers me because it makes me feel good about myself. It is me insisting upon who I am, and feeling stronger because I'm forcefully articulating something about myself, regardless of whether I'm wearing an LBD or jeans and a tee. When I was a teen, I bought a pair of very high heeled "Candies" sandals, which I kept hidden in my bike's panniers because Mom and Dad probably wouldn't have approved. I didn't wear them to attract anyone's attention, I wore them because I'd grown up around pinup girl art, and I'm short. Wearing them both made me feel a little more powerful, and let me reach one shelf higher in the stores, without someone saying "Oh, let me help you reach that." There's nothing I hate more than being helped. I'm well aware of the sexual connotations of clothing, and the use of sex to manipulate. So, I had great fun lampooning that during my years the male dominated field of electrical/computer/biomedical engineering. The fellas I worked with were far more interested making things than skirt chasing, but were years older than me and of their time. I can't remember just how the lampooning started, but I eventually started dressing smartly for meetings with my team in which I'd intended to make a course change, or introduced some other wrench into the works. I'd walk into the meeting room, wearing a fitted blazer, pencil skirt, my highest pumps and lipstick. The fellas would look me up and down and say "Oh, geez. This means trouble." It might be months of jeans and sweaters before they saw anything like that again. I remember a company Christmas party at which my guys expressed concern that I'd got all dolled up to ruin Christmas. I've told the story here of leaving silly trails of sexy lingerie through the house leading my ex-hubby to the bedroom, where I'd be waiting for him wearing something absurd. I find sex silly and absurd and I treat it as such.
  21. Madelaine McMasters
    Scylla, that's a new story. Thanks for bringing it to me. Now, I wonder if that's the entire story. Here's what happened to American women pilots who helped battle the Nazis... https://time.com/4923054/world-war-ii-sugar-engines/ https://www.caller.com/story/news/local/2021/05/26/how-women-airforce-service-pilots-served-their-country-wwii/5185061001/
  22. Madelaine McMasters
    Why would you disagree with a supposition regarding other people's personal preferences? They have them, period. I have always, SL and RL, dressed for myself. The moment I start dressing for someone who doesn't share my tastes, the potential for resentment arises. In RL, I mostly dress for the task at hand. That's true here as well, though the tasks are different. Your "Naked Ape" reference doesn't work the way you think. While it's true that much of our behavior descends from our common ancestor with the apes, ape and human behaviors are far more varied than Desmond Morris described in his book. Much of the detail of his book is flat out wrong, as is much of his reasoning. It's been forty years since I read it, but my impression at the time was that the book was poorly researched pulp fiction, written by a chauvinist. Elaine Morgan's "The Descent of Woman", though possibly no better researched than "Naked Ape", managed to shine a harsh light on Morris' now obvious male bias. In 2022, a citation of "Naked Ape" as the explanation for human sexual behavior and gender roles says far less about that than about the person doing the citing.
  23. Madelaine McMasters
    Don't tempt me, Marianne. When I was a child, my parents took turns sleeping with the school principals. When I was very young, I joined in, particularly when we slept outside. It was not uncommon to find me, a parent, and/or a principal wandering around the "school" naked.
  24. Madelaine McMasters
    What do you imagine doing while wearing that dress, Katherine? If you'll be beachside, gladiator sandals or flip-flops would work. If you pick heels, pick mules so you can slip them on/off quickly. If you're going dancing, flats would work. I have these in my closet, and pair them with just about anything... https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/KC-DANIA-BALLET-FLATS-50-COLORS-FATPACK/12868119 If you're gonna supervise the construction of a seaside cottage, I'd recommend something like these... https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/ILLI-SLinkTMPMaitreyaBelleza-Whitney-Work-Boots-HUD-Driven/10800498
  25. Madelaine McMasters
×
×
  • Create New...