I get the pronunciation, it's just that the difference between -ch and -ck isn't that well appreciated in English without other context, some wouldn't hear it as different. And then also many people hear -ch well enough but say -ck, for instance, they hear Loch Ness but say Lock Ness.
It does actually turn up in non-niche English usage: Heuristic, Hugo, Houston, and other formations (which escape me now). But you heard one about the Scotsman who moved to Germany, and started saying Ach instead of Och?
I like the etymology though (google translate gives a nice list of synonyms, some of which make more sense in context than simply "box") and the corresponding verb (google translate has "fachen" and "to fold").
]]>Of course, the UK is as bad if not worse. Look at the original DPA (and even the current one, to some extent) and CMA.
]]>For 5-HT2a, some of the NBoms are quite selective, which might explain why some psychonauts thought "something missing". Please note they might not be as benign with toxicity as some other psychedelics.
For 5-HT2c, AFAIK Lorcaserin is quite selective.
And as for 5-HT2b, it has become something of an antitarget due to problems with valvopathy, though AFAIK 5-ABP is kinda selective.
(please note there are a bunch of other possible receptors involved, e.g. TAAR1)
Problem is, 5-HT2a agonist binding activates a bunch of downstream targets, and this is where biased agonism was discovered, e.g. the subset activated by psychedelics is somewhat different from the one serotonin activates. Or other nonpsychedelic agonists. And actually some agonist effects like downregulation of 5-HT2a expression IIRC also happen with antagonists and inverse agonists. So one might also try a bunch of different agents with kniwn differences in efficacy for e.g. calcium mobilisation vs. phosphoinositol pathways.
Please note I never graduated above THC in this regard, which, me not being a habitual stoner, was still quite, err, interesting. Though come to think about it, I lent my copy of PIHKAL (lacking the signature I got some years later) to a guy trying to synthesize meth in my first year at university. Guess he was searching for something different. Errr ..
]]>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_W._Franke
about kids playing economic sims and later on realizing they are managing actual tribes in the Amazon, including their military action. When a character finds out, he's quite distraught, problem is IIR he didn't read the EULA. It all turns out quite well in the end, though I can't find the title ATM, Guess I read it in my late teens.
Thought abou this author some time ago, when I read
about his idea of a non-selfconscious AI manipulating people, no idea if I mentioned this already,
I was somewhat reminded of ATHENA in OGH's "Rule 34", thogh sadly, Franke doesn't have OGH's quirky ideas, pop culture references and snarkiness.
(Hm as far as I recall one of the ideas about ATHENA was a "rubber hand illusion" with the Toymaker as part of its self; not that we're that much different, according to some interpretations of Libet. Funny, makes ATHENA finishing off the Toymaker at the end some kind of ego death:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
I remember a friend talking about it when I met her in 2003, me just recovering from a quite severe depression with burn-out and rediscovering my abilities, which is always quite strange. Maybe it's one of the memories I should go through in the next few weeks, I guess she was quite discontented with what she was, what her goal were, and how to keep her emotions in check. She scalded me for being too belligerent, IIRC. Err, sorry, might need some synthesis, she died 2 years ago of cancer, she had gotten better, but like a lot of hypies had turned into a workaholic and didn't care for diffuse symptoms.)
Googling for some short stories by Franke I found a text by Heinrich von Kleist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Kleist
(actually, he's somewhat of an embodiment of some things I don't like in German culture, but, well...)
talking about how talking about things to others might make them clear to yourself. And that actually sounds familiar...
]]>"WHAT "information density"?"
I had a thought today about "information density" or maybe something similar.
Thinking about the best way to preserve information so that it lasts through the coming dark ages in a form that during some future Renaissance they'd be able to figure out how to decipher it. I concluded long ago that microfiche would probably be the most likely form of information storage to survive burial in a post-apocalyptic landscape until sufficient civilization returned that people could figure out how to use the information. The advantage of microfiche is you can see that there's something there just by looking at it. The only technology required to actually read it is a magnifying lens.
I was wondering how may microfiche cards would it take to store the same amount of data as a standard CD-ROM I figured someone here would probably already know the answer.
]]>My copy of Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II is 392 pages in hardback so would take 1.5 to 4 cards. A .txt copy I have of it is 770KB. A CD could hold ~900 books of that length as plaintext. That'd be 1,350 to 3,600 cards - a stack 10-25 inches high. Trouble is, they stick to each other after a while, unless they're in paper sleeves.
Images would be a different story. The microfiche copies of golden age comics hold one 64 page issue on a card. Scans of the issues might give 15MB of jpegs at 150dpi. I have The CD-ROM 'Totally MAD' set from 1999 which holds ~380 issues on 7 CDs (plus bonus features).
The last printed Encyclopaedia Britannica is ~32,000 pages, so would take up about 200-330 sheets. It fits on one DVD (approx 7 CDs).
]]>"Good thinking, but unfortunately microfiche and microfilm are both very susceptible to water damage. The worst thing is that drying it out once it has been wet makes it more or less unrecoverable. The current procedure for wet microfiche is to keep it wet till professional restorers arrive."
That's not entirely my experience. Before they started moving everything to personal computers & laptops, the U.S. Army used to issue Supply & Publications Catalogs on Microfiche. I've had a number of experiences where binders of microfiche ended up getting soaked out in the field. You didn't want to use heat to dry them, but rinsing them in clean water and air drying worked fairly well.
If they're intended for archival storage, you'd take extra care to pack them into sturdy, watertight containers. And you'd want to have multiple caches scattered about to ensure redundancy. If one of the caches got damaged, you'd still have a good chance that some of the others would survive.
I chose microfiche because of things I've read about how the plastic in pop bottles will take hundreds of thousands of years to break down in a landfill. CD-ROMs don't last that long. Even archival grade CD-ROMs only last 10 years or so. It seems to me that taking just a little care in packing microfiche for preservation, they should last a long, long time.
DaiKiwi @ 735:
"A standard 'fiche card is A6 & commonly holds 98 to 160 images, depending on the reduction, though they can go up to 270 images.
My copy of Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II is 392 pages in hardback so would take 1.5 to 4 cards. A .txt copy I have of it is 770KB. A CD could hold ~900 books of that length as plaintext. That'd be 1,350 to 3,600 cards - a stack 10-25 inches high. Trouble is, they stick to each other after a while, unless they're in paper sleeves.
Images would be a different story. The microfiche copies of golden age comics hold one 64 page issue on a card. Scans of the issues might give 15MB of jpegs at 150dpi. I have The CD-ROM 'Totally MAD' set from 1999 which holds ~380 issues on 7 CDs (plus bonus features).
The last printed Encyclopaedia Britannica is ~32,000 pages, so would take up about 200-330 sheets. It fits on one DVD (approx 7 CDs)."
Going by that - maximum 270 image frames per microfiche card - 32,000 pages of Encyclopedia Britannica should fit on approximately 120 microfiche cards (118.518...); 200 cards at 160 image frames per card.
Dividing that number by 7 gives me approximately 17 microfiche cards to hold the data on one CD-ROM ... or 29 microfiche cards at 160 image frames per card.
So I'm looking at somewhere between 15 and 30 microfiche cards to hold the number of page images that a CD-ROM might hold. How do you get 1,350 to 3,600 cards?
]]>Apples and oranges: the CD is holding plain text files at less than a MB each, rather than the page images. DaiKiwi should have said 'That'd be the equivalent of 1,350 to 3,600 cards - a stack 10-25 inches high"
]]>I was thinking of what a CD could hold as pure plain text data versus what it or the fiche can hold as page images. A CD can hold about 900 400-page novels if they are stored as .txt files. If what we're storing needs the actual page images - because of illustrations, maps, layout, etc - then yes, 15-30 cards per CD.
Playing around with a few txt files, it looks like a CD could hold the equivalent of 200,000+ pages of plain text if it was printed out as 11 point Times New Roman on A4 with 2cm margins. At 270 images that fills 740+ cards, at 98 images it fills 2040+ cards. If you were to zip/rar the files you could probably triple that.
Does that make better sense?
]]>