The Knuth diamond sign collection, from http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/diamondsigns/dia

During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides. (Well, not every sign; only the distinct ones.) For provenance, I also stood at the base of each sign and measured its GPS coordinates.

This turned out to be even more fun than a scavenger hunt, so we filled in some gaps when we returned to California. And we intend to keep adding to this collection as we drive further, although we realize that we may have to venture to New England in order to see `FROST HEAVES'.

All photos on these pages were taken by Jill C. Knuth, unless noted otherwise.

Raspberry Pi Imager is a tool created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to install new systems on the tiny Raspberry Pi. SD cards and USB drives are supported, as well as the most popular operating systems. It’s also possible to flash any custom image for the Raspberry Pi.

If you haven't ventured over to the America 250 link on Whitehouse.gov, this Independence weekend is the perfect time. In partnership with Prager U, the White House has launched the "Founders Museum," with videos that feature AI representations of the founders and revolutionaries of our republic. With the representation of each biography and their contributions to the founding of our nation, the AI animations put forth a challenge to the viewer on how one should carry forward liberty and what was fought and paid for through their sacrifice.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/america250/founders-museum/ //

The videos can be viewed individually, in their respective series (Founding Fathers, Ladies of the Revolution, Major Events, and Declaration of Independence Signers), or as a whole unit. The section also includes a learning option with downloadable biographies, portraits, and documents that allow one to create their own "Founders Museum."

They have gone to court, they have gone to the media, and they have gone to Corporate America rather than loosen their own pursestrings with an endowment estimated at over $53 billion.

Harvard and its defenders claim that accessing the money creates massive complications, due to terms and conditions of the donations and the structure of the endowment itself. A new analysis from the Wall Street Journal suggests that the main complication is that a significant amount of that money may be imaginary -- and that may open a Pandora's box on Wall Street:

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) recently sought an investigation into Harvard’s financial disclosures to bondholders. She might as well have fired a bazooka at the entire private-equity industry. //

So if the SEC investigates Harvard over the valuations, it should also investigate the private-equity firms that provide them, if not the whole private-equity sector. This could be helpful. With a full-court press under way in Washington to get private-market funds, like private equity, into Americans’ 401(k) retirement plans, it’s more urgent than ever that alternative investments reflect market realities, not wishful thinking. //

The act of liquidating assets or selling stakes to raise funds for operating costs would force transparency on the true value of the endowment, and that would have a ripple effect throughout the economy. That itself might give Harvard some leverage with corporate America to kick in some cash as a donation rather than liquidate assets that might impact their own wealth estimates in the long run.

The development of the small nuclear device began in June 1960 with the M54 SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition). The M54 was put into production in August 1964. The weapon was 12 inches in diameter, 18 inches long, and weighed approximately 59 pounds. The transport configuration added many more pounds to the weight of the device, and demanded specialized skills to operate.

SADM had a variable yield estimated to range from the equivalent of 10 to 1,000 tons of TNT! //

This device, though, was aimed not at making enemy soldiers glow in the dark, but for blowing up bridges and other infrastructure, while also making it glow in the dark. For most bridges, even the Golden Gate or the Brooklyn Bridge, though, a 1-kiloton nuke seems like a bit of overkill.

But then, no war was ever lost by making the enemy too dead. The weapons programs of the Cold War sure seem to support that assertion, too. //

RedRaider85
4 hours ago
Nuke ‘em til you they glow, then shoot ‘em in the dark!

I'm using ZREP to replicate two servers with each other and each server contains one ZFS-pool containing two datasets as replication master and two sets as replication target. The master sets contain the system and VirtualBox-VMs of the local server, the replication targets the same from the other one. //

The problem.

But from time to time it happened that ZREP got into some state not able to sync anymore. To resolve that issue, a coworker told me that he needed to delete snapshots and follow the process to initialise ZREP again all over. That problem got fixed by not let ZREP run in parallel with rsync and our own snapshot anymore in the end.

ANSWER

Yes you still get all the data in-between but you just can't rewind to in-between.

If you have snapshot's 1,2 and 3 and the remote pool only has snapshot 1, you can give it snapshot 3 and skip 2.. it just won't be able to roll back to the '2' state. But the data will still be there.

The snapshots describe what was there at the time. So missing snapshot '2' on the remote pool, it's like you never took one at that point in time. It literally doesn't know about the '2' snapshot and what stuff looked like back then.

If you change your mind, you'll need to delete snapshot '3' on the remote pool and only then can you send '2', then '3' again.

Poème symphonique, pour piano et orchestre, op.43

1. Ballade
2. Bardic Song
3. Scherzo: Fantastical Hunt
   Peter Benoit

Liberia's former President William Tolbert has had a symbolic reburial, 45 years after he was murdered during a coup and his body was believed to have been dumped in a mass grave.

Ten days after the president's killing, following trials by a kangaroo court, 13 of his cabinet were stripped, tied to stakes and then executed by a firing squad on a beach next to an army barracks in the capital, Monrovia.

None of the 14 corpses has been found but each man got a state funeral at a ceremony attended by President Joseph Boakai and other dignitaries.

The event was seen as an act of reconciliation and part of a process of the country coming to terms with its violent recent past.

"It is an act of national conscience. It is a moment to acknowledge historical wrongs and to reaffirm collective commitment to the truth, justice and reconciliation," President Boakai said. //

Doe himself met a violent death at the hands of rebels in 1990. His reburial in his home town last week was also ordered by the president.

"This is not just a burial; it is a moment of national reflection, a time to reconcile with our history, to heal from our wounds, and to remember with respect and purpose," Boakai said at Doe's funeral.

For the families of those executed in 1980, Tuesday's ceremony was both an act of remembrance and a way of bringing some respect to those who died.

How to Create ZFS File Systems

Caruso's experiment is amusing but also highlights the absolute confidence with which an AI can spout nonsense. Copilot (like ChatGPT) had likely been trained on the fundamentals of chess, but could not create strategies. The problem was compounded by the fact that what it understood the positions on the chessboard to be, versus reality, appeared to be markedly different.

The story's moral has to be: Beware of the confidence of chatbots. LLMs are apparently good at some things. A 45-year-old chess game is clearly not one of them. ® //

Robin
Reply Icon
I just tried your query against ChatGPT to make an image of a chess opening board, it's hilarious. It's 8x7, with squares labelled A-H across the bottom but on the left and right sides it's got numbers 5,2,4,5,6,7 and blank. The pieces look weird, like the knights are mixed with rooks. And it seems like white has 2 queens whilst black has 2 kings. //

MageSilver badge
Alert
LLMs good at some things.
Other than boasting, (or advertising copy – is that the same thing?) what are LLMs good for? //

Jack of all trades and master of none?
AHomo.Sapien.Floridanus
Re:tari put modern Ai queen a rook and a hard place.

Barta was battling topical steroid withdrawal (TSW) syndrome, a debilitating condition some face after quitting high-potency creams to treat skin issues like eczema.

Common symptoms include intense burning, redness, itching and skin shedding. Many sufferers are bedridden or housebound for months — or even years — before the effects begin to subside, according to the International Topical Steroid Awareness Network (ITSAN), which advocates for awareness and supports those affected.

On June 23, New York’s Governor Hochul announced that she had directed the New York Power Authority to build a new nuclear energy facility with at least 1 GWe of capacity. During the announcement speech, she provided several bits of information leading to an informed prediction that the facility will initially include 4 BWRX-300’s on a site close to Lake Ontario. ///

Didn't New York just shut down a 1GWe (or more?) nuclear power plant near NYC just a couple of years ago in favor or "renewable energy"? So this is an acknowledgement that shutting it down was a mistake and waste of money.

Ron Howard's 1995 love letter to NASA's Apollo program takes a few historical liberties but it still inspires awe. //

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring. //

Howard ultimately shot most of the weightless scenes aboard the KC-135 since recreating those conditions on a soundstage and with CGI would have been prohibitively expensive.

In fact, Howard didn't rely on archival mission footage at all, insisting on shooting his own footage. That meant constructing realistic spacecraft interiors—incorporating some original Apollo materials—and reproducing exactly the pressure suits worn by astronauts. (The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like the original Apollo astronauts.) The Mission Control set at Universal Studios was so realistic that one NASA consultant kept looking for the elevator when he left each day, only to remember he was on a movie set. //

Is every button pressed in the right way? No. Does it bug the crap out of me every time Kevin Bacon answers Tom Hanks' "How's the alignment?" question by nonsensically saying "GDC align" and pressing the GDC align button, which is neither what Lovell was asking nor the proper procedure to get the answer Lovell was looking for? Yes. But's also pure competence porn—an amazing love letter to the space program and the 400,000 men and women who put humans on the Moon.

And like Lovell says: "It's not a miracle. We just decided to go." //

Purpleivan
For anyone wanting a more extensive Apollo 13 experience, then have a look at LunarModule5's YouTube channel.

They've created an end to end (from a few hours before launch, to a few after splashdown) series of videos. These use the entire recorded audio for the mission, both for the crew and controllers on the ground. Long periods of silence have been edited our, but enough silence/static gaps between audio, for the cuts not to feel strange. They've also included some backroom discussion recordings, to fill some of the empty sections audio.

The videos show a simulation (I don't know the software used) to visualise the events of the mission, as well as a huge collection of photos from the mission.

I've watched a few of the videos and plan at some point to watch them all (something like) end to end. However, as the set of mission videos comes in 19 parts, with many 10 hours long, for a total of about 120 hours, it's a serious commitment of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4gb6Eb_Mes&list=PLC1yaZz2qeGrj_-TCMeupfzRUmf6CysdF
June 29, 2025 at 7:15 pm //

postpar Ars Centurion
6y
221
Subscriptor
FWIW, and this is a throwaway here, Chrysler never really got the credit they deserved for their stellar work on those rockets, or on the electronic communication and diagnosis devices, which were quite advanced and reliable under tough circumstances. When Apollo ended, a lot of those guys went back to Detroit. Some of them worked on the racing program, doing aero and diagnostic work; others worked on electronic ignition and on-board automotive computers. They did all this for relatively small profits.
https://www.motales.com/chrysler-corp/aerospace-defense/rockets-by-chrysler.php //

Those Mission Control consoles were built by Ford (Philco division.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XbEIMcxl04)

Most fittingly, the Lunar Roving Vehicle was built in part by General Motors.

And with all that fresh space-age engineering experience under their belts, the American auto industry...basically fell apart at the seams for the next decade. //

JoHBE Ars Tribunus Militum
14y
2,881
Subscriptor++
The movie is now older than the mission was at [the movie's] release.

With these comments, Pulte is demonstrating that he, like his boss Donald Trump, subscribes to the standard Yellen-Bernanke inflationist model of monetary policy: the job of the central bank is to forever force down interest rates, churn out more easy money, and devalue the currency.

Pulte claims publicly that this somehow makes homes more affordable. As we’ll see below, though, the Fed’s easy-money policy of recent decades has not made home more affordable. Rather, Fed policy has helped to relentless increase home prices through the Fed’s asset purchases, interest rate policy, and monetary inflation. //

There are many factors that affect mortgage rates, of course, but over the past thirty years—and especially since 2009—falling interest rates have coincided with rising home prices. In fact, falling interest rates slightly precede rising home prices, suggesting a causal relationship.

I created this site to enable people to compare many so-called “secure messaging apps”. Likewise, I hope to educate people as to which functionality is required for truly secure messaging.

In 2016, I was frustrated with the EFF’s very out-of-date comparison, and hence I decided to create a comparison myself. Reaching out to various privacy organisations proved to be a complete waste of time, as no one was willing to collaborate on a comparison. This is a good lesson learnt: Don’t be beholden to other people/organisations, and produce your own useful work.

This site is not meant to be comprehensive; security is difficult, and a full review of each app is simply not plausible due to time, a lack of access to source code in many cases, and a lack of knowledge of development practices, and general cyber security maturity.

CNN weekend host Michael Smerconish spent more than six minutes in his opening, detailing Trump's accomplishments over the past 12 days. //

Winning became a punchline that Trump’s opponents used to lampoon him in his first administration. He was a political novice then, surrounded by a team with which he was unfamiliar, and he was probably as surprised as the rest of us were that he won the election.

This time is different. This time he came with a plan and a cabinet with senior advisers comprised of loyalists, all well known to the president. And recently, he’s exhibited a more layered approach to governing on both the domestic and international front, no longer solely guided by winning each day’s news cycle.

By any objective measure, President Trump has his opponents on the run.

Kwik EFIS is a suite of applications which implement a Glass Cockpit solution designed to function on most Android devices equipped with a GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer and a CPU with reasonable performance. The suite currently consist of applications:

• Primary Flight Display (PFD), Kwik PRIM
• Multi Function Display (MFD) Digital Moving Map, Kwik DMAP
• Combined Format Display (CFD), Kwik COMP

TimeLimit
Limit the usage of Android™ phones easily

Download at F-Droid

A group of simple, open source apps without ads and unnecessary permissions, with customizable colors. A fork of @SimpleMobileTools.