Lion ponderings

  Starship cookie MK 1 did not survive reentry. 2 hours later, starship cookies MK 2 emerged. Some survived re-entry while some did not. The trick was using shortbread instead of cookie dough. The home made cookie cutter was a failure. The way they get fine details in shortbread is by baking them upside down, in a metal mold. Then, a carefully timed process cuts apart the cookies before they harden. Lions can't fabricate a metal mold. It's clear that peppridge farm & trader joe don't bake their shortbread upside do wn. The trick might be refrigerating the dough to stiffen it, but it has to stay cold on the sheet. The lion kingdom used a mold to create the rings. A 2nd mold cut the outside shape, but ended up filling in the rings in the process. It might work better if a single mold creates the rings & cuts the shape, but this would require getting a flat sheet of known height to begin with or the excess dough would have to go somewhere. They tasted pretty horrible, ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiq5ymktg6w Looks like the remote work party is going to end in the next 6 months.  It's the darkest time with colder weather accelerating infections, but we're only 6 months from the end of the party. The trick is the virus doesn't mutate as fast as HIV or the common cold, so a vaccine was attainable. The vaccines about to be issued were created right around July & it's taken until now to get all the results. It took over 300 vaccine candidates to arrive at the current 3 success stories. The normal vaccine timeline of 15 years was compressed to just 6 mont hs. If a vaccine wasn't developed or was deemed impossible, the result would have been bleak. Mask mandates, travel restrictions, bans on social gatherings, & reduced indoor capacity would have been imposed for the rest of our lives & a large part of the population would have disappeared a lot earlier than its time. It became clear over time that the preventative meas...

  The lion kingdom is convinced the latest round of vaccine successes are legit & were withheld until after the election to try to suck the wind out of Trump. The whole crisis is going to be wrapped up in a few months. It shows how throwing enough money at a problem really can make a difference. These viruses had gone over 20 years without any cure. The media loves the word mRNA as much as it loved neural networks last year. mRNA vaccines were around when lions were still  in school. They inject cells with mRNA which the cells synthesize into antigen proteins similar to the virus. Elon mentioned that 1 of the tricks to cell absorption is to encapsulate the mRNA in lipids. The mane problem is protein synthesis depends on a lot of other factors besides nucleotide sequence. There are assembly steps, factory proteins, & you can't directly see any of it. The antigen proteins can't cause other problems. mRNA is unstable. The vaccines are hard to transport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0 The startup class of 2014 gave us $2000 juicers but skipped microwaves. Maybe 2021 will be the year. Surely, thermopiles, FLIR, PIR sensors, machine vision, big data, cloud computing, & of course neural networks can enhance the microwave. You'd think they could finally aim the magnetron beam based on a thermal image. That would be the biggest win. The problem is the people in charge of the startups are the gender which isn't responsible for domestic cooking. They give us industrial appliances & water cooler replacements, but nothing domesticated.

Lions ran by the seacliff house for years, thinking it was some kind of oriental themed store that was always closed. Found a bunch of photos from 1975-1978 taken inside. The internet says Grace Slick & Paul Kantner lived there, but while they broke up in 1975, the band was still shown there after Star Wars came out in 1977. Paul Kantner probably kept the house while acid queen moved out. Paul Kantner spent his later years on north beach. A lot of legendary songs were at least played in that house. Their 1970's songs have a murky foggy sound because of it. Surprising how modern it looked in 1975, despite the lampshade. The internet says it was built in 1963. The big recording studio shown was the entire width of the house & facing north. Hard to believe the band in the living room on that foggy day in 1975 was the same one which gave us all those 80's hits.

  The lion kingdom expected a landslide like 1984 in favor of Biden. It was far from it, despite all the media coverage. All the media got was an average victory, the same as if Anderson Cooper's makeup never was. Besides the republican landslide of 1984, it's interesting to compare where the population migrated between 1984 & 2010. Calif* & Texas were the big winners. The midwest & northeast were the big losers. Despite manhattan being a city, it never did have the luster for millennials that it did for generation X. To be a millennial, you had to move to Calif*. Would say a lot of generation X ended up in TX. Godaddy & Texas instruments were big hirers of this generation. Lions are sort of intrigued by the midwest like they're intrigued by the lost civilizations of Mayans & Incas. Why did people live in these now remote locations & how were these remote locations ever the center of civilization?

  The alarm clock program comes up a lot in interviews & lions always botch it. The problem is you have to schedule a bunch of events in the future. Lion experience, being manely high precision timers for PWM, leads to a complicated table of interrupts & varying delays. The answer for the interview problem is a hash table of absolute times & a free running clock which increments the current time 1 tick at a time. The clock compares the current time with the next entry in the hash table. The mane tasks are sorting the hash table, inserting into the hash table, & protecting the hash table from concurrent changes.

 Carter pulled ahead in all the remaneing battlegrounds. Democrats now control the senate & the white house. Big changes are coming to progressive tax rates & retirement plans. Not much is changing in civil unrest. Trains were routinely delayed by protests, in the 2014 time frame. That's not changing. The lion kingdom would say Dubya was the last spark for the republican party as generation X knew it & Trump was the final stutter. That ended a long cycle which began with republicans having huge wins in the 1980's, even in Calif*. Calif*'s past republican support shows how long the cycle was. It's hard to imagine now that Calif* ever elected a conservative platformed Schwarzenegger. The 2 party system of the future will be comprised of a relatively conservative Clinton, Biden group & a new socialist group represented by Sanders, Cortez. It's the way all governments have gone. The path from freedom to stomping inequality is a cycle humans have never re...

  Al Gore was in the same boat, flailing on his back, realizing his time was over & the lion kingdom can't remember him ever conceding, but that was a time when people were manely supported by families. The government is the modern family. The last times a president only got 1 term were Bush & Biden 1.0 or rather Carter. You have to be pretty hated to get only 1 term. Humans have normally re-elected the same rulers forever, so submissively they had to create term limits to pr otect against themselves. Bush & Carden were beaten by terrible economies but this is the 1st time someone lost despite the economy. He probably would have won & under achievers would have had better prospects if he just shut his mouth & issued the same executive orders. He got a meaningless change to progressive tax rates passed, a big reduction in corporate tax that got a lot of semi employed to incorporate themselves, a little more money to NASA. It's unlikely his immigration enforce...

  The world was so different in 1982, it's hard to believe we ever lived in that time. Workers living in houses, the wonder of just drawing simple 4 color graphics on the family TV screen, casting black guys as criminals without triggering a national emergency, & of course the ever present $1.30 gas. We were so care free in those days. Of course, some of the movie is a bit different than we remember.

District attorneys bring back dry, boring memories from civics class, but Americans love lawyers. Reading about the devastating earthquake in Turkey which was never covered by the media, it occurred to the lion kingdom that as Calif*'s government has become more & more restrictive in the last 20 years, these supposedly draconian middle east governments are the same as any other. Whether it was Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, they all just enacted the will of the people. The  general will of the people for the last 6000 years is to achieve total equality. The way to achieve total equality just tends to involve greater restrictions. Any time someone has something that someone else doesn't, it's inequality. All governments have moved to stomp out having stuff other people don't have. It sometimes seems silly, like requiring everyone to wear a hood or banning people from owning computers, not allowing anyone to say sex is determined by genetics, but all those crazy laws...

  So captain Ramius died 30 years after smuggling his submarine from the Soviet Union. Who knew when he gave himself a 1 in 3 chance of surviving his escape in 1990, he would survive another 30 years. He did end up paying higher taxes than the Soviet Union, but had a much higher income. He arrived in Mane penniless despite being a submarine captain. As for freedom, he eventually faced government mandates to buy health insurance, pay for grocery bags, bans on when he could hike up mountains, where he could drive his robot, homeowner association fees, lost all the money he made in 1990 to inflation, & a moronic population which considered 1 man's every freedom another man's infringement.