Lion ponderings

 The luck ran out with jury duty.  In 2023, lions got out of it by rescheduling for the day after a holiday.  All 3 courthouses ended up getting that day off.  2025 was the kaboom case, 1 of the 3 courthouses still had cases on that day & no-one even remotely sane got out. That method still reduces the chances of getting hit, but it's not perfect.  Now old lion claimed to never get picked.  He only lived in Calif* for 18 years though.  Memory of parental jury duty only spanned 10 years.  Over such a short time, he had a good chance of getting out by postponing to the day after a holiday.  Another theory is he got out by never voting. Lions have been called in for 25 years now.  The 1st call was in the 2005's, just a phone in.  2010 was the 1st commute to the courthouse but no selection.  Either the algorithm has gotten smarter or there are a lot more cases than 20 years ago.  There is definitely more likelihood of gett...

  This low gravity'll make you soft.    The lion kingdom never recovered from the posterior tibialis injury now 14 months in the past.  The modified foot strike & polarized efforts have allowed a return to long distances & up to 8 minute miles.  A lone 7m43s mile is sometimes possible, but anything faster is out of reach. Run hard 1 day, walk the 2nd day, & it tends to supercompensate in the short term.  Take too many days off & it reverts though.  Protein supplements are essential.  It needs the constant stress of the hard workouts.  On good days, the walking days can be slow runs up to 12 minutes/mile with sections of 10 minutes/mile. It didn't respond to massaging or stretching.  That might have made it worse.  It seemed to respond to more sitting & unloading but only up to a point.  Unload for too long & it regressed. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

 Continuing the run of really bad movies was The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.2008.  Holy hairpieces, it was the 1st full length movie lions fast forwarded through. Can't believe IMDB gave it 3 more stars than Snow White 2025.  It was manely an attempt to reprise Keanu Reeve's visuals from the Matrix: super powers, interrogation rooms, agents.  Matrix super powers were a common theme in those days.   Kind of amusing to see the table top screens of those days getting promoted.  That concept went nowhere.  Never forget the early 2000's OLED aftermarket car radios.  When the motorized door broke, the bling was gone. The reimagined robot was even bigger. John Kleese didn't do much.  No-one did much of anything.  Old lion won't remember ever watching it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------     An HD copy of the original finally landed on the hard drive af...

 The all stonk IRA has been a house of pain since Dec 2024.  It's down .5% over 6 months.  Meanwhile, treasury funds have all made 2%. In times like this, don't trust the government. Was pondering the chance of a rate hike because inflation & yields have kept rising while the Powell has been in another universe.  The internet has such short term memory, there's no longer any memory of 3 planned rate cuts in 2025 & the new memory is of a planned pause.  There won't be any memory of a pause if the narrative switches to a rate hike. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://x.com/arikuschnir/status/1924953349943697763   Some really impressive speech synthesis from Veo 3 hit the internets today.  The video is the incrementally better potato quality we've come to expect, but the win is the leap in speech synthesis.  It's so far beyond any speech synthesis we...

  The backflow starship incense burner took about 1 month to lick, from the concepts with forced air to the solving of the melting. Then it was back to a familiar pattern of struggling to find anything else meaningful to build.  It takes infinitely less time to build structures than it did 25 years ago.  Something like an incense burner or a mouse once entailed a very long period of testing materials, cutting wood, sanding wood.  Now we're overflowing in crap in no time after the decision is made. There's also been a shift from toys that teach to toys that generate value.  A big part of the old days was the learning from building toys that weren't valuable.  Some of it was a lack of money.  Old lion is going to buy a programmer instead of build one from scratch & buy 3D printer addons instead of fabricate them from scratch.  Most of the knowledge is now commonly available, especially all the electronical stuff young lion had to fight to d...