Lion ponderings

Stills from Mars: Inside SpaceX.  This was a separate show released concurrently with the awful soap opera that the general public saw, but not publicized.  There were no goog search results for it, only a buried link on nationalgeographic.com.  Still no hi res shots of that falcon heavy plaque which reveal the names.

The Phenom II X4 955 has 1 week to live & had the longest lifespan of any CPU. It has more sentimental value because it ran for 8 years. There weren't any major improvements until the last year. The best Macs in 2016 were just as slow. Before that was a dual 2.4Ghz Opteron which lasted 5 years & had 8GB of RAM. The brief 8GB configuration was actually more than the last 8 years.  Before that was briefly a dual 1.4Ghz Athlon which came after a longer stint with a dual 933Mhz Pentium III. The Pentium III was actually faster than the Athlon but the lion was ignorant & endured years of pain with the Athlon.  The RAM before Opteron was probably 1-2GB. Before that was the dual 550Mhz Celeron & the one that started it all, the Cyrix PR200, with 64MB & 32MB. The  Phenom II grew to thrash & thrash when running any modern programs.   Hard to believe the lion kingdom went as long as it did on 4GB of RAM.  Today, it's unthinkable. ...

The 8 year old computer takes 5 minutes to seek & 1 second to render each frame, but most striking in the latest PR video is the laptops giving way to phones & hot pixels. For someone who lived in a time when 8k meant a 70 lb camera, it's disappointing the relative ease of making 8k movies now has only resulted in IMAX theaters abandoning the 8k 4:3 format entirely, showing tiny 2k movies in letterboxed format.

Finished a complete rewatching of the entire Harry Potter series. Most notable was the change in film technology from 2001 to 2011 adding to the passage of time already obvious in the actor's aging.   The final 4 episodes were still bad. Gathered the mane conflict was between descendants of supernatural parents & descendants of mortal parents. It was less about Harry's magical ability, since he was manely incompetent, but more about his parents. This was the escapist series millenials grew up with, on their way to lives spent protesting crises they saw on the internet. Hunger Games was the series lion aged parents took generation Z to see. The live action kid fantasy got started with Harry Potter & made 2001-2005 a magical time in the movies, but it quickly lost its way with Lion Witch Wardrobe & Hunger Games. 2025:   The magical moments of our 20's are few & far between after 50.  We've just seen it all.  It was neve...

Some channels in the last year have risen to incredibly high view counts while most channels have dropped to nearly 0 views. They changed the algorithm to concentrate all recommendations on a small number of channels with the highest quality. The view counts are what would previously be considered good numbers for Casey Neistat, but now everyone in the top tier is getting those numbers. There's also an explosion of users of the platform, as they've licensed enormous amounts of copyrighted content. Next to every licensed video is a list of recommendations from the top channels. The logarithmic scoring has meant the days of seeing recommendations for mediocre videos with a couple views are long gone. The user experience is definitely improved, even if you're seeing a lot less videos.

The lion kingdom has endured truly awful keyboards for the last 20 years, despite spending lavishly on a piano for just the right action. The latest one was bad enough to finally replace with a "mechanical" keyboard. Mechanical keyboards came out in 2010, many years after the world was perfectly fine with membrane keyboards. They were nosebleed expensive. Not sure why people suddenly cared after not caring or why the ancient model M suddenly became famous. Refurbished   model M's are a waste because the biggest memory of the 1980's was how fast the keys broke. Keys would die instantly or stiffen, while newer membrane keyboards lasted forever. Mechanical keyboards today are finally affordable & should use enough modern methods to last longer. Not sure if lions notice how bad the keyboard is because of the mechanical keyboard craze, dementia, or because it really is bad. The last traditional feeling one was in 1997, but it quickly ...

Reading about the south pole to predict what the 1st colony on Mars would be like is depressing. The 1st antarctic station was buried in snow & they lived underground. The most recent one is a giant building on stilts, reflecting the economic high point of 2000. They only get 2 sponge baths per week & no fresh food for 8 months per year. Supply trips are limited to the summer. All the energy to melt snow into water comes from burning jet fuel which is flown in. The early Mars colony would probably be underground & similarly constrained. The problems would extend to supply trips every 2 years, the need to recycle all air & water. They would have slightly warmer temperatures & no snow drifts. Annual solar energy is probably comparable, but lack of snow would make solar panels more practical.  Solar panels might be a huge win, concentrating sunlight for growing fresh food, freeing up supply trips for something besides fuel, but most of the energy budget would ha...