monotremata

I mean TVs have volume buttons but also a mute. It's nice to be able to use volume to set a specific level but then also quickly toggle between that perfect level and silent.

It's not something you strictly need a physical button for, but the way they implemented it on old iPhones was nice. It was a physical switch rather than a button, and it looked different in the two positions--the slider under the switch was red on one side and black on the other. (or maybe silver, i forget, but it didn't stand out the way the red did.) So you could tell at a glance if it was muted as well without turning on the screen.

The new button seems like a step back from that to me, but if you don't use the silencing feature then a reprogrammable button is maybe more useful to you.

Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn't specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.

Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it's an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.

I've thought about this too, and for a similar reason. About a third of the way through my first sock I realized that knitting was contributing to tendonitis, at least on top of my day job which was non-stop typing. I've got a tub of yarns waiting for me to figure out what I'm going to do about them. I've watched videos from various folks about the 3d printed options.

One thing I've never really figured out is how the socks compare to something like a smartwool. It seems like they might be pretty prone to becoming loose. I'd be interested to hear your evaluation of the actual end product.

It mostly avoids them, but it doesn't necessarily do that on the first layer, and it does a big travel at the end to park the print head. You could probably get something to work if you wrote it with the FullControl Gcode Designer.

Travel moves wouldn't work, because the wire core has to be continuous.

I think the best bet is to design a model with a cavity that the wire can snap into, and add the EL wire after the print is finished.

Yeah. Honestly I was more interested on whether it could actually work, rather than whether I could sell it. It'd be easier to sell than to actually evaluate :P

Of course! One of the only things I actually did do on that project was get a box of Mr. Sketch markers and look at which ones might be usable as highlighters. The main reason it fell apart was that I didn't really know enough people who did highlighting as a study technique. I knew they existed because I kept buying used textbooks that turned out to be covered in highlighting, but it must be a relatively niche group that does it.

Y'know, I had an idea about this back when I was in college: scented highlighters. Use a few different scents for different categories of information, and test whether it improved recall over using regular highlighters. I never tried to follow through on it.

I don't know. I think "toot" also plays on the English expression "toot your own horn." I think it's more playful and self-effacing, and that its violation of what would be considered acceptable in corporate branding terms is part of its appeal as a rejection of those aspects which came to control and ultimately corrupt its predecessor.

I mean, how much dumber is that than "tweeted"? We just get numb to it eventually.

I think by "close to the sun" they meant "similar to the sun" rather than "proximate to the sun." In other contexts this word substitution wouldn't cause confusion (e.g. "a plantain is pretty close to a banana" would not lead most people to look around them for the subjects) but the context of space makes this word choice a little prone to this confusion.

The Cambrian had a bunch of strange creatures like this. There was the Opabinia, which had five eyes and a mouth on an arm. And there was the Anomalocaris, which is kinda similar to the new one they discovered (at least from the perspective of a non-scientist just looking at the artists' renditions), but with only two eyes and an order of magnitude bigger.