Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 7h

My father grew up in a really small town in Ontario (Grand Valley). I asked him whether they had a phone in the 1940s:

“Of course we had a phone!” (Indignantly)

“What was your phone number?”

“37”

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve wearily given up on the “begs the question” thing but hugs to those still fighting the good fight ❤️

1 3

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 1d

Ha! 1997

1 1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 2d

I used to ride my bike from SD through Camp Pendleton. I once snuck both of us around a chain link fence going into the ocean into the officers beach club and had a shower before riding home.
This is not at all germane to the post but it will be the one and only time I get to tell the story.

1 1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 2d

Paul Henderson’s goal and what everyone else said.

1 1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 4d

But he does know about “Magnets” and other Elements!

1 1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 6d

That’s pretty much my point: stupidity is a far more important consideration than age as far as one’s likelihood of falling for scams. Broadly speaking…

1 1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 11d

i don’t know your age, David, but I’m 64. Way before I started using the internet in ‘93 I was very familiar with scams. Yes, it used to be one on one, and maybe less slick. There are more now. But I don’t think an old person like me should be more easily tricked (dementia aside) than a young one.

1 1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 11d

This reminds me of how these news stories are always saying scammers are “preying on the elderly”. The elderly should be *less* likely to fall for scams, not more: they’ve had decades more time to observe the pattern, and scams have been around since before they were born. A 15 year old OTOH…

3 7

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 15d

The take-home lesson here is that good, principled people will be cheerfully exploited by unprincipled people on that very basis. So what is a good person to do? This is the advice I gave to my daughter:

Do no harm but take no shit.

1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 15d

Congratulations on this beautiful science!

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 17d

My first HP scanner: $2,000 before taxes. And that’s all it did!

1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 17d

I wrote my PhD thesis on a PowerBook 140 in 1991. I don’t want to make anybody jealous, but it had a 40 megabyte hard drive. Yes, you read that correctly — that’s *million*!

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · 27d

It’s easier for us, as we weren’t brainwashed from birth into believing the myth of American exceptionalism in all things.

1 2

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 12

Probably a mistake! 😄👍

3

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 9

It’s a start I guess, to equip the class medic, but I think the drones should drop radios so the class Looey can call in Puff the Magic Dragon for suppressive cover fire and a Jolly Green Giant for dust off.

1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 9

“Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”

1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 6

About bloody time

1

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 5

Social media gave stupid people a voice and a place to organize. Before, some wing nut might buttonhole you in a bar and tell you all about vaccines or the govt. seeding the clouds. You’d brush him off, he’d go home, and that would be it. Now his fame catapults him into making government policy.

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 5

Or challenged, at the very least.

4

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Sep 2

I think I figured out why his hair doesn’t look quite right: HE’S THE ONLY PERSON WHO KNOWS HOW TO DO IT!

2

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Aug 27

Great — now let’s see more of those great tutorials!

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Aug 27

Genius. Nailed the world we are living through right now.

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Aug 25

Me three…

2

bigbenchrob 🍁🇨🇦 @bigbenchrob.bsky.social · Aug 25

Halt and Catch Fire has stayed with me to this day; I get chills reading this thread. That’s how good it was.

2