Mastodawn

This is amazing. EA1FUO has built nec2c into WebAssembly, and now you can do antenna simulations on your phone or desktop without depending on nec2c running on a server. You can also deploy it locally, and he provides instructions for how to do this on docker or bare, and you can run nec2c on the server if you like.

Takes seconds to simulate my inverted V, and it even displays updates on what it is doing while running the simulation. It then gives a 3d rendering that you can drag around to get a better intuition. As you hover your mouse over the model, it shows gain in dBi with elevation and azimuth.

Beautiful work!

I don't know where else he's active, but he's been posting about this on Reddit as he's been developing it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1rfsr6f/my_new_modern_free_and_open_source_antenna/

Source code GPLv3: https://github.com/EA1FUO/AntennaSim

#HamRadio

AntennaSim — Web Antenna Simulator

AntennaSim — Free web-based antenna simulator powered by NEC2

Bob Mar 3

I’ll post a cover of one of the obvious #robinhood picks for #tunetuesday - Jesse Welles singing the Oo-de-Lally from the animated Robin Hood: https://youtu.be/hAOtTLNtn0M?si=otzN8yNX6Aet_2Zm

Oo-De-Lally - From “Robin Hood”

YouTube

Bob Feb 28

Just finished up another painting project. A T’au XV26 kill team with 5 stealth suits and their support drones. #killteam #WarhammerCommunity #miniaturepainting

Bob Feb 14

Fernandez-Cartoons Feb 13

Ich weiß, ich weiß, zu viel Text für Social Media. Hobbys brauchen eben ihren Platz.

Bob Feb 7

Ether Diver Feb 6

I'm making my usual #BandcampFriday plea: if you love music, consider spending as much today on music at Bandcamp as you do every month on music streaming subs. One $10 sale can make an artist's day-- and put as much money in their pocket as ~5000 or more streams!

Bob Feb 3

asmw Feb 3

We usually met on the second level of the mall, in the coffee shop run by some weird dreadhead. They didn't seem to mind a couple cyberpunk kids hanging out in the back, as long as we drank copious amounts of coffee. Also, the uplink was exceptional.

We had already fueled up and jacked in. Shelly hooked a tripwire into the shop's cams, to let us know if someone got too nosy, security in the mall was a joke.

"Yo check this out." bROOTal dumped a couple twilight addresses on the channel. Ain't gotta tell us twice.

0pid moaned "Sooo slooow! Where the fuck is that routing?"

I set up a jail, opened a connection, and data trickled in. We dumped checksums and partial payloads in the channel.

"Huh, everyone gets a bespoke stream, headers look like VR sims." Shelly had started annotating patterns in the binary and bROOTal had set a ghidr/ai loose to decompile the code. "There's connection code in there, and lots of crypto. What's a #veilid?"

"So, anyone wanna sample?" 0pid's avatar started wagging an eyebrow.

"Fuck it." I flashed a hard damper onto my interface and the world grew dim. Less pressure from the seat and the cup in my hand felt cooler. My vision grew a little blurry and muted. I fed the payload into the runtime.

The world vanished. No more seat, cup, or hand. No more vision. I floated in absolute blackness. Then a fractal of light exploded in the sky. Unfurling tendrils of complexity ate away the darkness, replacing it with pulsating constructs of nightmarish beauty. Nothing was dampened. My head hurt and I tried to remember how to unplug, but instead of my memories I found a face. Not a human face. A facsimile of one, nearly correct but wrong. Smiling a wrong smile with too many teeth. Speaking without opening it's mouth.

«BE. MY. GUEST.»

The headache got worse. There was pressure on my ears and my heart was racing. I couldn't breathe.

«LET. ME. HELP.»

The face grew a body with too many limbs and stretched an arm out to touch me. Just before the hand reached me, I snapped back.

I lay on the floor of the coffee shop, smelling vomit and tasting blood. My friends were staring down at me, and so was a weird dreadhead.

"You alive?" They slapped me gently on the cheek and I moaned as the headache flared up again. My friends grabbed me and pulled me onto a seat. Dreadhead threw us a pitiful look.

"So you're smart enough to find trouble, and dumb enough to not know."

They grabbed a coffee, pulled up a chair and sat at our table.

"Listen up, kiddos, today we'll learn the lesson: Fuck ICE."

#guest #wss366 #cyberpunk #writing #tootfic #macrofiction #microfiction #scifi

Bob Jan 6

ProPublica Jan 6

After the events of Jan. 6, 2021, we sifted through thousands of videos taken by Parler users during the riot at the Capitol.

Then we created an interactive database that lets you sort through the footage.

See the full collection here: https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#Jan6 #Insurrection #Trump #Video #History #Data #Archive

What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol

ProPublica sifted through thousands of videos taken by Parler users to create an immersive, first-person view of the Capitol riot as experienced by those who were there.

ProPublica

Bob Dec 30

raptor

Dec 30

“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”

https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/121/11/1771/30038/The-importance-of-stupidity-in-scientific-research

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

The Company of Biologists

Bob Nov 18

yawnbox Nov 18

today is the 30th anniversary of the Japanese release of the first Ghost in the Shell film

"Ghost in the Shell is a 1995 Japanese animated tech noir cyberpunk action thriller film directed by Mamoru Oshii from a screenplay by Kazunori Itō, based on the 1989 manga by Masamune Shirow."

utmost respect for Atsuko Tanaka, the voice of Motoko Kusanagi, who passed away a little over a year ago on August 20, 2024

GitS is by far one of my personal favorite anime 🫶🏻

#GhostInTheShell #GitS

Bob Nov 15

My #newmusic pick of the week, some Canadian #postpunk, Watch it Die by Home Front.

https://lavidaesunmus.bandcamp.com/album/watch-it-die

Watch It Die, by Home Front

12 track album

LA VIDA ES UN MUS DISCOS

Moxfield	https://moxfield.com/users/SensorLock
Bandcamp	https://bandcamp.com/tma-3