Don't get me started about food labeling. Because I need to avoid gluten, reading food labels is a nightmare because regulations in the U.S. do not yet require companies to declare all gluten-containing ingredients, which means I have had to educate myself about the many items that contain gluten but don't obviously say so. A subject for a whole different rant. 😠

As to my latest distraction, I seem to have fallen down the rabbit hole of weird medieval marginalia, as many of you will notice from my frequent posts.

weird medieval marginalia

Yay! Those are fun. 🙂

Latest distraction is the Finnish puppy cam.
all puppies all the time

Did go down a bit of a rabbit hole on stereo equipment. And turns out I need to buy a stylus (a whole new side quest). Bleah

Compared to "the old day" food labels, imperfect as they may be, are a godsend. I watch salt and sugars - and those are called out fairly clearly on US food labels. (But artificial sweeteners are not adequately described.)

Here in California there are even food labels on THC gummies.

(Right now, food labels are, for me, a bit academic. Today I had to mostly given up eating - hopefully temporarily - and certainly not by choice.)

Many years ago, I was in a park in Bath and one of the squirrels was closer than they usually are; as I had some nuts, I crouched down (to make myself seem less threatening) and cast a nut gently toward it; it claimed the nut and, after eating it moved closer; so I cast another; several nuts into the cycle, it grabbed for the nut before it had left my hand.

One is intellectually aware that squirrels have long claws to aim in tree-climbing; but the physical experience of those claws embeds the knowledge in a whole new way.

So, my most memorable squirrel event is literally a squirrel event.

I have been lucky in that many of my rabbit holes used to be the kinds of things software companies or cell bio labs would pay money for. Not so much any more. I'm currently fiddling with seemingly unexplored avenues in geometrical tilings, boutique algae cultivation techniques, and ways that humanity might get to "orbiting all the things".

Nobody seems to be eager to pay much for any of that at the moment.

Checking in.

Wowee. Voted on my lunch break today. No fascists with rifles or weirdos in tactical pants "protecting" against voter fraud at the polling place, thank you very much. Lots of cops driving around, highly visible; reminded me of 9/11.

I've fallen down two rabbit holes.

One, a funky two opposing piston engine design using cams instead of crankshafts.

Two a scheme to use the hypervisor table in an mmu to implement a capability based OS.

@Richard - All of the capability designs I worked with (or created) had underlying tagged memory and memory region support in the hardware.

Our first capability OS was all software, and I never felt that we had really done it right.

I'm kinda bugged that the Linux people claim "capability" capability - what they did is nothing even close to what we were doing back in the 1970 and the Linux stuff is far less flexible and much weaker.

I spent 30+ years in an ongoing debate with Peter Neumann at SRI about whether capabilities should be subject to garbage collection (my position) or permanent (his position) He finally conceded.

WTH is there HFCS in Mustard FFS?!?

the one that jolted me was "unsweetened" peanut butter
checked standard peanut butter—sure enough, sweet
Murika

cams instead of crankshafts

despite several years of Roadkill fandom, I still don't quiiiite grok the difference between the two, other than the crank lives in the middle of the block... they look rather similar 🤷‍♀️

I do know that overhead cam zips, and makes a great sound 😁

One is intellectually aware that squirrels have long claws to aim in tree-climbing; but the physical experience of those claws embeds the knowledge in a whole new way.

I had a similar experience, with the teeth rather than the claws. I offered the peanut in an open hand rather than pinching it and presenting it nut-first. The end of a finger is peanut-shaped and surely smelled like peanuts by that point. Fortunately the squirrel and I both noticed the error before any damage was done.