the brandensite

What's up with radio station call signs? 2025 Feb 19
Why do American radio stations west of the Mississippi River start with K whereas those to the east start with W? This Big Think / Strange Maps article doesn't answer that question, exactly. It comes close, but it never quite addresses why we need two different prefix letters depending on which side of the country you're on. Because one prefix wouldn't have been enough? So someone crash landing on our planet can quickly determine which side of the Mississippi they've landed on? Because America got assigned those prefixes in the international negotiations and by golly we're going to use them? No answer is forthcoming.

But I link this article anyway because it does at least provide some interesting trivia around the entire topic. Namely, why the letters K and W in particular? We learn that the Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunications Union assign the US four prefixes: K-, W-, A-, and half of N-.

It seems that the letters A and N apply only to military radio stations (A to Army and Air Force, N to Navy and Coast Guard) – and that they are the basis of the otherwise seemingly random choice for K and W. The Morse Code for A is dot-dash (.-) and for N is dash-dot (-.). Add a dash to each, and you get W (dot-dash-dash, or .--) and K (dash-dot-dash, or -.-).

I also learned that "radio call signs are reversed out on the ocean. Ship radios on America’s Pacific coast start with W, and with K on the Atlantic side."

So what about all those terrestrial radio stations that start with W- or K- but aren't on the appropriate side of the Mississippi river? The article enumerates the exceptions and provides the reasons for each, except for the three nobody can explain. The majority stem from the K/W divide prior to 1923 being placed further west. Some others come from radio stations which were once "portable" or otherwise moved or were granted exceptions. And one in particular (KTGG) was because someone in government "mistook Michigan for Missouri" – amazing.

And then there's the fact that while the Mississippi River forms the border for most of the states it passes alongside, it bisects Louisiana and has its headwaters inside Minnesota, meaning those states' radio call signs are all over the place, apparently.

So, basically, it's all arbitrary.

Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar 2025 Feb 19
Remember that time in 2013 when Guy Fieri started a new restaurant but didn't buy the domain name matching the restaurant's name and then someone else did and used it to put up the most amazing menu? Well, I do, and I'm sharing it here because I want to.

Most numbers are unimaginable 2025 Feb 19
When I think too hard about math it makes my brain hurt. Which is why I don't think too hard about math. This person named Ben Orlin on this blog called Math with Bad Drawings posts in 2016 while thinking too hard about math, and considers how many of the numbers in the existence of numbers (if numbers even exist at all) "cannot be touched by the human mind" and that "this is most numbers" ... oww brain hurty.

If you pick a random number between 0 and 1, you will arrive at a number that literally cannot be communicated or expressed. Sure, you can list the decimal digits, but if you ever stop, even after a trillion years, then you will have failed to specify your number – and there is no process by which you can tell a computer to carry on the job.

This is best summarized by the comment on the post from mr sock monkey who says:

monkey still not sure of definition of word number or if number have existence independent of human mind. when monkey read definition of number by mr russell it make simple brain of monkey spin.

What is LEGO SNOT? 2025 Feb 18
Everything you never wanted to know about LEGO bricks with S.tuds N.ot O.n T.op, of course. I found this just because I wanted to know what they were talking about while watching LEGO Masters on my television.

Q&A with a person who survived yesterday's commercial jet crash 2025 Feb 18
Want to know what it's like to walk away from a crashed jet airplane? Well, here's a reddit with a person who did just that yesterday when the Mitsubishi CRJ-900LR plane she was on crash landed in Toronto, the wings ripping off as it rolled over to a stop in stormy, snowy conditions. As of the latest reporting, there were 18 injuries and zero fatalities among the 76 passengers and four crew members.

Of note, the woman answering questions admits that during the evacuation a flight attendance had to "yell at me for grabbing my backpack" which... yeah, there's a reason you're not supposed to do that. Cuz you gon' die.

Five Geek Social Fallacies 2025 Feb 16
This is from 2003, and I wish someone had shown it to me back then. I went in to this linked article being like "oh lol, this'll be fun, reading about all my friend's social foibles" and was immediately smacked across the face (gently smacked across the face – the author manages to smack you without you even realize you've been smacked until well after the smack has concluded) by seeing myself in the mirror. Oh good lord, I'm living a lie.

Is the California High Speed Rail project reasonable? 2025 Feb 9
The linked article is about how our country's new president dislikes my state's High Speed Rail project, and while his opinions aren't interesting to me, the Fresno Bee does what he can't and enumerates actual facts, detailing the issues plaguing progress. It's a bleak picture: an "abundance of lawsuits", rushing into construction purely to meet funding deadlines, a glacial pace of acquiring right-of-way, and hundreds of millions of dollars in change orders, all with an estimated final pricetag somewhere between $88.5 and $127.9 billion.

All of those issues and more set set in motion a domino-like series of circumstances that continue to plague the project, which is now not expected to begin carrying passengers between Merced and Bakersfield until sometime between 2030 and 2033. No time frame has been offered for building or operating future extensions to San Jose or Los Angeles.

Still, the rail authority said it is poised for the future. “The majority of the approximately 500-mile system from San Francisco to Los Angeles is fully environmentally cleared and stand shovel-ready for future phases of investment,” the agency’s statement said.

I would not be the first to see this and wonder, is our country no longer capable of building great big things? Not to say there's no innovation happening in America, that we're not progressing in capability, but those advances now seem to come solely from small, private teams working in isolation and not the big society-driven we're-all-in-this-together initiatives that created the groundwork for the American century.

All us Californians wanted when we voted this damned project into existence is to get from NorCal to SoCal with the ease, comfort, and simplicity of those fancy trains we get to experience when visiting Europe and Japan and China. It didn't cost $127,900,000,000 to connect Paris to Marseille in eco-friendly 200mph rail routes, did it? This report from 2011 says it costs France (at that time) €16-27 million per kilometer to lay track, with this updated map on Wikimedia Commons showing what's been completed since, going from approximately 1,800km to 2,800km of TGV's LGV rail in the same timespan since CAHSR was greenlit. That 1000km is coincidentally about the same length as the proposed rail between SF and LA, and it cost France (using the estimate above) a total spend of €16-27 billion. My math is very rough (people argue over all these numbers) but even if I'm only in the ballpark, there's a staggering difference between the 1,000km of track that France has actually built in the last 14 years and the 0km that California has built for spending in the same rough-order-of-magnitude.

I'm hoping I can one day get to LA via high speed rail, but between the project's slow progress and my sincere doubt that our current president's "investigation" will do anything to actually help it, that hope is withering.

Everyone knows my location 2025 Feb 3
This guy breaks down exactly how the panopticon works – from banner ads on your phone to the ad brokers who put them there to the data brokers who skim their data off the ad auctions to the market where your data is sold. And he proves in plain text that no, it doesn't matter if you've selected "don't share my location" or "don't allow advertisers to track my identity" because the ad companies do it anyway.

Extropia's Children 2025 Feb 2
Linked is a seven-part series by Silicon Valley veteran Jon Evans dissecting the weird underbelly of the rationalist/effective altruism communities, written in 2022 but surfacing again now due to the downright bizarre (and murderous) ZIzian death cult that's splintered away from ... mainstream rationalism? What in the five fucks is going on inside the rationalism movement that death cults can even exist within its sphere? What business do cults have with rationalism, effective altruism, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, Scott Alexander, and the technological singularity? Evans makes it clear that rationalist thought isn't a cult, but the movement sure is left smelling a lot like the techbro version of Scientology.

In light of this newest rationalist-cult mess spilling out into the larger world, Evans has written a piece updating us about the ZIzians and how their leader faked her own death before spurring several highly-educated data scientists to go about attacking people with swords among other implements of murder.

Ah yes, peak rationality.

Bette Midler is a Hoss 2025 Jan 30
No, really, it says so on the big wiki, saying she "was voted 'Most Talkative' in the 1961 school Hoss Election." This bold claim is referenced to my opening link, which now only exists in the waybackie. Although whether the archived page claims such is uncertain; images did not survive the archival process and only text persists. Midler is (in text) listed as being on the 1961 school newspaper staff, if that matters to you Bette aficionados.

But me and this lost Hawaiian WRX enthusiast in 2004 both want to know, what in the high hell is a hoss?

Midler grew up and went to school on Oahu, Hawaii, and while the islanders mix a good amount of Hawaiian language into their daily lives, the word hoss doesn't sound very Hawaiian to me. And yet, some quick a-searchin reveals that whatever a 'hoss election' is, it definitely is an island thing. In 2007, columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser Lee Cataluna ran a couple color articles on this topic. On June 24, 2007 she realized "that hoss is an exclusively Hawai'i phenomenon" defining them as beginning at least by the 1960s: "We all get the concept. Most high schools in Hawai'i have them at the end of the school year. You know, Best Dressed, Most Athletic, Cutest Smile, Most Likely to Succeed ..." before asking her readers, "Somebody has to know. What is a hoss election, anyway?"

A month later, Aug 26, 2007 she gets her answer when Larry and Henriette Valdez share their 1959 yearbook photo as winners under the banner "Horse Elections." She quotes Larry as saying, "Prior to 1960, it was a 'Horse' Election ... a blue ribbon for First Place, Red for Second Place, Yellow for Third Place. We only had Blue Ribbon categories for Most Likely to Succeed, Best Looking, Best Dressed, Best School Spirit, Most Athletic, Most Talented and Most Comical."

But is that correct? Hoss and horse kinda sound similar, especially if you talk with a cowboy accent or a fan of 1959's Bonanza, that old Western TV show where Dan Blocker played rancher Eric "Hoss" Cartwright, a large-but-friendly main character.

The internet abounds with various groups' hoss election results, but few of them delve into the origin of the term. I think it may be best summed up on this beautiful Angelfire page from 2003 (complete with an actual MARQUEE tag, omg I love it) for Kauai Community College's Filipino social club's "HOSS Elections" where they state: "No one knows for sure what HOSS really stands for or what it means."