Arghblarg

No comment other than the phrase in title is prominent on the hats intentionally shown behind the young man being interviewed here. I'll let everyone reading this decide for themselves whether this is a problem or not.

EDIT: For the record, perhaps my original commentary on this post was attempting to be too 'clever'. I was most definitely * not * trying to promote these chuckleheads. It was posted in order to ensure people know the enemy -- there are some scary forces working in Canada to instill the horrors we are seeing down south, right here, right now.

As most have predicted and feared, the US Administration appears to now be testing if they can push one step further towards enforcing an authoritarian ethno-state: threatening a full-on US citizen by-birth with detainment and deportation (to where, exactly, if they are a born US citizen?). Someone who, "coincidentally", is an immigration lawyer, someone who might defend other targets of their deportation agenda.

First they came for ...

EDIT: a thread indicating this has been a mass email to others https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lmljpkrdj22h

In response to suggestions by a lunatic in the US Oval Office, Green Party Canada's leader Elizabeth May suggested Canada should invite western states Washington, Oregon and California join B.C and split from Canada to form the 'Cascadia' eco-state.

(Note this article is from Jan 8, 2025 and Elizabeth May has since become co-leader of the party alongside Jonathan Pedneault).

I was searching online for quite a while this evening, chasing a half-remembered bit of trivia, that trilobites were supposedly unique in their use of calcite for their lenses, composing the ommatidia of their compound eyes.

It must be so obvious to scientists in the field of studying insects that they never mention it in their papers...

So, what compound(s) do modern arthropods use in their compound eyes. If it isn't calcite, what do modern 'bugs' use?

If you haven't heard of it, this island has a population that the world has collectively decided to leave alone, mostly because they have proven, on multiple occasions, that they absolutely do not want visitors. Like, arrow-to-death anyone attempting to land or even visit near their shores.

This probably cannot go on forever... but maybe, it could. Essentially, we are already implementing a 'Prime Directive' of sorts here. Would the 23rd, 24th, ... centuries in Star Trek canon still have this little island on Earth, isolated from not just from Earth's own unified Federation society, but from the greater Federation races? What steps would the Federation and Earth take to maintain their isolation and the ecosystem on which they depend?

Would make for an interesting episode, or at least a cool side-note reference in one :)

See linked posting. I've commented there with a link to a CLI tool in Python that allows downloading of IA collections. I've submitted a patch to enable specifying start and end points so that it's easier to resume downloading a huge collection, or to allow multiple people to split up the work.

https://archive.org/details/georgeblood

https://archive.org/details/78rpm_bowling_green

F*ck the RIAA and absurdly long copyright.

EDIT: There is more than one collection of 78s on IA, so I updated the title.

The issue with these collections are that they're absolutely HUGE. And yes, IA offers torrents for them, but as a separate torrent for every. single. album. And the torrents have all data in them -- FLAC, fixed-rate MP3, VBR MP3, PDF liner notes, etc. etc... there may be some extremely hardcore data-hoarders out there who want everything, but IMHO as these are scratchy old 78 records, FLAC is overkill to just save the audio in a listenable format. The George Blood collection, just the VBR MP3s, is looking to be about 6TB. With ALL data it might be over 40TB! I can't afford that many hard drives :)

So, my approach at the moment is to save just the VBR MP3s (they seem to be done at up to 320kbps VBR) and the JPEG album cover. If I have a chance and any storage left afterwards, I can make a separate pass to get the album liner PDFs...

Tool used: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive

Patch to allow setting start and end item indices for downloads: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/pull/605

Example usage to grab just the VBR MP3 and record label JPG for each (note the --start-idx and --end-idx arguments):

#ia download --start-idx=4001 --end-idx=8000 -a -i --format="VBR MP3" --format="JPEG" --search collection:georgeblood

I'm going to concentrate on the George Blood collection for now.. I'm starting at item 1. It would be great if others started at index 50,000, 100,000, 150,000, ... and others started at the end and worked backwards in similarly-sized chunks, so that it's assured someone gets each of them.