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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.








  • Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.

    In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:

    -kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time

    -the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly

    -many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS

    -that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need

    -(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive

    -most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis

    Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.


  • This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.

    DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.

    It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.


  • I had a partner for eight years. We met when we were both 31. She was my first monogamous relationship theretofore because I decided to give monogamy a try. She was utterly, screamingly boring in bed. There was nothing else notably wrong with the relationship, except for her unwillingness to communicate on anything beyond household, workaday topics. No oral (give or receive), no anal, not into foreplay, and she would just lay there. But no conflicts either. There was the advantage of she was always willing and ready to go without any foreplay or lube. She got off and claimed she was absolutely sexually satisfied. Sex wasn’t even fun in the context of Free Use, which is a kink I enjoy. I tried to engage her in all kinds of Gottman Method relationship work, but she bluntly and explicitly refused.

    At one point early in our relationship, she moved and clamped her vagina in a way that was quite enjoyable. “Honey, that was great! Please do that more.” And for the rest of our relationship, any such complement was a sure-fire way to make sure it would never happen again. After eight years of nearly daily, invariably terrible sex, I stopped approaching her sex for three weeks. She never said a thing. On day 22, I broke up with her, and she was absolutely gobsmacked, claimed that I was throwing away eight years of great history. She hadn’t even noticed that there had been no sex for three weeks.