I’ve only been streaming for a few days, but some results are in. On the days I streamed a couple hours, I used 5GB/day. About 1GB or so of that was probably other traffic. Maybe more, since I’ve been doing some IPFS stuff and other moving data around. But the numbers show that the bulk of it was streaming.
So if it takes 2GB/hour, I definitely can’t do it a couple hours every night and stay under my 50GB/month limit. I could get away with an hour, though. Or, if I do an online class, I could do a live classroom for a couple hours twice a week. Something like that should be doable. Some more testing is in order, but no more two-hour sessions for this month, or I’ll cross my limit with a week of month left.
Vox takes another whack at the evolutionary pseudoscience pinata today. I was initially skeptical of evolution because it was pushed by the same people who pushed a lot of other nonsense through the schools: that men and women are the same, that socialism is the best, that we shouldn’t eat animals, that we should switch to the metric system.
Then a couple years ago I went through a biology course. The shift in presentation when I got to the evolution section was striking. Up to that point, everything had been presented clearly and logically, fact A building on fact B and leading to conclusion C. On evolution, that was replaced with handwaving and appeals to authority. The book made very confident claims about how the evidence for evolution is overwhelming – so overwhelming, apparently, that they couldn’t decide which bits to choose to put in the book.
On the other hand, the sections on the structure of a single living cell and all its moving parts, and the function of DNA and how much goes into the production of a single protein molecule that’s needed for some function of the body, just made me laugh that anyone could study this and think it just happened. It’s easy for them to wave their hands at schoolchildren and say, “And then a mutation produced feathers,” as if one little change could do that. But at the genetic and cellular level, so many changes would have to happen simultaneously in support of each other to make that happen that the idea is laughable.
I was playing Sentinel the other day. It’s an old C64 game that I could swear I’ve done a video on before, but now I can’t find it. Guess I’ll put that on my todo list. It occurred to me that I should put my list of level keys online, since it’s up to about 450 of the 10,000 total levels, and I couldn’t find a list online that has more than a few dozen. So here’s my list of Sentinel level codes, now linked for posterity.
Hearing the sports news this morning, it occurred to me that the NFL has gone past parity and reached randomness (“We’ve gone to plaid!”). People often praise “parity” in the NFL, meaning that any team can “get good” and compete fairly quickly with some smart/lucky draft picks and signings, good coaching, and hard work. But this isn’t that. This is randomness, where a team that does everything right can get pounded by a team that does everything wrong, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. I don’t think that’s what sports fans want. Maybe it’s what non-sports fans want, because it’s cheap, reality-TV-style drama.
But it’s not sports drama. Pick any sports movie, and there’s a progression to it. Usually it starts with a benchwarmer or a plucky team of losers, and through a lot of hard work and overcoming setbacks, they make it to the top and achieve greatness. They don’t just screw around, lose games they should win, back into the playoffs because other teams screwed up, and then win the championship on other teams’ mistakes. (Unless Rian Johnson made a sports movie that I don’t know about.) If my team sucks, I want to root for them to get better and win. I don’t really want to root for them to get lucky in inexplicable ways.
Back in 2016, CNN decided it didn’t like the way people were increasingly turning to word-of-mouth and alternative news sites for their news. So they came up with their “Fake News” campaign, where they would run ads showing people getting bad info from sketchy sources, and recommend that everyone stick with brand-name, major-network, establishment-approved news.
Some people on the Internet quickly said, “Oh, really, you are calling out Fake News? That is rich.” The memes began to flow and CNN’s Fake News was called out every time they lied, which was most of the time. At some point Donald Trump picked up on it and started using it during the campaign, and there was much rejoicing.
Sometime last year I said CNN was dead. Unfortunately, like the guy on the cart in Holy Grail, it’s not completely dead yet. It’s dying, but still gasping and flailing about like a chicken with its throat only half-cut. But the end is coming, and there will be more rejoicing.
