Ryan's Wisdumb

I read a book a decade or so ago, published in 1997 called:  The Fourth Turning An American Prophecy . The book proposed a theory for predicting the future based on cyclical repetition of the past along with the mechanism behind it.  The centrist-leaning conservative authors, historian and economist Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, argue that history repeats itself in roughly 80 to 100 year cycles (about one long lifetime and called a saeculum) due to the constellation and archetype of generations that are influenced by events in the same way as their cohort generation 80 to 100 years in the past. Background on the Fourth Turning Generational Theory Per the theory, there are 4 generations influencing society at any given time (with smaller numbers very old stragglers still hanging on but not influencing society anymore and young children being born to the next generation).  The archetypes used for these generations are Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist.  Each ...

What comes to mind when I say, "Philosophical Society"?  For me it conjures up images of the famous Royal Society with groups of gentleman scientists gathered in a grand room lit by candles with overstuffed chairs and dark wood paneling discussing the leading scientific theories of the day while contemplatively puffing on a pipe.  It's a romantic image and probably has little basis in reality but I would have loved to be a fly on the wall listening to the likes of Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday and Ernest Rutherford discussing their theories and breakthroughs.  In my mind, science in the 17th through 19th century was largely accessible to the average person with some curiosity about the world around them.  The body of knowledge to draw on was limited and a lot could still be learned with simple experimentation.  Many of the scientific breakthroughs of those eras came from wealthy men who had time to pursue scie...

  It's been a while since I've had a good rant.  At least publicly.  Much like a volcano that slowly builds up pressure over time until there is a massive explosion, I have been absorbing the stupidity, faults, flaws and outright incompetence of the various products I interact with daily, and now it is time for me to erupt.  If you recall, Spotify was the target of my last good rant about software development .  Today's rant is brought to you by Yahoo! I have been using Yahoo! since the very early days of the World Wide Web.  I remember when it was hosted at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.  It was an innovative idea, and I immediately set it as my homepage in my NCSA Mosaic browser.  At the time, there were no other web-based aggregators of content (at least that I knew of) and Yahoo! provided a great starting point for finding content I was interested in (kids- this was before Google even existed).  For a fun trip down memory lane, take a look a...

 I just got up and running with a new DIY project that absolutely amazes me.  It is called BirdNet-Pi and it is a software package running on a Raspberry Pi that uses AI analysis of audiograms to automatically identifies birds by sound in real time.  It is designed to run 24/7 and collects data on all of the birds it hears around your house.  It can even generate notifications that I can receive on my cell phone so I can come running if it detects a bird I haven't seen in my yard before.  Almost as amazing, it is a free, open-source project! I was clued in to this project by a Facebook ad for a BirdWeather PUC  (shown above).  This is a standalone device that does much of the above- listens and identifies birds that it hears.  It is fully integrated with the BirdWeather website and shares its data to the BirdWeather database.  You can look up real time ID results for any PUCs that are shared on their map.  Pretty cool!  I wanted one...

  Do you have a portable power bank that doesn't seem to perform as advertised?  Do you suspect you are not getting the Watts you paid for?  You're not alone.  Inspired by your local news team, Channel Wisdumb went undercover into the seedy underworld of power bank specsmanship to uncover the truth.  What we learned will shock you. By publicly admitting this, I am risking my career.  I may be asked to turn in my electrical engineering badge and soldering gun.  I admit this here as a public service so others don't make the same mistakes I did:  I was dumb.  I wasn't thinking.  I know better.  I expected a 30000mAh rated power bank to be able to completely recharge my 5000mAh phone from empty about 6 times.  When I could only get about 1.5 recharges of my phone out of that battery, I knew something was as fishy as a tuna cat food tin floating in a vat of sardines.  I decided to dig deeper.   (Ok, that's it for the ...