I have a mouse with more than the usual 3 clickables (in my case, a Roccat Kova). Originally I got it because I was looking for better gaming performance (higher DPI, polling rate, etc.), and it's symmetrically shaped (re: ambidexterity). However, for some reason (that I can't remember) I ended up mapping two of the extra buttons to Page Up and Page Down.

Now, I use these paging buttons as complements to the mouse wheel for scrolling, and I have to say that this is one of those "how did live without this before" things. I honestly feel like it's similar to the transition in technology from wheel-less mice to mice with mouse wheels. Nowadays, it's a given that mice have scroll wheels, and everyone uses them, and it's practically unthinkable to want a mouse without one. I feel the same about my mapped paging buttons. I use the wheel for short-distance scrolling, but I use the paging buttons for wide-area jumping around in a scrollable UI element (e.g. web page). This particular mouse also lets me hold down the mouse button to get repeated "keystrokes" just like a keyboard.

I was curious what things other Tilders do with their extra mouse buttons. Maybe we'd pick up useful ideas from one another.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Around 3-5 years ago, Elon Musk was teasing that he thought he had a clever idea for how to make electric-powered aircraft viable/profitable with, basically, current technology ... and he was basically daring people to guess it.

Regardless of what he actually did or didn't know, it got me thinking, and I came up with an idea. I thought I'd run it past the Tildes Team, see if it passes muster.

My idea, in a nutshell, is to build airplanes with only 25%-50% of the battery capacity required for their flight (making them much lighter, with much more capacity for people/cargo) ... combined with, I'll call them Maser Cells on the undersides of the wings ... coupled with low-intensity maser beam emitters at all the major airports.

Airplanes use a ridiculous amount of energy gaining altitude. For short flights, it can be upwards of 50% of their fuel spent just getting from takeoff to cruising altitude. My basic idea is for planes to get up to cruising altitude in large circles over the airport, powered by a combination of battery power and maser energy beamed up from the airport below. Then stay in a taxi-ing circle over the airport until the batteries are fully charged, before departing. Longer flights can plan their route to include one or more detours to pass over other major airports (or other recharging hubs, like the Tesla Supercharging network, but for airplanes) to recharge the batteries along the way.

Trans-oceanic flights would be more challenging, perhaps requiring some kind of recharging hubs located midway in the oceans.

To clarify, my "Maser Cells" are similar to traditional solar-electric power cells, except they are optimized to convert either laser or maser beamed energy into electricity. These things already exist (I forget what they're called), although getting them to a high-efficiency commercial-airline level of production, that would take some effort.

There is, potentially, a lot of inefficiency in the conversion rates, from ground-generated electricity to ground-generated laser/maser, then on the plane, maser converted back to electricity into battery, then from battery into electric engines ... perhaps there are ways to reduce the amount of conversions necessary, or to increase the efficiency of the conversions. Or perhaps this is what kills the idea.

Similarly, if this were actually implemented large-scale, to largely replace fossil-fuel-driven planes, we would be talking about a LOT of electricity requirements, a lot of laser/maser emitters at every airport, and a massive redesign of flight traffic management, to allow for hundreds of planes routinely in hours-long recharging flights over every airport, all the time ... potential choke-points at various recharging hubs (again, similar to what Tesla sees at overly-popular Supercharging stations on the ground) ... and doubtless lots of other issues I'm not thinking of.

Anyway, though, that's the notion.

ETA: This idea could be extrapolated to an extreme degree, with on-board batteries almost completely eliminated.

With clearly defined flight corridors, and ground-based maser power stations located every 10-20 miles along, planes could fly their entire route on power beamed up to them, with only 20-30 minute battery capacity for emergencies.

ETA #2: A person who owned his/her own rocket company might also consider putting the maser cells on the tops of the planes, and launching a bunch of solar-power-generating satellites, with maser emitters shooting power down onto them.

I guess my main point is, if this maser-energy delivery system is even remotely feasible at a commercial level, there's a lot of potential.

I bought a flyswatter for my girlfriend to deal with a fly she hadn't been able to shoo out but usually we would go to great lengths to capture and release invaders outside, especially spiders whose company we tend to romanticize. I am not feeling especially regretful about the purchase but I got to wondering what opinions people here might have.

I have been influenced toward this concern by the essays I read on Brian Tomasik's Reducing Suffering website, here is the section on invertebrates. I'm self-conscious of stifling this survey with that slightly ponderous link. I am not sure that I always track the calculus of his moral methods, though I appreciate the thoughtful approach.

Admittedly keep education flowing is some corporate language. The only people who care about education are left-wing politicians and the actual teachers, neither of which matter now.

Anyway, my state government is broadcasting classes with 3 subjects from around 2PM to 4-4:20PM. The last subject of the day (3:30PM until the end) is only broadcast on the app they made and their YouTube channel unfortunately. All the classes are uploaded onto YouTube for posterity.

The app they made is mainly a chat, later limited to 15 messages as an attempt to stop copy-pasting from flooding the few meaningful/serious answers (it is a live chat with 20k people in it simultaneously so good riddance), to little avail IIRC. (IIRC because I watch by TV because my battery is limited and the screen is too small to actually copy to a textbook)

The quality is kinda mediocre but nothing bad enough usually. One time it was a 4:3 480p clip with interlacing, which is based until you start caring.

They are also sending us "handouts" (apostilas, PT-BR to English) and the normal state tests every bimester.

As for the teachers, they have sent us pretty much the full student workload via Google PDFs on WhatsApp, which is the opposite of private, but privacy is hardly possible when you're Brazilian and likely don't even have an up-to-date (defined as less than 5 years old ^LMAO ) PC. They haven't done any zoom/meet chats to teach us stuff however, since that's kind of the purpose of the TV/YouTube broadcast.

I've recently built a brainfuck just-in-time compiler and I'm looking for my next project. I think compiling a more complicated (and more easily written) language would build on what I've learned so far. Rather than design my own language from the ground up, I'd prefer to work with a toy language that already has existing programs and a spec. This would both save me some work and give me more solid ground to build upon.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

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