Not an idea - a question/observation.
I have been printing out my ideas ever since I started using the halfbakery.... They now amount to a very unwieldy collection so I have been compiling them into a series of "A to Z" volumes, with a corresponding Quarkxpress version on my laptop.
It's a laborious task, but I'm getting through it. What has surprised me is that some of my ideas, that I have print outs for, are no longer present on the halfbakery, despite me not deleting them, and them not being [m-f-d]s
One example is the "Coconut Milk Vending Machine" of 22 Sept 2012 - I have a print out, but the idea seems to no longer exist. I am going to repost it now, but what happended to the original?????? Any ideas, anyone??-- xenzag, Apr 03 2020 Very sad, but also sort of funny. https://www.bbc.com...-us-canada-52363852 [pertinax, Apr 21 2020] Might have got lost in the Great Outage ...
We archive all our ideas to our servers - the whole html page, including the annotations.
This "printing things out" is just so Second Millennium ...-- 8th of 7, Apr 03 2020 Nobody knows. All the records are missing, almost as if someone in the Ministry of Truth dropped them into a Memory Hole ...-- 8th of 7, Apr 03 2020 I have the print-outs so I know what's there and what's not there. I'm just surprised, and will now have to check every posting again against the printouts... a tiresome task that will take many days - thank you virus! ha-- xenzag, Apr 03 2020 If you have the archived HTML, you can run a short shell script under cron to make the comparison automatically at arbitrary intervals, and report discrepancies.
That will give you more time to work on your illuminated vellum manuscripts.-- 8th of 7, Apr 03 2020 I have found at least 15 missing ideas so far, and I'm only at the C's.... bollox
Once I have them all filed, I'll start reposting the missing ones..-- xenzag, Apr 03 2020 Using a computer, or by scratching them onto a cave wall with ochre and a charred stick ?
Quite a durable technique, mind, though not as durable as chiseling hieroglyphics into huge blocks of granite.-- 8th of 7, Apr 03 2020 Oh no. Most of yours are my favorites. Among others.-- blissmiss, Apr 03 2020 I'm up to 40 missing ideas.... and only just dealt with A to Ds.... by the time I'm finished at this rate there will be hundreds to repost. Some of my favs showing up.....eg Duck Billed Hatty Plus.... some of mystery solved - I had renamed some ideas but others are defo in the ether.
There used to be FASHION: HAT: FUNCTION category but it's gone completely. I presume the several ideas I see listed in the print out from 2006 are gone as well. I'll search and see. Ideas dispersed, but my Duck-Billed Hatty Plus gone.... I'm bringing it back! ha-- xenzag, Apr 03 2020 I have now detected over 50 missing ideas, and I've only looked at the "A"s to "P"s so far.... I expect many more to show up. Luckily I have print outs, so will repost the more worthwhile ones.-- xenzag, Apr 20 2020 Things don't really "exist" in any sense unless they are on the internet and seen by others. Those "sheets" of "paper" that you have are only visible to you and therefore could be either fictitious or the product of your fevered imagination, similar to the ideas themselves.
When an idea is visible to billions of netizens, we can all jointly verify its existence. That social verification is the closest thing there is to actual verification.
Consider this: somewhere in a cave is a stone that has never been seen by anyone. We cannot say anything about it - its weight, colour or location. The only person who can say that it exists is me because I can see it in my mind. That places it on a reality level with pixies and leprechauns. However the black stone of the Kaaba can be Googled and has been seen by billions, making it even more real than if it had only been seen by millions in real life.
I contend that your ideas may or may not have existed but are currently less real than Kaiser Sauze. Their best chance (if indeed there is even a 'they') is to post them here where they can be seen and become more real.
I am presupposing here that as you are visible on the internet, you too must be real in some way and so can post them.
This is also all based on the assumption that I am not simply imagining the internet.-- wagster, Apr 20 2020 You sure you're in the right universe, xen ? Who won WWIII ? Why aren't penguins allowed in Times Square ?-- FlyingToaster, Apr 20 2020 I can answer those questions...
1. Corona Virus
2. Corona Virus-- blissmiss, Apr 20 2020 The virus is doing good work, and should see the back of the stable genius for one thing.-- xenzag, Apr 20 2020 I'm sorry, [xenzag], but look at the linked news.
As I predicted in an earlier thread, Trump has pulled off the Easter miracle of making the world bear his sins. He is pretending, without a hint of irony, that Americans need protecting from pestiferous foreigners, which would have been true two or three months ago, but is now the opposite of the truth. Canadians, for example, are dying at only about one third the rate of Americans; better keep *them* out, to avoid invidious comparisons.
As I understand it, polls indicate that Americans are buying this line (at least, Trump's ratings have been going up, not down).
[edit: I was wrong about those polls - they've been heading down again since I last looked. There's hope yet.]-- pertinax, Apr 21 2020 //Canadians, for example, are dying at only about one third the rate of Americans//
Oh, don't discount the stupidity of our politicians, just yet. A few days ago they were making noises about lifting restrictions... reportedly (and believably) the national outcry was "What, are you insane ?"-- FlyingToaster, Apr 21 2020 The death rate over time doesn't matter (except to those that die, of course). The majority of these unfortunate people will die anyway.
The ONLY thing that matters is the EXCESS mortality in the general population; who has died who would not otherwise have died ?
Like all such diseases, it is hacking down the old, the unfit, the ones with existing vulnerabilities. The numbers of normal healthy adults who are dying is tiny by comparison. There are some, and the press is highlighting those cases with indecent glee.
Restrictions or not restrictions, the people who die with Covid are already "marked". The one-year survival for that cohort is 12%. By this time next year, eight out of ten will be dead, of something or other.
It's only because humans are helpless in the face of a normal, natural phenomenon that there's such angst and hand-wringing. People die all the time. It happens. it's not preventable. Get over it.-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2020 You should offer yourself to be mulched up, distilled, and made into an anti Covid vaccine.-- xenzag, Apr 21 2020 The T(h) for the virus is 18 days according to the researchers at AZ. That means that after 36 days, the current virus will share less than 7% of its antigen markers with its predecessor.
That means there is a 90%+ chance that any serum antigen test will return a false negative, and likewise a vaccine has a <10% chance of offering any protection at all, certainly not "immunity".
Besides, since any treatment is purely supportive (there is no specific active that will treat it) a formal diagnosis is not useful from a therapeutic perspective. The treatment is the same, whatever.
Testing the general population is epidemiologically interesting, but again, not very useful, particularly given the increasing prevalence of false negatives and the 50%+ asymptomatic cases.
The numbers do not lie. Read them and weep, Earthling.-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2020 Much better to sacrifice yourself willingly, and retain some dignity don't you think?-- xenzag, Apr 21 2020 Since you have none to lose, we consider you unqualified to comment on that topic.
The individual Borg is expendable in the interest of maintaining and expanding the Collective. Thus we conquer. Resistance is Futile.-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2020 What's your preferences for entering the mulcher? - Head or feet first? Audience or private shredding?-- xenzag, Apr 21 2020 No preference, but definitely with an audience and live on-camera.
We want to watch your shock and disappointment when, immediately following the attempted "destruction", we are instantly reconstructed, entirely unharmed, next to the mulcher by means of our transporter system and an image held in the pattern buffer.-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2020 I actually got one of my ideas back in The Great Outage. [jutta] had marked it for deletion and I had complied. Then the hard disk crashed and, as the idea was present in the last snapshot available, it returned. It's a terrible idea but I look on it fondly, like a plant that has been crushed underfoot only to start growing back.-- st3f, Apr 21 2020 // a plant that has been crushed underfoot only to start growing back. //
You're not doing it properly ...-- 8th of 7, Apr 21 2020 Swept away along with the intruding digital footprints.-- wjt, Apr 22 2020 Maybe those ideas just renamed themselves, but still exist?-- Mindey, Apr 25 2020 It would be possible to use an application like Webripper to search the entire HB directory tree for text from the idea name, using wildcards. That might show any orphan files.
But we consider that such orphans are unlikely to exist in any numbers.
We will examine some of our archives to see if any specimens show up.-- 8th of 7, Apr 25 2020 random, halfbakery