I assumed that in urban USA the map would be fairly complete and opportunities for edits would be somewhat rare. My assumption was very wrong. The app showed a dozen quests just outside of my office building. Thanks for suggesting it!
Borderlands 2 (BL2). I love the characters, the writing and the story. Handsome Jack is my favorite villain of all time. The game play mechanics feel good to me. The difficulty levels goes up with subsequent play-throughs (True Vault Hunter Mode (TVHM) and Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode (UVHM)). There's decent DLC; "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" was my favorite. Also, it is possible that the story of BL2 hits for me because I also played the snot out of BL1 and fell in love with the characters there who re-appear in BL2 in very well written ways. For the record, I think BL3 and BL4 are inferior to BL2 by a long shot.
Stardew Valley. The first play-through without spoilers and without knowing what I was getting into was magical. After that, the variety of things to do and different ways to play the game kept me coming back. You can just chill and take things slow, or min/max it, or try a speed run, or just focus on your farm.
Edit to add: GTA V. Love the characters and the open world. So much to do.
"The darker colours are points that were updated closer to 2007 and the brighter colours closer to December of last year." It's possible that this area was just more recently updated and is not necessarily more densely covered compared to other areas.
I pick a category, like fruits and vegetables or cars, and then try to come up with a word in that category that starts with every letter of the alphabet in order. To keep it relaxing I synchronize it with my breath. On the breath in, I note the letter I am on: "C" for example. On the breath out I note the word: "Cantaloupe". If I don't have a word for that letter by the time I breath out, no big deal, I conceptualize whatever was in my mind at that point and then repeat the letter on the next breath in.
Another thing I do that works well for me is just counting breaths. On the breath in I think "in-n-n-n-n" and on the breath out I count. When I lose count, and I am still awake, I start again from 0, as any sane programmer would ;-).
ETA: For a couple of months I have been doing a short gratitude routine as I am getting into bed. I acknowledge the good and positive things that happened during the day, and I tell myself that I did a good job (if I did) or that I did as well as I could today and that's good enough for today. Then I think, "And now it's time for rest. I've been looking forward to this." If any part of me starts thinking about the day again or thinks about tomorrow, I gently reassure it that I will attend to all of this tomorrow morning and that now it's quiet time and time to rest.
All of this plus 250 mg of magnesium an hour before bed has made falling asleep super consistent and easy.
From the Introduction: "Each satellite may carry traffic for dozens of independent networks through an array of on-board transponders, each covering a diameter of thousands of kilometers (at most a third of Earth’s surface)".
Can someone help me understand the use of "diameter" in this sentence. I am guessing it refers to the satellite's signal coverage of the Earth's surface. If that's the case, wouldn't something like arc degrees be a better measure? I just can't figure out how "diameter" can be used to describe a coverage arc or area.
"Unbreakable: The Western States 100" [1] came to mind after you reminded me of the Barkley documentary. “The Barkley Marathons, the race that eats it’s young” seems more human and better grounded than "Unbreakable", but "Unbreakable" captured the excitement of running ultra marathons so completely for me.
I think your experience reinforces my point that you can get to be proficient in electronics from either end: formal theoretical education leading to hands-on, or hands-on with theoretical learned as needed. Your case seems like the latter, and you learned about bypass capacitors early on. My case was the former, and I learned about them later.
Not kidding. I was a few years in having taken a few analog electrical engineering courses with labs, signals and systems, a course and a lab on power before we got to digital circuits. The first course in digital circuits didn't have a lab. It wasn't until we got to the microprocessors course where we had to work with a Motorola 68HC11 on a breadboard that the concept of bypass capacitors was explained to us in a lab. It was 20+ years ago. Maybe things are different now.
There are different ways to approach electronics. You can spend a few years getting formal background in math and electrical engineering, but I don't think that will necessarily answer the hypothetical question of "why does this buzz". Anecdotally, I struggled to even get digital circuits working after several years of electrical engineering university education until someone who ran our labs told us about bypass capacitors.
Which brings me to another way to learn, which is by hands-on tinkering and picking up theory where it is needed. I am pretty sure the guy that ran our labs didn't have a degree in electrical engineering, but he was amazing at building things and troubleshooting them. Building up intuitive knowledge and experience also takes years though.
I was wondering about the authors of this book. It's in the Introduction:
> Michael F. Robbins holds the S.B. in Electrical Science and Engineering and the M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degrees both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mike is the co-founder of CircuitLab, Inc. and developer of the CircuitLab circuit simulation software used by universities, hobbyists, and practicing engineers in 196 countries.
It looks like an introductory book to electrical circuits with interactive simulation exercises built into the book. This should give you an intuitive understanding of how the math that was presented actually works at the circuit level, which, I think, is very cool.