lidar chip

The datasheet implies that it is pulsed. Probably a ultra-wideband signal modulating the laser.

Joe Gwinn

Guys, Jan is just winding you up. He does it all the time. Try teasing him back about cheese, or mud, or little boys with their fingers in dikes, or, wrongheaded environmental regulations that are going to cause starvation overseas--you know, the stuff Holland is famous for. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Great book:

Randy wrote that as he was dying of AIDS.

Holland was one of the original seven united provinces of the Netherlands. It's now divided into North and South Holland, and both are still provinces.

If you want to be rude about the Dutch nation-state, the Netherlands, you need to get the name right, otherwise people won't take you seriously. "Wrongheaded environmental regulations that are going to cause starvation overseas" seem to be similarly off-the-wall.

I don't think he is. I know other people who follow/sympathize with the Russian media bullshit and they all seriously believe all that nonsense. In fact you won't believe how far it goes, I know a guy - an engineer, technical support on the nuclear power plant here - who genuinely believes that and more - e.g. that the moon landings were just a fake,

*all* sorts of utter nonsense. And he is far from alone, many of the people in his working environment are no better. I know how ludicrous this all sounds to a sane person but there seems to be some sort of mental illness making plenty of people prone to the ridiculous Russian propaganda (if you could understand Russian and listened to it for 5 minutes the effect on you would be literally jaw dropping, yet plenty of people fall for it).

I worked in the USSR for a month. It is a very weird place. It would be great if they could become a prosperous and boring european country, but I think they are too damaged by their language and history.

Unfortunately you are correct. No such thing as a "normal prosperous country" in sight. It appears that even the younger generations, those who were brought up in post soviet times has not evolved much. The regularity they put some psychopath in the Kremlin with speaks for itself.

What is puzzling is how people *outside* of the Russian environment sympathize with the Russian imperial ambitions and believe their propaganda nonsense. Part of the reason for such people to exist must be some plain inferiority complex, they see themselves as having no chance in the civilized world so they look for the saviour, being fine with one who would erase the civilization they cannot fit in the way they would like to. But may be there is more than that to it, to fall for the *utter nonsense* of the Russian propaganda takes some sort of a mental condition.

seems like they have just convinced themselves that anything the western media, "establishment", and most people believe must be something the "Illuminati" has planted so it must be wrong, and the opposite how ever silly is it must be correct

In the times before WWII it was obvious that the USSR was run by murderous psychopaths, but there were lots of people in England and the US who idolized the workers paradise.

Yes. When theory is confounded by reality, some people stick with theory.

I made two good friends when I was in the USSR, and both came to live with me here for a year or so. Sergei, the native Russian, never learned English and didn't like America and went back to Moscow. Nick, a Ukranian, loved the US and stayed and imported his family. He's an IT consultant in Sacramento.

He does it about other stuff too. Jan has a puckish sense of humor as well as many strong opinions, and posts enough sane and reasonable on-topic stuff that he gets taken seriously.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have a Russian history book whose preface begins, "It is not true that people get the government they deserve, and nowhere is it more grotesquely false than in Russia."

After the local Slavs were taken over by Vikings, there was a long period of warlordism and foreign domination. After that, the Russians endured two centuries of Mongol rule, five centuries of serfdom that gradually became more and more crushing, a brief interlude of comparative freedom, then three quarters of a century of Bolshevism, two catastrophic wars, deliberately imposed starvation on a huge scale, the breakup of empire and the looting of the economy by oligarchs. Then they've had Putin.

It's really no wonder that they're both crazy and pathologically suspicious--it's the only rational response. :(

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That was Fauci too.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I know he does it and I agree his on topic posts can be taken seriously. And I stand by my post about his pro-Russian nonsense.

I follow a Latvian podcaster (Kristaps Andrejsons,

). One of his regular segments is translating the amusing pro-Russian propaganda of one Igor Girkin, which is very much along the lines you mention.

I'm just not at all sure Jan actually believes it. (FWIW I think that enlarging NATO all the way up to Russia's border is geopolitical insanity, but not because of any good opinion of Putin on my part. Once a KGB colonel, always a KGB colonel.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Ukraine was no/is where near fulfilling the requirements to join NATO So Putin can't use that as an excuse

Well I hope you are right. But I did not sense any irony in his posts on that topic, may be I just don't know him well enough.

Insanity or not, on this world we all live with two options - swallow or be swallowed. It would be a shame if our civilization is lost because it was swallowed by the barbarians; it will be triple shame if it gets swallowed without giving a fight.

The idea that Russian could be some kind of Babel-17 with built-in error generation is a trifle improbable.

Every country is shaped - and damaged - by their history. If you haven't invested enough in manufacturing capacity, transport, public health service and education, your capacity to invest more in those areas is compromised.

The US stopped investing enough a few years ago. Russia never did - Lenin did electrify the country in the 1920's, but that merely got them up from backwards to primitive, though the country was big enough that even a primitive manufacturing base was enough to let them out-produce, and eventually defeat the more advanced, but less numerous, Germans by 1945.

Putin is trying to grow Russia's economy by taking over it's neighbours. Since this involves shelling the Ukraine back into the stone age before taking it over, this has to be a pretty silly idea.

Not all that many. H.G. wells wasn't too impressed by Stalin.

John Larkin can't process the facts that show that anthropogenic global warming is happening right now, and like's the theory that says that all these facts are being invented by a global conspiracy of climate scientists

Never learning English seems to have been the crucial difference. There may be something wrong with John Larkin's English, or perhaps just with the ideas he uses his English to express.

You've lived in the Balkans too long. ;)

Yup. One of the things I really miss about the Cold War was that most of the commies were overseas.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs