On our last road trip, I gave our 4 year old a printed map with the route highlighted and lettered milestones every hour or so. I was hoping to give a sense of scale (how far away are we, how far we do we travel in a certain time, etc.) that's harder to convey with a digital map. It also worked to practice letters and cardinal directions (we're at K, what's the next letter? the road turns at M, which direction will we be going now?). It worked rather well, but probably because he got a gummy bear at each waypoint.
The book I learned from suggested five types of knots for different problems and suggested learning one of type, which I found to be a great starting point.
The five were: a stopper knot, to keep a line from pulling through something, a fixed loop, a running loop, a hitch (attach a line to a thing), and a bend (attach a rope to a rope).
My go-to knots were a figure 8, bowline, running bowline, clove hitch, and sheet bend respectively.
I generally only need `ln -s <src> <dst>`. I know the -s means symbolic link, but in my head I read it as "source", since that's how I remembered the order long ago.
This is confusing, because when you picture the link as an arrow (as in `ls` output), the link name is the source and the link target is the destination.
These, and the spoofed number phone calls where the other side just hangs up when you answer. For the phone calls, I just assumed that someone was trying to build a database of phone numbers that do or do not answer for some other/future purpose...
Based on the delays in these sorts of calls, I’d guess that they’re robocalls which dial way more numbers than they have operators for and try to filter out no-answer and voicemail pickups automatically. Then if you pick up, they route you to an operator. If there’s no operator available, it just drops the call rather than reveal which annoying company just wasted your time. That way the operators— clearly the most expensive link in the chain — are always engaged. Just a guess though!
Even if that’s wrong, I’m sure you’re right that they collect caller-pick-up stats. I imagine even cursory vetting would dramatically increase the resale value of their lead list.
I assumed that the gap between the cost to do the bare minimum and the cost to do some elaborate was smaller at the time. If you're already laying each brick by hand, it seems like the incremental cost to work a pattern into the bricks would be small compared to modern (bland) poured-concrete buildings, where we lay a whole floor in one go. Likewise in other trades.
We invented machines to build large amounts of simple things cheaply, so we designed simpler things.
I remember discovering this as a boy scout of around 14 and when I presented it to our scout leader, the look he gave me suggested that he was trying to decide whether to call the police or the psychiatric services. I've kept these things to myself ever since.
The book I learned knots from said that there are ~5 categories of knots and knowing one of each will cover you for most things. The categories were fixed loop, running loop, stopper knot, hitch (rope to object), and bend (joining two ropes).
I have about 4-5 knots memorized for each of those category, but sailing I typically only use a cleat hitch, bowline, and clove hitch (in order of frequency).
The ABoK was something I always wanted to see, but never bothered to buy... until I found that PDF. Scrolling through it finally convinced me to buy a hardcopy. It's one of my favorite books to just flip through. There's more than just the knots: the history and the anecdotes are a fascinating window into the past.
