The RFCs have been known to be very imaginative as well — RFC1149 or RFC2549, for instance.
New IETF draft reveals Egyptians invented pyramids to sharpen razor blades
Warren Kumari has had it with Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) drafts being held up as canonical statements that reveal the organisation's thinking or position. And so he has written his own hilarious draft to make the point that such documents are not normative. Among Kumari’s declarations: pyramids were used to …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 20th May 2021 07:12 GMT b0llchit
Even with these imaginative RFCs, they are real and are in fact functionally useful in one or another way. At least one group has made an implementation and thus proven its viability at some level. Adding weights to the feet is a practical consideration, which is left to infrastructure operators for actual implementation.
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Thursday 20th May 2021 08:57 GMT amanfromMars 1
Re: Some get government support
One of our previous home secretaries wanted mandatory implementation of RFC3514. ..... Flocke Kroes
Hence their current, previous home secretary status, Flocke Kroes. One can't have madness running amok in office. It is terrifying and terrorising and just encourages the natives to revolt and exercise their own initiatives with rogue and renegade resources from forceful sources well beyond the physical reach and remote control of afflicted and supporting government agencies.
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Thursday 20th May 2021 09:03 GMT Peter Prof Fox
A useful project
Although it may not have worked to sharpen razor blades, it got you (and me) interested in experimenting and actually trying something for ourselves. Was there something in our set-up that wasn't quite right. How do you actually make a pyramid? Is sellotape or compass direction going to interfere with the 'forces'. When you give up you're able to face loonies with confidence, and tell them if it's so easy they why don't they show you a working system.
In a world where opinions smother facts, actual experiments are fresh air. For your pleasure I enclose a link to a page I wrote long before Google existed. https://vulpeculox.net/misc/try.htm Seven easy to do-it-yourself experiments which are quirky know-all bait.
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Thursday 20th May 2021 10:56 GMT ThatOne
Re: A useful project
> if it's so easy they why don't they show you a working system
Define "working system"... The problem with those things is the placebo effect. I've seen people turn blue and topple over due to [environmental condition], but have no reaction at all when they didn't know that condition was met.
So the razors might be just as blunt (or even blunter), the believers will be persuaded they are now sharper. Maybe not totally sharp, but definitely sharper than before, no doubt possible. Convictions are impervious to reality.
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Friday 21st May 2021 07:14 GMT jmch
Re: A useful project
"The problem with those things is the placebo effect"
I'm not sure the placebo effect is a problem, as long as the desired outcome is achieved. If I convince an asthma sufferer to go into a pyramid to breathe better, and they get better, then does it matter if they got better because of the placebo effect?
What's really a problem is the nocebo effect - people genuinely getting sick because they've convinced themselves (or allowed someone to convince them) that they are somehow unhealthy.
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Friday 21st May 2021 11:29 GMT ThatOne
Re: A useful project
> I'm not sure the placebo effect is a problem, as long as the desired outcome is achieved
That's true and even sometimes actively used by modern medicine.
My point was rather about the difficulties debunking crazy theories by simple observation: Observation, and thus the assessment of efficiency, is never objective (due to participants' expectations and biases), which is why serious research uses blinded experiments (double-blind trials).
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Friday 21st May 2021 14:04 GMT not.known@this.address
Re: Reiki
If you have ever had a Reiki 'practitioner' squeeze your foot and felt something go all weird* in your back, you wouldn't be so quick to mock. It might not solve world hunger or stop missiles unexpectedly turning into bowls of petunias but it can be very relaxing...
* a sort of 'crunch' followed by a pleasant warmth that spread slowly. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in *your* philosophies...
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Friday 21st May 2021 18:50 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: RFC is "rough draft"?
I-Ds (Internet Drafts) are drafts of some sort, rough or otherwise, and that's what we have in this case.
Frankly, while Kumari's draft might be amusing (I haven't read it, and the excerpts quoted in the article didn't inspire me to do so), I don't have much sympathy for his complaint. Some people will cite I-Ds as authoritive. So what; people will cite all sorts of things. Those who understand the IETF know that I-Ds are not normative and neither are many RFCs, only some of which are even on the Standards Track.
The archive that the IETF maintains of I-Ds is nonetheless useful, because some I-Ds never make it further but nonetheless become de facto standards, or at least a guideline for implementation, where no other standard exists. draft-ietf-tn3270e-extensions-04.txt (which I don't think made it to an RFC) is one example.
There are others of historical or theoretical interest, such as draft-ietf-usefor-useage-00.txt.
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Thursday 20th May 2021 16:40 GMT martinusher
Bit late to this game
This isn't the first time that people have noticed that you can put anything in a RFC. The early ones had all sorts of weird stuff in them (back then people had both a higher tolerance for weird stuff and a sense of humour).
As for sharpening razor blades, I don't know if anyone's got it to work. Its such an old idea that it talks about 'razor blades' even though the safety razor has long followed the cut-throat into obsolescence. (Yes, I know some people still use them....fashion's like that......)
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Thursday 20th May 2021 17:36 GMT Baudwalk
As Pratchett himself wrote:...
..."A Pyramid, properly viewed as a device for manipulating time, doesn't so much keep a razor blade sharp as remind it of a time in its life when it wasn't blunt, and to make a suggestion that this would be a nice time to revisit, for just long enough to do Pharaoh's legs."
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Thursday 20th May 2021 23:18 GMT NullNix
Re: As Pratchett himself wrote:...
Yeah. You know what was missing in this RFC? An assignment for X-Clacks-Overhead and/or "GNU Terry Pratchett". (But the existing assignments were hilarious, and reminded me of nothing more than the oh-so-carefully-chosen keybindings for the immortal gnxt text editor.)
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Thursday 20th May 2021 21:45 GMT HinD
Well, i knew it
Laugh all you want, but the quartz in the chambers, the positioning and the electrical conductivity of the pyramids suggested all along they could vibrate to supersonic speeds, almost as if they were designed to rub against a metal plate of some sorts. I think you all are underestimating the importance of keeping one's lawn well trimmed when you are an alien millions of light years away from the closest intergalactic convenience store.