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This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. In our next look at the game mechanics for Civilization V we examine the topic of Science and how to win a Science victory. This is something that has been in Civilization from the very beginning, but in Civilization V there are some changes worth addressing. Playing Civilization V, Part 7 Science In most respects this is not all that different in Civ 5. Most of the techs are the same, there is a tech tree that is pretty similar, and you need to keep up in Science for any victory condition you are seeking. You may want to just beat your enemies into submission, but if you are using Chariots while they have Tanks, you aren’t going to have success. But also it is obvious that if you are going for a Science victory, you need to really focus on this. So many of these tips should be followed for any victory condition, but should be mandatory if you are going for a Science victory. The mechanics of researching technologies is that you have to accumulate a certain amount of Science to discover a new technology, but this amount goes up over time, so you have be continuously looking to increase your output of Science to keep up. for instance, one of your first Techs would be Pottery, which has a cost of 35 Science. But in your Capital city you get 3 Science from your Palace, and let’s say you have a population of 2, so you are generating 5 Science per turn. That means you will research Pottery in 7 turns. But the Education tech costs 485 Science, Astronomy costs 780, Scientific Theory costs 1650, Plastics 4700, and Particle Physics 6000. These are all key techs to advance your Science to a Science Victory. So you can see that you need to be continually increasing your Science. To start with, Population=Science. You get one Science for every one point of population. That does not, however, mean that you need to have a lot of cities to get there. 4-5 well developed cities are quite sufficient, and adding more cities can cause Unhappiness problems. Since higher population itself can cause Unhappiness there is no good reason to add to the problem. Buildings The next boost you can give to Science is by building city improvements. The first, which comes early in the game, is the Library, which is available once you research Writing. A Library boosts the Science output of a city by one Science for every two citizens (roughly a 50% boost, rounded down), so building those early pays off. Because advancing through the tech tree is a process of accumulating Science, the earlier you can get these boosts the better. The other population-based boost is the Public School (available when you research Scientific Theory), which also boosts Science by one for every two citizens, and also offers a Specialist slot for a Science Specialist. And since more population means more Science, the Granary (available when you research Pottery) is a good building because it helps to grow your population. There is one other building worth mentioning which is the Observatory (available when you discover Astronomy). It doesn’t depend on population, but on location. You have to have a city that is located directly next to a Mountain to build this, but it adds 50% to the Science output of the city. Mountains are otherwise useless (unless you are the Incas), but if you want a Science boost and happen to see good location (the ideal spot is an isolated mountain that is not part of a mountain range so you don’t lose farming and mining production) this can be great boost. Scientist Specialists You can at a certain point take some of your citizens out of the farming and mining and turn them into Specialists, but you have to have a slot for them, and those slots come in buildings as well. We’ve already mentioned Public Schools providing one slot. Universities (available when you discover Education) provide 2 slots, as well as boosting the city output of Science by 33%. The other Science building, which comes late in the game, is the Research Lab (available when you discover Plastics) which adds another Specialist slot, plus 4 Science, and then adds 50% to the Science Output of the city. It comes too late to help much in most of the Tech Tree, but is essential to research the Space techs, which are very expensive. Wonders The first one to try for is the Great Library. It gives you a free Library in the city, +3 Science per turn, and a free tech. Use the free tech to get an expensive tech like Philosophy. Oracle provides 1 Great Person Point per turn towards a Great Scientist. Hanging Gardens provides +6 Food per turn (boosting your population), and a free Garden which boosts your Great Person Points by 25%. Leaning Tower of Pisa increases your Great Person Points by 25% in all cities, plus a free Great Person of your choice when you build it. Porcelain Tower gives you +50% from Research Agreements, plus a free Great Scientist. and Hubble Space Telescope provides two Great Scientists, a free Spaceship Factory in the city where it was built, and +25% production for spaceship parts. All of the above are World Wonders, which means you are in competition with other players to build them, and only one player can be successful in each case, so you won’t get them all. You can sometimes rush a World Wonder by “chopping”, i.e. using your workers to cut down Forests for added production, but you need to have high production cities to build Wonders in general. There is one National Wonder to focus on, though, the National College. Every player can build their own version of any National Wonder. The National College can be built only when you have a Library in every one of your cities. Your strategy should be to build it as soon as possible, so don’t build more than 3-4 cities before you get to this. It gives you +3 Science, plus an increase of 50% in the Science output of the city you build it in. Great Scientists As you work on your Science you will accumulate Great Person Points towards getting a Great Scientist. Some wonder produce Great Person Points, and all of your Science Specialists produce Great Person Points as well. As these add up you will suddenly see a Great Scientist appear. In the early game, the best thing to do is use this Great Scientist to build an Academy. Move the GS to any tile within your city and create the Academy there. It will yield at least +8 Science, bu there are also modifiers that can add to that. The alternative which is better later in the game is to use the Great Scientist to get a free Tech discovery. The reason is that early in the game that +8 Science is very significant, and it can accumulate over time. Combine that with things like an Observatory and a University that increase the city output and it can add up nicely over time. But by perhaps the Medieval Era, and certainly the Renaissance Era, you start running out of time for that accumulation. Meanwhile, the techs have gotten so expensive that a free Tech is the better option. Research Agreements These become available once you research Education. You have to have a Declaration of Friendship with the other player to create one. You each put a certain amount of gold into the pot to fund the research, and after a period of time (usually 30 turns) you each get an amount of Science from it. The way it is calculated is based on the partner that produced the least amount of Science during the agreement. From a science standpoint if you are ahead in Science it probably won’t benefit you to enter into the agreement. But it does build your relationship with the other player so I wouldn’t avoid them altogether. If you are behind in Science it can help you, of course. Policies and Ideologies Given that you should probably be building tall (4-5 cities) instead of wide (8-12 cities), it makes sense to start out with Tradition instead of Liberty. But once you get to the Renaissance you will want to enable the Rationalism tree to maximize your Science. When you get to Ideologies, you have a choice to make. Ignore Autocracy as that is not a Science-oriented choice. If you have 3-5 cities, Freedom is the best Ideology because Specialists require less food (Civil Society), and have reduced Unhappiness (Universal Suffrage). With a wide strategy (more than 5 cities) Order starts to look better. Getting Worker’s Faculties will give +25% Science from every Factory. Exploration and Techs Exploration is generally a good idea for a variety of reasons, but one to focus on here is the effect of meeting other players. In the first place, if you find other players who have researched techs you do not yet have, you can trade for them. You do this whenever possible. Remember, the other players will all be trading with each other anyway, so if you don’t participate you will simply fall behind. If you have a nice tech and can trade it to just two other players, you will jump up two techs along the tech tree, and that can be huge. If you hold onto it as a secret, some other player will research it, and they will trade it and get that boost instead. So trade whenever you can. Another advantage is that when you discover that another player has a tech you don’t have yet, your cost to research it goes down. Trade This is the next Science boost we will cover. when you set up a trade route with either another player or a City-State, one of the benefits can be an increase to your Science. The main benefit of trade routes is money, at least the way I play, so I will always start by looking for the best addition to my Treasury, but if I can choose between equivalent monetary rewards but one trade route offers more Science I might prefer that if I am going for a Science victory. Choosing an Empire There are many Empires you can play, and some of them are oriented to a Science victory. The two obvious choices are Babylon and Korea. Babylon gets a free Great Scientist when you discover Writing, which is very early, so you should use it to put down an Academy. And it earns Great Scientists 50% faster. Korea’s advantage comes from +2 Science from all specialists and from all Great Person tile improvements, plus you get a tech boost each time a Science building or wonder is built in the Capital. Of course, you can win a Science victory with any Empire if you are careful about leveraging your Empire’s strengths. For example, Venice and Portugal can rake in the gold in huge amounts, and you can buy a lot of stuff that way. Or with the Celts you generate a ton of Faith, and that can be used to buy buildings and Great Scientists with the right Social Policies. Conclusion This is just a quick overview of the Science path, and there is always more to learn. If you really want to dive into the Science options and get a Science Victory, the Civilization Fanatics site has a pretty good strategy guide at https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/science-victory-guide-any-difficulty.530940/. Links: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/science-victory-guide-any-difficulty.530940/ https://www.palain.com/gaming/civilization-v/playing-civilization-v-part-7/ Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. lrest=0; while true; do echo refreshing project list; tsk=$(task +PENDING _unique project | shuf); for x in $tsk; do echo proj:$x; dispmd="task proj:$x ready || task ready"; [[ $lrest -eq 0 ]] && dispmd="task ready"; timeout 1500 watch $dispmd; ((lrest=lrest+1)); echo "begin break with enter..."; read; resttime=5; if [[ $lrest -gt 3 ]]; then resttime=15; lrest=0; fi; while [[ $resttime -gt 0 ]]; do echo $resttime minute rest; sleep 60; ((resttime=resttime-1)); done; echo "break over, enter to continue..."; read; done; done Provide feedback on this episode.

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This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Hello, again. This is Trey. Welcome to part 6 in my Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) Project series. Thank you for hanging in there with me on this rambling series. If you wish to catch up on earlier episodes, you can find them on my HPR profile page https://www.hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0394.html To review, my project is to build a portable morse code "Keyer memory" which can be connected to any of my amateur HF transceiver radios by simply plugging it in to the code key input port. This is based around an ESP32 platform which comes prepackaged on a yellow PC board with a color touchscreen display, WIFI, and Bluetooth. We fondly call this contraption the Cheap Yellow Display. So far, I have defined the necessities, collected the required hardware, and failed miserably building the graphical user interface (GUI). While I sort out the technical challenges getting my GUI code to play nicely with the CYD's touchscreen, it is important that we spend some time discussing Morse code itself, and the timing standards we will need to follow. I am not going to dive too deeply into the history behind telegraphs and Morse code, but it is very interesting. If you want to learn more, Wikipedia has the origins and evolution written out quite nicely at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code For our purposes, we will fast forward from the year 1820 (When telegraphy began) all the way to 1865 when the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardized, what it called "International Morse Code". When I say Morse Code for the remainder of this podcast, I am referring to this ITU International Morse Code. Morse code typically includes the following characters: The 26 letter basic Latin alphabet The Indo-Arabic numerals 0 to 9 There is also a single accented Latin letter (É), which is written as an E with an accent mark, and a handful of punctuation marks. These characters are encoded using a sequence of short and long signals. Each short signal is referred to as a dit . Each long signal is referred to as a dah . At a young age, I began to refer to them as dots and dashes, as this is how they are usually written. For example, the letter "A" consists of a single dit followed by a single dah. When written out this would look like a period followed by a hyphen (what some might call a minus sign) .- This encoding method allows messages to be sent by turning on and off an electrical signal. This could result in a light flashing or a tone sounding to the pattern of the signal. The timing of a dit and dah, along with the spacing between them is carefully defined. Morsecode.world does a great job explaining the timing, and you can find their explanation at https://morsecode.world/international/timing/ It all starts with the dit, or more accurately, the amount of time the dit signal is turned on. We will call this length of time 1 unit. We will get to the actual length of time for a unit later in this episode. For now, it is just one unit. So, if a dit is 1 unit long, a dah will be 3 units long, so there is an obvious and consistent difference between a dit and a dah. Also, empty space between elements of the same character is 1 unit long. The space between characters should be 3 units long. Let's demonstrate using the letters H, P, & R. An "H" would be 4 dits …. A "P" would be 1 dit followed by 2 dahs and ending with 1 dit .--. An "R" would be 1 dit followed by 1 dah and ending with 1 dit .-. Remember when we send these grouped together like a word, we need 3 units of spacing between each character. You can hear this now. This is Morse code for the letters "HPR" at 15 words per minute .... .--. .-. That is the perfect segue to the next section, words per minute. The speed of morse code is measured in "words per minute". But how do you calculate this when some characters are short (Like the letter "E" which is only a single dit long), and other characters are long (Like the letter "J" which starts with a single dit and is followed by 3 dahs)? And that's just letters. What about words? We have short words and long words. How can we standardize on words per minute with so much diversity of length? Well, thanks to the French, we have a quite elegant solution to this problem. Well, not the French in general. Just PARIS. PARIS is the standard word which has been agreed upon to be used for determining the speed of Morse code. The word PARIS is 50 units long. "P" = dit(1) + (1) + dah(3) + (1) + dah(3) + (1) + dit(1) = 11 units {Space between letters} = 3 units "A" = dit(1) + (1) + dah(3) = 5 units {Space between letters} = 3 units "R" = dit(1) + (1) + dah(3) + (1) + dit(1) = 7 units {Space between letters} = 3 units "I" = dit(1) + (1) + dit(1) = 3 units {Space between letters} = 3 units "S" = dit(1) + (1) + dit(1) + (1) + dit(1) = 5 units {Space between words} = 7 units 11+3+5+3+7+3+3+3+5+7 = 50 units Here is the word PARIS sent at 15 WPM .--. .- .-. .. ... Morsecode.world again does a great job explaining the maths for how many milliseconds long a dit should be for a specific WPM of code ( https://morsecode.world/international/timing/ ) But, no... We could not keep it that simple. Some guy named Donald R. "Russ" Farnsworth had to complicate things and increase the gaps between letters and words to make interpreting code much easier. There are even more maths for Farnsworth timing... Wait a minute. When did I start saying "Maths" instead of "Math" like a normal North American? What is the reasoning around pluralizing "Math" anyways? Which way is more original English, "Math" or "Maths"? This sounds like a show idea for someone other than me. If you know or are interested in researching it, I look forward to listening to your show in the future. ANYWAYS, there IS much more MATH about Farnsworth timing on another page on Morsecode.world. ( https://morsecode.world/international/timing/farnsworth.html ). But I don't want to get into all of it in detail here. Not when there is a shortcut we can use in our code. Simplified, we can take 1,200 and divide it by the WPM we desire, and it will give us a close enough approximation of the number of milliseconds long a dit should be. For the 15 WPM messages you have heard throughout this episode, a dit was 1200/15 = 80 ms in length. If I speed it up to 20 WPM (The speed at which I try to practice) a dit will be 1200/20 = 60 ms long. This will be an important calculation for us as we develop the code we will later be using to construct our messages using the CYD. And this is also a good stopping point so that I can get back to trying to build that infernal GUI. Provide feedback on this episode.

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The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2025-December/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Any other business Thanks to all 57 HPR contributors in 2025! Ahuka, Al, Antoine, Archer72, beni, Brian-in-Ohio, candycanearter, Celeste, Claudio Miranda, Daniel Persson, Dave Hingley, Dave Morriss, Deltaray, dnt, Elsbeth, folky, FredBlack, gemlog, hairylarry, Henrik Hemrin, Honkeymagoo, HPR Volunteers, iota, Jerm, Jeroen Baten, Jezra, Ken Fallon, Kevie, Kirbotica, Klaatu, ko3moc, Lee, Lochyboy, Major_Ursa, Manon, Marc W. Abel, mightbemike, Moss Bliss, MrX, murph, norrist, operat0r, oxo, Paulj, Reto, Rho`n, Shane - StrandedOutput, SolusSpider, Some Guy On The Internet, Swift110, thelovebug, Thibaut, Trey, Trixter, Trollercoaster, Whiskeyjack, Wojciech Provide feedback on this episode.