interessting thing though that within a generation one pic if gif can transport many messages. Like in the old pictures where a vase stand for faith etc. Aa always humans like to group together and invent social codes and secret handshakes (but with a 10 times cropped cat pic from 2009)
But yeah my S/O is of the ‘If I fits, I sits’ school of plugging cables where they don’t belong. I ended up #3Dprinting ‘child-proof covers’ that same day.
I think the masthead wind transducer is nearing the end of its life. That means that: A. I need a new one and they’re quite pricy (like 400 euros), and B. I need to go up there with a screwdriver. FML
@tricia @Alexandra Lanes The bit I hate most is how you get cramp in your arms from trying to undo a rusted bolt above your head while your legs go numb from sitting in the harness.
I am not scared of heights (used to be, cured myself), and my mast climbing technique is solid, but I just find working up there unpleasant and uncomfortable.
@ajlanes I haven't climbed my mast; before the refit I was too sketched out by the state of the bearings. But I rock climb so not toooooo fussed about sitting high up while tied in. Ofc, rock walls don't usually sway.
@tricia @Alexandra Lanes I'm a climber too, although I can't do it much any more because I have Dupuytrens.
Climbing the mast is easy. Friction knot with a mooring line round the mast, make a foot loop, main halyard tied to belay loop, have someone on the winch. You lift yourself up, they take in the slack. Repeat.
The issue is that you're not standing on anything, so even in the comfiest of harnesses, I find my legs go unpleasantly numb quite quickly. If you were hanging on a rock face, unless it was severely overhanging, you can usually take SOME weight on your legs, but try with the mast and you'll just pirouette around it.
The swaying you get used to. Worst bit is when some prick in a gas guzzler does a close pass and kicks up a load of wake. Then it gets interesting.
@ajlanes yeah, fair. Hard to justify a bosun's chair when you already own climbing gear I guess. Bummer about the dupuytrens. I've only been climbing for about 18mo but I enjoy it well enough. I have to take a couple months off for recovery starting in (omg) a week, but that's very temporary.
@tricia @Alexandra Lanes It’s annoying. Started when I was 38. Held it at bay for ten years with radiation, but it’s now very aggressive. I can do stuff that doesn’t involve fiddly finger work, so via ferrata and suchlike.
400 quid? You own a yacht. You're super rich. Just kidding. I so agree to what you said about the average yacht owner the other day. And which these complacent idiots being happy about orcas attacking sailing yaczts just don't want to see. Keep it up!
And the message queue is empty! Check out that little Mac Mini there, taking friendica-cron in its stride!
(Ok, I have the contact directory discovery thingie turned off because that is a destroyer of worlds, and disk space, and doesn’t actually seem all that useful for a small instance, but still)
Dear god, the number of follow requests I’m getting. Tempted to set to auto approve. I may be a miserable cynic so expect most will go back to the shouty Nazi site if he pays his server bill, but my, it’s busy!
Seriously though, if the fediverse doesn’t work out for you, there’s always Bluesky, where all posts are the same 12 people telling obscure in-jokes that you won’t get if you don’t have Bluesky piped directly into your cerebral cortex 23.9 hours a day.
Dear Twitter people. Lots of us were once Twitter people too. This place will not spoon-feed you. Passive participation doesn’t work here. This is a very active and buzzing place, but unless you FOLLOW people and INTERACT, it will pass you by.
Follow people. Lots of them. You can always remove them later. But really, follow early, follow often.
@supercharv Sure. I wasn’t suggesting that all users should be interacting on all of the issues that come their way, even if they had the energy. However, there are many who limit their interractions to retweeting/boosting, and I think social media is a better place if they do more than that.
There were two things I liked about Twitter. People could be very very funny and the immediacy of the news (from reputable people) was great. Can someone direct me to some suggested follows to find similar? I seem to have a lot of deep tech connections and I’m just an ordinary Joe who knows how to click on things.
@Tomsprints2 I'm not sure it's a twitter thing, I think it's always been a little bit like that in online networks. Even just "likes" are a great step forward from the olden days when you made something and was received with deafening silence, and then six months later multiple people come up to you saying: "I really liked that thing you did".
@Alisdair Calder McGregor Thing is, we're here doing our own thing. Plenty of us will carry on doing that, and it can't really be killed. Anyone with enough tech knowledge can spin up their own instance in half an hour and jump in.
It fails to catch on for a certain group. If you look at where they are coming from they, I would say, see that they will lose any influence that they previously enjoyed. Their only recourse is to undermine what they perceive as a threat to their ethereal influence.
He used a carbon fibre pressure vessel. Carbon fibre is a material that’s good in tension. Is has no strength in compression at all: it’s just woven cloth.
It works as an aircraft pressure vessel because the pressure inside is higher than the pressure outside, hence the carbon fibre works as a balloon and is in tension.
But for a submersible, the pressure outside is higher. The pressure vessel is getting compressed.
So the carbon fibre will give it a bit of stiffness, but the actual crush resistance is being provided by the epoxy resin that holds the carbon fibre weave together.
Am I missing something? Why the hell did they build a compression pressure vessel out of string glued together? It doesn’t matter how strong the string is: it will still fold up if you scrunch it into a ball. The structural strength came not from the string, but from the glue.
I’m amazed it took as long to fail as it did. I must be missing something here, right?
Why, for
... show more
Am I missing something about the Titan sub?
He used a carbon fibre pressure vessel. Carbon fibre is a material that’s good in tension. Is has no strength in compression at all: it’s just woven cloth.
It works as an aircraft pressure vessel because the pressure inside is higher than the pressure outside, hence the carbon fibre works as a balloon and is in tension.
But for a submersible, the pressure outside is higher. The pressure vessel is getting compressed.
So the carbon fibre will give it a bit of stiffness, but the actual crush resistance is being provided by the epoxy resin that holds the carbon fibre weave together.
Am I missing something? Why the hell did they build a compression pressure vessel out of string glued together? It doesn’t matter how strong the string is: it will still fold up if you scrunch it into a ball. The structural strength came not from the string, but from the glue.
I’m amazed it took as long to fail as it did. I must be missing something here, right?
Why, for the love of all that’s holy, did they use carbon fibre?
If you have many many layers of T-shirt tightly bonded together (see gambeson), it might manage to be self-supporting. Maybe. The US Navy experimented with this for *shallow* water. But it's a really stupid way of doing it at any depth for all the reasons you say.
@Sion [main] I mean, that’s how my boat is built except s/carbon/glass/ but it doesn’t have to withstand a gazillion atmospheres. It just has to take its own weight and stay watertight.
Still, glass reinforced plastic boats delaminate if they take too many big waves. It’s not like delamination is a novel unknown failure method in these materials. It’s what they do.
The other obvious flaw, besides being made of a material that is notable for being strong in tension, not compression, is the use of a cylinder for a vessel that is going to experience pressure from the outside, not the inside.
Just suck the air out of an empty lemonade bottle, and you'll see how little of a pressure differential is needed for the cylindrical center section to squash flat, while the spherical ends keep their shape. Thicker walls are only going to do so much to prevent that.
That's why cylindrical submarines used down to hundreds of feet have bulkheads at intervals along their length to support the cylinder from the inside.
And submarines that are used at thousands of feet of depth are made up of spherical pressure vessels, because additional bulkheads and thicker walls cease to reinforce cylinders sufficiently at depths where the slightest imperfection can result in deformation, that /will/ progress further under those forces. Even submarines that look cylindrical from the outside, like the DSRV:
The boat is filthy. We need to go outside to clean it. We have brought materiais to clean it. We cannot be forced to clean it. Once we are outside the hatch, we are outside the law.
Ok, they ended that a minute or two before I thought they were going to.
In the book, she worked out it was a lie before she went outside. They discovered the code for the display and noted that it was only 8192 * 2048 pixels: enough for a helmet, but not enough for the cafeteria view screen.
How they choose to do season 3 is going to be interesting. The second book, “Shift”, takes place partially in flashback to our near future, and partly contemporaneously with the events of Wool.
The books are Wool, Shift, and Dust. Dust unites the storylines of Wool and Shift and continues immediately afterwards.
@Ozzy I think what happens at the end of Wool works better with Simms’ motivation. The way he does it with Lucas in the book is a bit 2 dimensional.
The question I’m wondering now is if S2 will end at the end of Wool, or about a chapter from the end. That would give them a nice cliffhanger, but if S3 is the first half of Shift, then none of it involves the characters we know (a lot of it happens pre-silo and we find out why they were built, who built them, and what it is that kills them when they go outside).
First time @Zoë O'Connell and I have got to the boat in months.
A new lifeform has evolved, created from some sort of capillary action resulting in months old sewage working its way back into the toilet bowl. Dealing with it was more disgusting than I care to think about. I am now having a beer.
@Simon Waldman Billionaires live in London and this is in London. so must be the same people. They should flood the tunnels, or something. #OrcaPeoplePosting
Renton Sinclair’s mother is a former Miss Illinois who wants to force trans people out of public life. That’s exactly what makes her a rising star in MAGA World.
A shit tonne of British people living in the EU have had their UK bank accounts closed because of you, so consider it karma, you nasty piece of shit. independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli…
Should you see one of those “schoolchild identifies as cat” stories, note that at least one UK journalist has been spotted on social media offering money for stories from parents whose children “identify as cats”.
Which is, of course, going to result in totally accurate stories.
*sigh* The transphobia spreads and the Right never has new ideas.
The "schoolchild identifies as a cat" probably won't catch on here because in the US it was confabulated because of the prescence of buckets of "kitty litter" in the classrooms.
They were there, of course, because of mass-shootings. Can't let kids go to the toilets when armed gunmen are roaming the halls.
@Christopher Mackay 🇨🇦 @CrazyMyra Like Tony Blair’s “hello nurses”; he made a target that everyone going to accident and emergency departments had to speak to a nurse with X minutes.
So hospitals just hired a nurse to stand at the door and greet people.
They may not be being crap -- there's a particular spot in my house where small (and thankfully inaudible and non-bitey) flies circulate, up to a couple of dozen on a hot day with windows open -- I don't think it's a chemical cue, I suspect it's a consensus fly nightclub spot, à la en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokunaga…
I once read a blog post by a plant breeder who was crossing domestic and wild tomatoes to develop tomato varieties that could produce a crop in climates where our current varieties don't grow.
Most of the poisonous compounds in tomatoes have a bitter flavor, so he got pretty good mileage out of tasting a tiny amount of a fruit and not continuing if it had a bad taste. But one time he ate a very tasty little tomato he'd bred, and then several hours later started feeling really sick. For some reason he wrote "sorry" and the identifying info of the poison fruited plant on himself and went to bed instead of seeking medical help. (He may have been living off grid in a remote place or something like that, I don't remember.) Luckily he wasn't too badly poisoned and lived to tell about it.
For anyone interested in plant breeding, modern domestic tomatoes don't have the genes for poison fruit anymore, so you can crossbreed them with each other safely.
@Kincaid @David Honess AIUI, that one came from an observation of the effects on goats that ate the plant by a monk who wanted to replicate the effect in humans.
@Becky is not a bear In terms of hemlock, apparently there’s no intoxication: just a horrible death as you lose the ability to breathe, but remain fully aware (it’s a neurotoxin).
Solanine, it seems can cause hallucinations, but only once you are deep into “oh shit, I’m going to die” territory, and apparently you have to get there via nausea, diarrhoea, muscle cramps, and a whole lot of other fun stuff.
The latter is one of my main IBS triggers, so I eat potatoes very sparingly.
I recall Guns Germs & Steel mentioning that not being poisonous in almonds is a recessive genetic characteristic, then speculating that some almonds being non poisonous might have been discovered by accident when a naughty child ate almonds and then didn't die.
The more I think about the 'coup' in Russia, the more I wonder if it wasn't just a bit of staged performative theatre, in order for Putin to appear as the 'strong', 'authentic' leader.
Elaine (middle left, top photo) wasn’t present for the reenactment so we had to improvise, but other than that, same people, 20 years apart. I’m the one at the back.
More Silo spoilers, probable ending scene of S1. Don't open unless you have read Wool.
So, S1 cliffhanger: I'm guessing it's going to be a zoom out from Juliette as she walks away, as Bernard says that line from the book, "Silo one, this is silo eighteen. We've got a problem."
Or is it going to show her entering Silo 17, and seeing that the airlock is jammed open, the silo is dark, and everyone is dead?
They're obviously playing up the whole, "the view screen is a lie" thing, so a huge part of the cliffhanger is gonna have to be the revelation that, no, the view screen is showing the truth (presumably by, as in the book, the skybox in the helmet view failing as she crests the hill. Seeing the ruins of Atlanta off in the distance would be quite dramatic). The human race is, indeed, almost extinct. The last sheriff and his wife did indeed die on that hill after cleaning the camera. There is indeed something very nasty out there. They're all dead, Dave.
vox popsicle vox dei
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •bizarrojimmyolsen
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •CDR Sir Samuel Vimes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •David Steele
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Yaasmin_B
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •devolute
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •How is ASCII art formatting on this platform?
]>~={[[]]}}°>
Alex, the Hearth Fire
in reply to devolute • • •@devolute discouraged, because screen readers turn it into gibberish
I recommend putting an "ASCII Art" content warning on ASCII art
Juniper 🦨 Skunktaur
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Alex, the Hearth Fire
Unknown parent • • •