That’s Tuba Skinny getting it done curbside. Wonderful ambling stray dogs, and a couple dancing down the sidewalk even though they don’t know how. That’s a sure sign you’re getting over.
If you’re not hip to the difference, that’s a cornet, not a trumpet. They’re very similar instruments, but cornets have a much warmer tone. A trumpet is a single diameter tube that ends in a bell. It’s a musical rifle. A cornet is a tube that gets bigger around as it makes its way to its bell. It’s a blunderbuss.
I’d explain the difference between a trombone and household plumbing, but there really isn’t any.
This is a Minuteman ICBM, on its way somewhere with its cargo of canned sunshine:
ICBM of course an acronym for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It’s called a Minuteman because it’s got solid fuel in the rumble seat instead of liquid propellant. You’d have to fill up the tank just before launch if it relied on liquid fuel, and you’d feel pretty silly getting an incoming missile on top of your head, what with you standing there with the gas pump nozzle in your hand.
America has three kinds of ICBMs. Minutemen missiles are the land-based leg of the stool. Trident submarines are loaded up with missiles, and skulk around the world’s oceans waiting for Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman to agree to turn the keys at the same time. Bombers carrying nuclear weapons are the third leg.
Minutemen are old tech. They’ve been in service since 1962. They got upgraded to deliver multiple warheads from the same missile in the ’70s. They’re due to be replaced by something else ghastly in 2030. I wouldn’t stand on one leg and hold my breath expecting the replacements to be delivered on time, however. Many Ukrainians currently have one leg, and have decided to permanently hold their breath, while waiting for munition deliveries from our Military Industrial Complex, for example.
So if you’ve ever wondered what it was like sitting in an underground bunker, waiting for the president to drop the nuclear football and step on the button, here’s a virtual tour of one from aerospaceutah.org. Press anywhere on the photo to visit the interactive wonderfulness. One word of caution: it starts making noises right away:
I’ve worked in a defense plant, so I’m used to these sorts of drab surroundings. The cheap toaster oven on the counter is a nice, human touch. And far be it from me to wonder why a facility that can end the world has about the same amount and quality of equipment you’d find in your average college radio station. Better chairs, though.
Never mind all that. Poke around with your mouse, and zoom in here and there, and you’ll discover just how serious this whole procedure became. Over in the corner, in someone’s duty bag, you’ll find this:
Nuclear Armageddon could turn out to be a long slog. Best pack your fuzzy doggie slippers.
So, the Swiss want to repave a busy road. As you might expect, they go about it in a very Swiss way.
I’ve had to supervise the paving of a few short stretches of road, and lots of parking lots, so maybe I can tell you what’s going on in the video.
First, they’re scarifying the road. This is done by a big machine with lots of nasty teeth that can handle grinding away at little rocks suspended in emulsion all day. They’re removing what is called (in the US) the wearing layer of pavement. What’s underneath is sometimes referred to as scratch pavement here. I have no idea what the Swiss call theirs.
All the stuff they grind up will be recycled into more pavement. The grinding wheels on the machine are circular, so it leaves a bit of a curved ramp at the end of the run. A worker uses a handheld abrasive wheel to cut a slot at the same depth as the scratch pavement level, and then a guy with a jackhammer (pneumatic) cuts out the remainder to make a square place to butt the new pavement into the existing stuff.
Then a guy heats the edge of the old pavement with a propane torch, followed by a guy spraying emulsion. Asphalt emulsion is the goo that holds asphalt together, and acts as a kind of glue between old and new. Then they feed in a more substantial joint tape that’s also hit with a torch as it pays out.
Then they do something that’s sort of old-fashioned. They spray a heavy coat of emulsion over the whole surface, and then put what looks like recycled pavement over it. That serves as the sub-base, or scratch pavement. Roads used to be paved that way fairly often in the US. Just watch Cool Hand Luke to see it done by hand.
Then comes the actual pavement machine. It has wings that fold out to accept bituminous asphalt from a series of trucks, ferried by neat little front-end dumpers. That stuff (hot-mix asphalt) comes very hot indeed from the plant, between 300 and 400 degrees F. If you’ve ever seen a paving crew at work, you’ll often see them strap squares of plywood on their boots to keep the soles from melting when you walk on the fresh pavement. In the US, many dump trucks that carry pavement have heating elements in them to keep the temperatures up during delivery. Cold asphalt doesn’t spread or roll very well.
There’s some extra torch and shovel work at the join to the existing pavement. Then rollers roam over the hot pavement to compact and smooth the surface. A worker runs a gas-powered plate compactor over the edges to avoid having the rollers straddle the seam and risk breaking the existing edge.
And of course the most Swissiest thing about this very Swiss thing is that they built an articulating bridge on wheels that regular traffic can travel over unimpeded while the men work in safety underneath, and the bridge creeps down the roadway as the work is completed.
Sometimes, when I look out my car window, I don’t know where I live exactly, anymore. But it sure as hell ain’t Switzerland.
Well, it’s Tuesday. Trash day. That’s the day we dutifully put our single bag of jetsam out on the curb, and watch our neighbors put out three barrels-worth, or as we call it, the day after Christmas amount. Ho-hum. We’re used to swimming against the current.
I figure it would be fun to sweep some of my bookmarks into the virtual bin, just to get in the spirit of the thing. Here’s a healthy helping of some strings too short to be saved. That I, you know, saved.
NASA | Thermonuclear Art – The Sun In Ultra-HD
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, keeps an eye on our nearest star 24/7. SDO captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material.
The sun sure is lumpy. I hear it’s pretty hot, too. Hope they went at night, when it’s cooler.
I understand the problems associated with hiring the wrong people as well, which may well be the actual reason we are rightfully stuck with such fearful/timid hiring practices. For now, I’ll just keep practicing for interviews until I successfully trick someone into thinking that I know how to code and then secretely become one of the best employees they have ever had.
Yes, yes they are. Then again, pretty much all job interviews are pretty dumb. I’ve recently become vaguely interested in the tech world hiring process, because my son has entered into the want ad maelstrom. The entire Human Resources Personnel interview process is borderline insane now. And by borderline, I’m referring to the far side of the insane frontier. And by the by, Darren, I’d never hire you because that’s not how you spell “secretly.” I’m constantly mystified by people who produce computer code, where a single misspelling can cause trains to crash and planes to fall from the sky, but somehow think spelling is unimportant. That’s one thing you can say for Open AI chatbots. At least they know how to spell. They’ll be passing coding interviews soon, and coders everywhere can go back to misspelling your name on your food orders, like God and nature intended.
Microsoft is reportedly working on a new, in-house artificial intelligence (AI) model that is “far larger” than the other open source models it has trained. The new model, MAI-1, is expected to have about 500 billion parameters, Seeking Alpha reported Monday (May 6), citing a paywalled article by The Information. It aims to compete with models created by Google, OpenAI (in which Microsoft is an investor), Anthropicand others, according to the report.
Pretty soon computers smarter than Manhattan Projects physicists will be serving up content to users who can barely read, write, or spell. The future’s so bright, ya gotta wear a welding helmet.
At first I thought of writing a Python script that would take a text description, calculate a few things and output measurements in text. But that would not be very visual, so it was hard to grasp for both ourselves and the furniture designers. Plus, I’d have to write some code that fits rectangles. I was losing motivation, as it would require some non-trivial work, and the end result would not look nice anyway. Was there any software I knew that did at least some of this work for me?
Hey, Allan: I’m extremely conversant with this topic. Try this: Graph paper, a pencil, and a ruler.
To trick their victims, the scammers contacted them on WhatsApp posing as a family member, typically a son, in some distressing situation requiring urgent financial help. Money transfers from 238 victims ranged from €800 to €55,000. The scammers were so convincing that in most cases, they managed to get continuous payments from their victims, according to the police.
“Typically a son.” Hmm. This rings true. Sons need intermittent emergency funds when they get into jams, which they invariably do, because they’re knuckleheads. Daughters need money daily, so dad might get suspicious if they ask for some twice in the same day.
“I don’t think anyone sitting at this table has any idea how to use it [the cash] effectively, and therefore we don’t use it,” Buffett said.“We’d love to spend it, but we won’t spend it unless we think we’re doing something that has very little risk and can make us a lot of money,” he said. “We only swing at pitches we like,” he said. And right now, they’re not liking anything other than T-bills.
Vultures generally don’t land on things until they stop squirming.
About a year ago, veterinarian Melissa Ezell started noticing subtle changes at the midsized animal clinic in Huntsville, Alabama, where she works. She said she and other vets were feeling pressure from management to make a certain amount of money from every appointment. If a pet owner wasn’t going to spend enough, the message from management was to offer more services. She was urged to pack in more patients outside of normal business hours.
The university graduation ceremony I attended over the weekend had a very large veterinary program. The graduates were 100% girls. I’m not sure when veterinarians swapped from 100% male to 100% female, but it happened. The veterinarians mentioned in the article apparently think that it would be fun to pat a few dogs every day and make six figures. Private equity has other ideas. The illustration in the article has four people drawing blood from a cat, so private equity might have a point.
Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google’s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google’s monopoly over search…
…Connor also argued that Google’s conduct wasn’t sanctionable because there is no evidence that any of the missing chats would’ve shed any new light on the case.
Got that? This was said by a lawyer, with a straight face, I assume: Because we erased the evidence, there’s no evidence that the evidence was evidence, your honor. I once met a lawyer walking down the street. “Hi,” I said. “Hello,” he lied.
Contact forms are almost always worse for users than just putting an email on your website. I explore why they’re terrible, why you’ve done it anyway, and what to do about it.
Preach it, brother. Just tell potential customers to email you, and then Google will send it to your spam folder, because reasons. That’s how it’s done.
Have a great Tuesday, everyone. I’m going to hit my thumb with a hammer now.
The Miniatur Wunderland is touted as the largest model railway system in the world. I’m inclined to believe it. It’s currently running over 1,100 trains. The miniature city around it has a population of 290,000, which is a lot more than I can say for the capital of my state. Hell, it has 52 airplanes taking off and landing.
It’s only 24 years old, but it looks like people have been working on it forever. It’s a big tourist attraction in Hamburg, Germany, and I ever found myself in Hamburg, I’d certainly go see it. It’s got that wonderful vibe of obsession just short of mental illness that I love.
When I was a kid, miniature trains set in a landscape was still quite a thing for my parent’s generation. I saw many abandoned dioramas in various basements with trains in various stages of not working. Our generation loved slot cars, not trains, so grandad or dad couldn’t convince the next generation to keep pinching their fingers while assembling the tracks with those nasty, sharp little pins that aligned them.
Perhaps the concept has been abandoned long enough to get generally popular again, like so many hobbies. It’s slightly silly, but it’s also a lot of fun to look at. And before you even think about mocking the German robo-dweeb trying to get his Formula 1 miniatures to behave on his track, keep in mind that the founders of the Miniatur Wunderland all were awarded the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. When you’ve got one of those, then you can mock them, and not before.
Month: May 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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