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I thought it might be a good idea if I bit the bullet and just started a Thread dedicated to (what I hope is) general ‘Interesting Stuff’ that doesn’t fit under other existing Threads, rather than keep hijacking the existing ones (as I am want to do at an appalling rate. Sorry).
Fulfilling an earlier promise, here is a quick bit of poetry first:
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.(‘Whales Weep Not’ by D. H. Lawrence)
https://neal.fun/deep-sea/?fbclid=IwAR1RK4skwk7tIXw9XocFTkOWblwAYftXvy2YbXVfngsgF8H-qPqiGzRXOwM
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<p style=”text-align: center;”>Something for the Night Owls* (voluntarily or ‘otherwise’) – It’s</p>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>The Perseids Meteor Shower! </p>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>Viewing time tonight/tomorrow morning between 2 am and Sunrise.</p>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>https://www.independent.co.uk/space/perseids-meteor-shower-2021-peak-b1899920.html</p>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>(*Weather permitting)</p>Well THAT didn’t work. (Serves me right for trying to be clever.)
Persieds meteor shower tonight – 2 am to sunrise.
I might be awake for a change😁, as Tharg mentioned, raining here cloud cover.
I’ve got a photo somewhere, Mrs ajn and Son laying out on the patio armed with blankets cushions for the head, watching a meteor storm way into the early hours..
slept right through the night, typical though the time I’d like to be awake early hours and I’m sleeping…😴..
Cloud cover anyway I think.
Yup – it clouded over at 10pm and then rained all night. Still drizzling this morning until lunchtime. If it clears later we might get to see a few stragglers tonight – the ‘shower’ usually lasts 3 nights and it peaked last night.
Watched these last night and I thought they were interesting:
Raising Tower Bridge:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raising+tower+bridge
Lunch atop a skyscraper – New York construction workers c.1932:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QCYDzsQ_yM
The Silver Bridge disaster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w5Fjouvma8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpGVP5yU6c8
Great Tower Bridge stuff, Georgie. Marvellous construction. Sailed under it countless times when working on Thames boats. Could also draw/paint it from memory since our school art-room had a direct view from about 300yds away and if art master was feeling lazy, it was chalk and charcoal and “draw the bloody bridge”. Back in the day it was solid black, from coal dust not that nice stone colour.
Don’t know what procedures are for a vessel to get it to open now but when the Upper Pool of London was a proper port, all you had to do was fly a black ball from the foremast and it’d swing up for you!
I went through a while back in my son in laws boat. You had to give 24 hours notice by email, as far as I recall, and not be late!
Good Morning, there you go Tharg, a nice one to start your day 👍
That’s great, ajn. Would never have chosen a Staffie before Tilly came along. Now, I think we’ll always have Staffies. If our girl is anything to go by, they’re just so affectionate, kind and charming. Also tough as old boots. That’s one difficulty with them: they do not “complain” about pain or discomfort. They just get on with it. So difficult to work out whether it is something which needs attention.
My sister’s very fond of her neighbour’s Staffie and always says that she’s a very sweet and gentle dog.
Here are 3 more odds and ends that I’ve found in the last couple of days. Luckily the RSI in my right wrist has finally cleared up and I can spend more time practising and playing computer games and less time surfing.
Potentially space-worthy 3D printed rockets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz165f1g8-E
Colour footage of the Japanese bombing raid on Pearl Harbour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b6auSQPvGs
5 Seriously Dangerous Toys:
I’ve been following the Afghan disaster as it unfolds for days. What a waste of lives – 35,000+ on all sides; what a waste of time – 20 years to the day from ‘9/11’.
Most of all I pity the women. In two weeks their lives have devolved from has gone from Freedom to get an education, get a job, dress how they want, marry who they choose, think for themselves to living The Handmaid’s Tale for real. Losing their independence, losing their jobs, having to wear a big cloth bag on their heads whenever they leave the house under ‘male supervision’, hiding their qualifications and burning their Degrees (with limited to zero formal education for girls in future, too), being forced into ‘marriage’ to whichever passing mujahideen takes a fancy to her . . .
Horrific is an understatement.
What’s going on is absolutely horrific. Georgie. Well worth a read about why what is happening, is happening:
I do so full-heartedly agree, Georgie. It is the plight of the women in the hands of these mindless macho thugs which breaks my heart. Having seen it first hand when forced to attend a conference in Dubai, it utterly repelled me and made me very angry. I will never go to countries in that part of the world nor, indeed, any Muslim country. I know I will be accused of prejudice and so be it, but what Mrs T saw and experienced there was a disgrace to humanity. Barely above the level of savages. We were deeply offended by it all and, at times. went in fear of our lives.
On the subject of fusion as a power source, saw this today:
An old joke about nuclear fusion—that it is 30 years away and always will be—is so well-known that The Economist’s science editor forbids correspondents from repeating it. No one doubts sustained fusion is possible in principle. It powers every star in the universe. Making it work on Earth, though, has proved harder. Engineers have tried since the 1950s, so far without success. The latest and largest attempt—iter, a multinational test reactor in southern France—has been under construction for 11 years and is tens of billions of dollars over its initial, $6bn budget.
One day, one day….
Planet based fusion v. hard unless you simply want to blow up cities. Still worth trying though. And talking of much-repeated fusion jokes…
There was a young fellow named Bright
Who travelled much faster than light.
Her set off one day,
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.An old joke about nuclear fusion—that it is 30 years away and always will be—is so well-known that The Economist’s science editor forbids correspondents from repeating it. No one doubts sustained fusion is possible in principle. It powers every star in the universe. Making it work on Earth, though, has proved harder. Engineers have tried since the 1950s, so far without success. The latest and largest attempt—iter, a multinational test reactor in southern France—has been under construction for 11 years and is tens of billions of dollars over its initial, $6bn budget. One day, one day….
The other one is superconductivity that they’ve been talking about since 1911 and when they do get it to work everything is going to be great, like you said “one day”.
“An experiment suggests the goal of “ignition”, where the energy released by fusion exceeds that delivered by the laser, is now within touching distance.” And has been for quite a while. What NIF have basically done is what JET did more than ten years ago.
Once they’ve resolved the problems caused by asymmetries in the hohlraum x-ray flux or overcome hydrodynamic instabilities (aka ‘turbulence’) – and the closer you get to ignition the more unstable it all becomes – then we’ll really have something to celebrate.
Me – I still think we’d be better off investing in Thorium. China’s going to beat us all to it – they’ve already invested US$3.3 billion on reactors in the Gobi Desert and what has Britain done? Dipped our toe in the water in the 1970’s (Dragon at Winfrith) and then literally ‘pulled the plug’. I think we had a team from Cambridge University give it another look under Geoff Parks a few years ago, but I don’t think it came to anything.
A matter of perspective – Planet Earth comes it at #6. In 5 minutes we start wondering why the People of Earth can’t just find a way to get along . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXfOzhZGtNw
