tingilinde

a paper trail

For environmental lawsuits against oil companies.

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It became a years-long quest, and as he pressed on, Muffett noticed one report kept coming up in the footnotes of the memos and papers he was poring through — a 1968 paper commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful fossil fuel trade group, and written by Elmer Robinson and Bob Robbins, scientists at the Stanford Research Institute, known as SRI. Muffett wasn’t sure what it said, but it was cited so often he knew there must be something big in it. Then part of Stanford University, SRI wasn’t an ordinary department, but a contract research outfit that had been intertwined from its founding with oil and gas interests. The paper had been delivered privately to the petroleum institute, not published like typical academic work, and only a few copies had spilled into the public realm. Long since forgotten, they had been gathering dust in a handful of university libraries. Eventually, through an interlibrary loan, Muffett managed to get a hold of one.

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a unique greeting from new zealand soldiers

another impressive amateur rocket effort

origami-like wings

High-speed video of earwig flight and wings.  The way they fold is fascinating  Around the 45 second mark you see how they fold to stow. Probably lessons for engineering.

it's difficult to imagine many large companies will want to be associated with this

The growing dumpster fire of Twitter.

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These changes are alarming, researchers said, adding that they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.

“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They have reacted accordingly.”

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on the drone war

Commentary on the drones - their uses and impacts - on both sides.

 

impact of a megadrought

A catastrophic scenario for the Colorado River and those who depend on it.

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Worse, officials warn, is the possibility of an even more catastrophic event. That is if the water level falls all the way to the lowest holes, so only small amounts could pass through the dam. Such a scenario — called “dead pool” — would transform Glen Canyon Dam from something that regulates an artery of national importance into a hulking concrete plug corking the Colorado River.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

proper calking

Greg posted a very useful piece on calking.

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Caulk seals and spans. Providing the surface is carefully cleaned¹, and an appropriate chemistry identified, sealing is often trouble-free. But "spanning" is another issue entirely if the spanned gap moves with time and temperature.

How far can you stretch caulking before failing? Well, a bead of fresh silicone caulk might stretch (and recover) by 300%, and latex by nearly 100%. That's in the lab. In the real world, performance is actually closer to 50% and 20%. Why? Well, caulking ages and dries out and may shrink. It stiffens in the cold and softens in the heat. It's exposed to cleaning solutions, sunlight, water and scratches. When stretched, those scratches explode into cracks, in the same way the nick on the top of a ketchup packet concentrates forces so you can easily rip open the foil.

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victorian-era radiator

with a built-in bread warming compartment

 

critical software and lack of support

All to often the support of mission critical software falters.  It could happen in particle physics. People need to think about proper incentive structures.

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Particle physicists use some of the longest equations in all of science. To look for signs of new elementary particles in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, for example, they draw thousands of pictures called Feynman diagrams that depict possible collision outcomes, each one encoding a complicated formula that can be millions of terms long. Summing formulas like these with pen and paper is impossible; even adding them with computers is a challenge. The algebra rules we learn in school are fast enough for homework, but for particle physics they are woefully inefficient.

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