tingilinde

the confetti illusion

Making fruit lie

snip

...

Food growers learned a long time ago that if they packed oranges in orange netting, the oranges inside look more orange, which the mind interprets as a more luscious ripe fruit. The same thing is true for yellow netting for lemons and green netting for limes. The color of the fruit as seen between the plastic netting is altered by what Gegenfurtner describes as color assimilation.

...

 

the fehmarnbelt tunnel

A long underwater tunnel to connect Denmark and Germany .. one of those remarkable large engineering projects.

snip

...

Hemmingsen said making the tunnel bore more of a resemblance to building electronic components than traditional construction

“What we’re doing right now is not so much a normal construction project, where you have a lot of people running around like small ants in a limited space. It’s more like building iPhones actually.”

There are six production lines – designed to be “optimised and lean” – each producing a different element of the tunnel.

Hemmingsen compared piecing about 900 small elements together to form 90 larger elements of the tunnel to “using Lego blocks”.

“If you fail at one element you can actually replace it,” he said. “Once it’s done it looks very simple, but from an engineering perspective there are a lot of details that have to be in place before you can start.”

...

 

 

amtrak's hopelessly outdated northeast corridor

There have been an increasing number of infrastructure failures

snip

...

Long stretches of that system are unchanged from when the defunct Pennsylvania Railroad first electrified it a century ago, The New York Times has found. And any wholesale modernization effort would come at tremendous cost and take more than a decade.

“It’s staggering, it’s just staggering that we’re still having antique technology controlling our rails,” said John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board whose duties included overseeing railroad investigations from 1995 to 2004. “That’s last century’s technology.”

Michael Bezilla, a historical researcher at Pennsylvania State University who wrote a book on the electrification of trains on the Northeast Corridor, said, “The question is, why hasn’t Amtrak upgraded and why isn’t it using modern technology?”

...

 

two comments

 

RFK Jr endorsing Trump is like E. coli endorsing diarrhea....

 

                    __________

 

MAGA: Democrats are anti-family child haters

Democrats: (show authentic heartfelt love between parents and children, step-children, nieces and nephews, and children of strangers)

MAGA: Ick. Gross. Un-Christian

 

 

the 100th birthday of a badass french WWII resistance fighter

Madeleine Riffaud had good reason to celebrate her 20th birthday.

 

 

one of the many times he set an example for his followers

the baltic way

Today is the 35th anniversary of The Baltic Way - when over two million Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians joined hands in a 675km long human chain.  A protest against the Soviet occupation of their counties.

If Trump wins and Ukraine falls as American support for Ukraine and NATO evaporate it is reasonable to expect Putin will be after these countries next.

 

the only choice for those who believe in democracy

Former Republican Rep Adam Kinzinger and one of the most important speeches at the DNC last night.

 

 

burning wood pellets is far from green

Several countries do it and claim it's carbon neutral.  In reality it isn't and has some other issues.  

 

 

 

 

 

hcr on hope and change

The historian offers commentary on what's taking place in the Democratic Party.

snip

...

The Democratic National Convention has powerfully illustrated that the rest of us are finally reclaiming the country and its symbols. The convention has been full of references to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the American Revolution, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance. Tonight, attendees chanting “USA” waved signs emblazoned with the letters. Speakers, many of whom are military veterans, have testified that they are proud to be Americans. The theme of patriotism was even in one of tonight’s afterparties: Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean played The Star Spangled Banner with an interpretation that recalled Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. “America is the best place to be,” he said. “I’m the best of the American dream. Welcome to America…. You know what makes America great? We’re a bunch of immigrants.”

As Jean indicated, that embrace of our history does not come with the exceptionalism of MAGA Republicans, who maintain that the U.S. has a perfect past that it must reclaim to become great again. Indeed, speakers have emphasized that honoring our history means remembering the nation’s failures as well as its triumphs. The Democrats’ patriotism means recognizing that despite the fact that the U.S. has never fully realized the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence, it has never abandoned them either—a statement paraphrased from President Joe Biden, who has said it repeatedly

...