Substantial grid fins…
Booster B4 has been stacked in the high bay. Look at those grid fins! 🤩🚀@NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/9NRwNJIngO
— Mary (@BocaChicaGal) August 1, 2021
Many Raptors are installed on B4. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Join us live at – https://t.co/V9tgT0VtZn
@NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/20QBxAB2Vj
— Mary (@BocaChicaGal) August 2, 2021
One more reason I’m not too sad that I don’t fly much anymore:
Two people debating: forget what they are arguing about, what their views are. Which one would you actually listen to? The calm, rational one, or the one losing his damn mind? If you are going into a debate, watch this video and DON’T BE THAT GUY.
I’m no Greenpeace weenie, but I admit to discomfort at zoos. Locking some animals up into small enclosures is downright cruel, and a lot of animal exhibits are simply depressing. The final straw for me was back in the 90’s: my father and I visited the National Zoo in D.C, and there was a lone male rhino in a relatively small enclosure… and it had been driven so mad by loneliness and/or boredom that the path it wore in the dirt as it endlessly circled its enclosure was four or five inches deep.
That said, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium is spectacular, and one of the few things about California that I miss.
Anyway, here;s a piece about a remarkably realistic robotic dolphin. The suggestion is made that some animals – dolphins, orca, tigers, etc. – could be replaced in captivity with robots.
The robots maker says that what he wants to do is replicate extinct sea critters… you know, the *good* ones like mosasaurs and ithyosaurs and pliosaurs and the like. Now, if there was a good sized aquarium that had Jurassic Seas as an exhibit, I’d be all over that like ugly on an ape. But a regular aquarium, where all the fish were replaced with robots? The otters and penguins and such replaced with Nexus Seven replicants? If I *knew* that, my interest would be minimal. A zoo where the lions and tigers were also robots? Meh. But am I an outlier here? If zoos had wholly believable robotic bears and tapirs and pythons and the like… would people pay to see them? Not just initially for the novelty of it, but years and decades down the line. And would zoo patrons start demanding more and more of the robots? Instead of watching a lion lounge around, would people come to expect the robolions to hunt down the robogazelle every quarter hour? Would the kids demand that the robolions put on a song and dance act?
An upcoming video game where you play a cat. YMMV.
Once again, lack of any actual artistic skill or talent seems to lead to a monumental payday. Of course, there might be other reasons why someone would blow half a million on one of Hunter Biden’s “art.”
I suppose some people might like Biden’s paintings. An artist hardly needs to be “good” to produce art that someone might like (witness Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol). But any random person who made this stuff would probably expect to sell said art for… what? A couple hundred bucks, maybe?
UPDATE: Unrelated…
https://theycantalk.com/post/652649940103856128/artist
I shudder to imagine what the dollar value of the ammo expended here was:
So today I was in a hospital room listening to the beeps and examining the decor when I saw the “pain chart.” It’s a fairly standard bit of simple art that’s supposed to help the patient tell the doctor just how bad they feel. But as should be *blisteringly* obvious, it’s really… lame.
Only the last one looks like pain, and it doesn’t reflect just how painful pain can be. Fortunately, eleven years ago, a FAR more accurate version was released to the world by Allie Brosch:
You’ve probably seen some version of that chart before. You may also have noticed how inadequate it is at helping you. Based on the faces, this is my interpretation of the chart:
0: Haha! I’m not wearing any pants!
2: Awesome! Someone just offered me a free hot dog!
4: Huh. I never knew that about giraffes.
6: I’m sorry about your cat, but can we talk about something else now? I’m bored.
8: The ice cream I bought barely has any cookie dough chunks in it. This is not what I expected and I am disappointed.
10:You hurt my feelings and now I’m crying!
None of that is medically useful and it doesn’t even have all the numbers, so I made a better one with all the numbers:
0: Hi. I am not experiencing any pain at all. I don’t know why I’m even here.
1: I am completely unsure whether I am experiencing pain or itching or maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth.
2: I probably just need a Band Aid.
3: This is distressing. I don’t want this to be happening to me at all.
4: My pain is not ᚠᚪᛣᚳᛁᚾᚷ around.
5: Why is this happening to me??
6: Ow. Okay, my pain is super legit now.
7: I see Jesus coming for me and I’m scared.
8: I am experiencing a disturbing amount of pain. I might actually be dying. Please help.
9: I am almost definitely dying.
10: I am actively being mauled by a bear.
11: Blood is going to explode out of my face at any moment.
Too Serious For Numbers: You probably have ebola. It appears that you may also be suffering from Stigmata and/or pinkeye.
A common genre of YouTube is the “reaction video.” Generally these are millenials/Gen Z’ers reacting to music videos or movies that *supposedly* they’ve never seen before. Sometimes you can tell they’re faking.
And sometimes you can see that they’ve not only never heard that particular piece before, they’ve never heard anything like it before. For anyone raised on the talent-free autotuned crap that seems to flood the airwaves today, Luciano Pavaratti has *got* to be a revelation.
The high point? At about 3 minutes when they are flabbergasted by what you get when you mix talent with skill and lots and lots and LOTS of practice.
