At a local gun shop…
Dec 312020
Dec 302020
Ummm…
Boston Dynamics’ robots are starting to get a bit spooky in how well and fluidly they move.
Dec 302020
This guy *really* wanted to go to Portland, I guess.
Man climbs on wing of Alaska Airlines plane departing Las Vegas airport, takes off shoes and socks
He broke onto an airfield and somehow climbed onto the wing of a 737-900 and spent the better part of an hour wandering around before the police finally showed up. Sadly they didn’t taser him… gravity wound up doing the job. Behold:
@AlaskaAir crew has been exceptional as The Original Wingman graces us with his presence. #StayHot2020 pic.twitter.com/79PHcHhJ0q
— Brooke Knight (@SkipperBK13) December 12, 2020
Another view:
WTH did I just witness… #alaskaairlines #alaskaflight1367 #lasvegas #lasvegasairport pic.twitter.com/vdXsDrrU44
— ErinInWA (@ErinInWA) December 13, 2020
I wonder who he voted for???
Dec 292020
Wheeeeeeeeee!
Unrelated:
Dec 292020
Feds decline charges against officers in Tamir Rice case
In case you’ve forgotten, Rice was the kid who thought it was a good idea to wave a realistic-looking pellet gun around in public and got popped by some cops for his efforts. This was waaaaaay back in 2014, so it’s taken the Feds six years to decide that this wasn’t actually a provable Federal crime. Get ready for more reasonable discourse:
Dec 292020
The year of lockdowns has given a lot of people time to work on personal projects. Here’s a dubious one:
The entire movie “Shrek” was mashed onto a single floppy. The way this was done was to reduce frame rate to four per second and resolution to 120×96. The audio… takes a bit of a hit.
Dec 292020
… but damn it’s cool. A Russian machinist first makes a bolt that can take nuts with either direction of twist:
And then makes a matching nut with both directions of twist at once, so you can thread in and out using whatever direction you want:
Tolerances seem pretty loose, so the nut wobbles a lot. But for a first attempt, it’s certainly far better than I could do. But what could you actually *do* with such a thing? Those “threads” would be far more fragile than normal, since they come to sharp little points rather than sturdier ridges. And the structure is doubtless much weaker than a normally threaded nut and bolt. Still… seems like their aught to be some application that these would be perfect for.
Dec 292020
The Chinese Communist Party wasn’t entirely accurate??? That’s unpossible!!!
Nearly half a million people may have had Covid-19 in Wuhan, study shows. That’s almost 10 times the official figure
Turns out New York *also* had ten times the reported infection rate.
Dec 292020
The left wins again:
Statue of slave kneeling before Lincoln is removed in Boston
A statue depicting a slave rising from bondage that has stood since 1879 has been removed from public display because… reasons. The left wing war on history and art continues alongside their war on science and engineering.
Bah.
UPDATE: video has come in from the future showing the ultimate expression of the memory-holing of American history and iconography:
IRONY:
Vandals smash Breonna Taylor sculpture in Oakland
Dec 292020
As I’ve made mention numerous times over the years, I am – or at least was, back when I had the time – a builder of models. As such, I watched a lot of YouTube model building videos to pick up new skills, new ways of casting parts, new ways to paint details. A lot of the videos are pretty redundant of course… you can only watch so many vids on the dot filter process using oil paints, for example. Yet there are always new things to see. It’s good to sometimes step outside your own niche. Me, I’d build mostly airplane models, spacecraft, some sci-fi and, long ago, armor. Japanese anime characters? Giant fighting robot mechs? Meh, not for me. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s worth watching videos showing someone building and painting such models. Sometimes there are interesting things to see.
Sometimes two things.