A good rubber eraser also takes sticker adhesive right off of most surfaces, safely.

I learned this when I was a kid, and the only problem is that nowadays, I haven’t seen a pencil nor its eraser and probably 15 years.

Still, a pretty great tip!

There’s a documentary about the British and American involvement in the Iranian coup called ‘Coup 53’

Well said. I stopped reading after point 13 for this very reason!

Ah yes oil rich Finland

Yeah, there’s a lot of snake oil in the audio world.

You’re spending five thousand dollars on solid gold cables that were soldered by blind monks then braided by trained gerbils, in an attempt to get the highest fidelity possible. Meanwhile, the album was recorded using the cheapest 10¢ per ft star-quad cable the studio could find, and $4.50 Neutrik connectors that were soldered by the studio’s unpaid intern.

There have been multiple instances where I have seen someone asking for advice on trying to track down an intermittent buzz in their system. They had people saying they needed to totally rethink their entire system, they had to buy thousands of dollars of new gear, completely change how they had everything routed… When all they needed was a 5¢ ferrite bead.

When I was a cable guy a customer’s Monster Cable RG-6 fell off in my hand.

“Ah! My Monster Cable!”

“I’ll make you a better one.”

I knew they weren’t up to the hype, but fuck me, the shielding was single-wrap, made of Chinese whispers and toilet paper. The copper core could be bent with harsh words. The dialectric (white part) was some form of marshmallow. In my 3 years in the industry, Monster was the shittiest cable I ever encountered, a cut below the cheapest Walmart cable.

Made him a new one, cut to size, out of our standard quad-shielded, real coax. Quite a lesson for both of us.

Cable hype is in every industry. You can buy hundred-dollar gold plated “Gaming” HDMI cables that are no better than any other HDMI cord

John Carver torpedoed the “golden ear” self-deluded class, one time, purrfectly…

He had them appear to review/compare a pair of prototype amplifiers…

They did, eventually coming to the consensus that 1 was categorically better than the other.

Then John Carver removed the covers, & the ONLY difference between the amps, was the packaging they were in: the circuit-boards were identical.

He had ZERO respect for all the snake-oil bullshit stuff going on.

I’ve dug-into speaker-builder books enough to know that yes, waveguides do make difference in acoustics, & yes, you can hear that difference ( compared with plain-box speakers that are closed, all 'round ).

I have not paid-for any of the speaker-builder software ( & Linux has some FLOSS stuff, in that domain, anyways, now ),

but yes, it is actual-fact, that to make lower-frequencies of sound, you need bigger speaker-drivers.

For high-fidelity concert, I’d want 15" drivers, or pairs-of-12"-ones, on the sound-reinforcement speakers, if it were needing good quality bass. ( for a Liquid-Jungle genre concert, or something )

( I can’t hear low-enough to hear the lowest human-hearable frequencies, but others can: it’d matter for them, right? )

_ /\ _

Be careful with that makeshift speaker cabling though. If you’re using small gauge power cables, you could easily melt those cables with a powerful enough audio signal.

Ahahah totally man. I dealt with a lot of this compliance, regulatory, quasi legal, bullshit too.

At one point to become an inspector of those huge oil storage tanks I had to basically study the specific building codes for those tanks back to front and upside down.

Cost hundreds to get the standards legally, thousands to take the tests, become registered, work with a qualified inspector etc.

That was 1 single standard, there are thousands. Tens of thousands when we’re talking industry generally, probably hundreds.

Then when you add international standards, everything is duplicated now per country. We make trade agreements and such to somewhat ease the shock of moving products and services across that Gulf of understanding.

Standards are trending in a good direction, we’re slowly moving towards more and more harmonized and universal standards but, we will never reach it, because we’re human, well always just be adapting to what comes next

Holy crap. Everyday I’m surprised at what is legal.

The standards for Normal, Utility, Aerobatic and Commuter category aircraft are codified in federal law, FAR part 23.

The standards for Special Light Sport Aircraft are ASTM standards referred to by law.

Same is true for ISO standards, in EU: I think it’d cost about 10 to 30 k-euros to get the standards required to sell a sailboat in the EU.

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You missed a bit. Overcoming your reflexes to “breath” underwater is HELL.

Dated a beautiful diver girl. She lived in the water. Got me in a class with one other person, young guy, to get our first cert.

Don’t know how to put this. Let’s say I’ve been in scarier situations than the vast majority of people reading this comment.

Truck full of skinheads armed with AR-15s rolls up to the punker hangout? Meh. Saving my own life in the face of certain death, twice? I could do it again, I hope.

I’ve been brave. I’ve been a coward. I have never in life been so fucking scared as taking that first breath underwater, took every ounce of courage I had. Only reason I didn’t bail? Didn’t want the young guy to fail. Because he was shitting bricks, couldn’t let him down. We made it!

Also, underwater currents are a lot stronger and faster than you think.

I’m grateful my dumb ass never went to a dive spot that I read about where the currents between 15-60ft deep were intense and there was a chain to follow to guide you down or to hold on to.

No thank you. So scary.

Additional “fun” fact about lung over-expansion. The pressure difference necessary for it to happen is startlingly small if you, for some insane reason, completely fill your lungs. You can do damage rising single digit numbers of feet.

We did a family introduction in a local aquarium and it was amazing. I had a something strange happen to me afterwards. I stopped breathing from time to time. Weird, because rule number one is “keep breathing”.

It started at work where I got the feeling I was suffocating only to realise I was holding my breath unconsciously. I had a constant feeling of being out of breath and only felt good I if I was conscious about breathing. Took me a bit of therapy to get it sorted out. Therapist figured that the dive triggered something in me.

Why tf is a Bastard Sword called a Bastard Sword?

Thanks. You made everyone whonread this clech their buttcheecks.

You mean, like, water?

Alright then, keep your secrets!

Depending on the era and genre, the most ubiquitous drum machine would be a Linn Drum (late 70s & early 80s pop, e.g. ABBA), Roland TR-808 (80s soft pop, e.g. Phil Collins), or Roland TR-909 (90s House/Dance/Trance, e.g. Scooter).

There are many others, of course, and even if the actual machine wasn’t used, these sounds have been sampled and reused countless times, e.g. using a Fairlight CMI.

Interestingly, the 808 is the only one of the three that does NOT use samples itself but synthesizes all of its percussion sounds, which gives it a rather distinct character. Perhaps that is what led you to believe that it is the most ubiquitous drum machine - it’s easier to recognize than the others, even in a crowded mix.

I look up everything interesting that occurs to me on Wikipedia so I know a lot of shit about random topics.

This is a very valuable habit.

I feel like there’s some amount of this in every hobby, which sounds like I’m downplaying this take and racing but that’s not that case I promise you.

I can imagine how this would be amplified big time in a pretty expensive hobby/semi-pro/pro? I assume there must exist some amount of pros

But yeah as a collector of a couple to many more likely expensive hobbies, it’s crazy how much shit you see designed to just separate people from their money efficiently

Forgot this stuff, sorry:

Aviation:

• you need ALL of Mike Busch’s books!
• Barnaby Wainfan, at Kitplanes: read ALL of his stuff. I disagree with some points of his ( & consider his faceted lifting-body aircraft to have been needlessly unsmooth: I like Mike Arnold’s ultra-low-drag paradigm! ), but he gives you sooo much understanding, that you simply aren’t competent in this domain if you aren’t understanding the stuff he’s giving.
• S-Glass is nearly as stiff as carbon, but MUCH tougher: consider it for your wings.
• E-Glass is radar-transparent, the other composites generally aren’t: make any radome of it.
• Turbine-engines cost about 10x as much as piston-engines, to buy, but maintenance-intervals can be MUCH greater, which is why commercial operations like them.
• All aircraft NEED redundant angle-of-attack indicators: fly that indicator, & you’re safe: nearly-all the final-approach-crashes due to stall would have been prevented with AoA-indicators on the flightdeck. ( the McDonnell Douglas 737Max fiasco is because McDonnell Douglas, now falsely-labeled as “Boeing”, they did a reverse-takeover from the inside, after the merger, allowed only 1 AoA-sensor on the airframe, & if that reading went wrong, the avionics highjack the aircraft from the pilots. People died. IN AVIATION, REDUNDANCY SAVES LIVES, for critical-avionics! )

Boats:

• there is the Kelvin Wake Angle that you need to understand: it is the angle from the longitudinal-centerline of your boat, out at an angle, along-which your wake’s peak lies. It is 19.5-ish degrees ( 19.47, iirc ). For multihulls, you NEED to make-certain that that angle doesn’t go from the bow of 1 hull to touch or get too-close to any other hull: it NEEDS to have space, xor you’re creating needless drag. Also, for slenderness, you need to be able to create that angle from your bow, & NOT have your bow’s bluntness violate that angle.
• the LWL:BWL ratios ( Length or Beam, WL means WaterLine ) of interest for multihulls are between 8:1 & 12:1. Going longer than that, as Gerr pointed-out, gives you too-much skin-drag. People who’ve studied aircraft-design know that you want the skin-drag to equal the other kinds of drag, because that’s your minimum-drag. Making a hull 18:1 means you’ve got less bluff-drag, but you’ve got waaay-more skin-drag, so you’re losing, in the displacement regime. Hydroplaning boats are different. Wave-piercing speedboats are different. The multihull designers generally target 9:1 because it really is an optimum LWL:BWL.
• Silicone-Silane is the ONLY anti-fouling that people ought be considering, nowadays ( “Silic One” is 1 brand of that kind of stuff ). NOTHING else works as well, or is as slippery for reducing drag.
• After you’ve earned you real-competence, & now you want to instantiate a business, you’re going to need ABYC membership, & if you’re wanting to sell into the EU, you’re going to need the ISO/DIN standards, which will cost you … about $30k, so you can make your designs compliant with their regulations. They intentionally constructed their standards to enforce as much buying-of-other-components-of-their-standards as possible. To me that is anti-economic-flourishing: putting needless barrier-to-entry, but they’re the ruling institution, so they get to make their economy obey their authority.
• The 1st implimentation of a boat, that vessel’s name, becomes the model’s name, so if you want to control your boat-names, then you can’t have your customers deciding on the name of the 1st implimentation of a design, can you?
• NOLO press makes books on intellectual-property, including Patent It Yourself, which includes a section on getting EU patent protection. Give yourself perhaps a year to get through that book: it’s technical stuff, and there is one hell of alot of stuff to know, in patent-applications, in order to not need to hire ( for $10k+ ) a patent-lawyer for your single application. EU patents are covered in a section of that book, but EU patents cost WAAAY more than North American patents, per point-of-application, or search, etc.
• look at the designs of Cape Falcon Kayaks: they’re elegant in ways that nearly-no boat-designers would do.
• look at the designs of Dave Gerr, if his site is still up, & see how solidly good his work is, compared with normal
• BoatDesign.net is the primary place for boat-design discussion, though … I think it was called “sailing anarchy” was a competitor to it, don’t know if they still exist ( don’t know if either still exists, actually )
• you need to study & understand composites, if you’re doing that, & I’d recommend studying some of the stuff from the aircraft-domain, too ( I got Niu’s composite-airframes textbook ), so you get much-better-than-DIY-“information” about what’s proper. 2" radius minimum for composite-carbon, & that may be pushing it, & you CAN’T mix reinforcement-fibers & get the benefits-of-both: you get the disadvantages of both, not the benefits… this one’s important & non-obvious, so I’m breaking it out into a discussion, not just this little list-point…

Say one has reinforcement-fabric with graphite fiber going east-west & kevlar going north-south.

Then the next layer is with the graphite going north-south & the kevlar going east-west.

Now vacuum-infuse it, so resin spreads forces between all the fibers…

What happens when the temperature rises, in hot sun?

The kevlar SHRINKS. Kevlar has a NEGATIVE Coefficient-of-Thermal-Expansion ( CTE ), but graphite’s is close to zero, & epoxy’s is positive…

So, now your layup is stressing, because some fibers are shrinking, & others are not, & the matrix is expanding.

Worse, when you try flexing it, kevlar isn’t stiff, so NO flexing-force is going onto those fibers, ALL of the flexing-force is going onto the graphite.

But did you calculate your layup so the graphite fibers would be able to take all the flexing that your piece needs to bear?

If not, now it’ll break.

In composites, the stiffest fibers resisting flexing, are taking ALL of the stress of that flexing, until they break, then the next-stiffest are taking all the load.

Mixed reinforcement-fibers is IDIOCY, but you can buy many brands of differently colored aramid+carbon reinforcement-fabric, from many vendors.

It is Niu’s composite-airframes textbook that caused me to know that, & the industry is pushing snake-oil bling, instead.

The only 2 cases where mixed-reinforcement-fibers makes sense, are

1. entirely-cosmetic pieces, which bear no structural load, &
2. pieces where you’re orienting all the stiffest fibers in 1 particular direction for stiffness in that direction, & you want flex in the other direction, so you use e-glass or something in the bendy-required direction.

Oh, & graphite-fiber’s just thinner, stiffer carbon, generally. Processed at a higher temperature.

There: hopefully I’ve given you enough so that you can compete against me better, in the future.

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_ /\ _

I was going through my saved comments again, and I want you to know that I very much appreciate you for writing this up. :)

For me it wasnt the police station but the traffic helicopter saying something half-unintelligible. My brother and I refer to it frequently as “yadda yadda reporting heavy traffic”

There’s one for hospital scenes. Noticed it on the opening of Eyes of a Stranger from Operation Mind Crime.

You know you’ve heard this many times.

I first heard it in SC3K also! I just thought it was “Brandon Scott Michael whrregerrarrrfrrr”, as if the VA was just told to mumble a few filler words and then nonsense thereafter

THE trope:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StockScream

: p