The rich are villains!
Anyone: Hey (asks about a special interest of mine)?
Me: Becomes an unskippable cutscene
you can tell this website is autistic as hell because someone posts a video with a mildly catchy phrase in it and no one shuts up about it for an extended period of time. or image even. image with a mildly catchy phrase in it even. we love phrases here on tumblr dot com love to repeat them. due to the autism
It’s symmetrical :)
voice offscreen: Hi, excuse me, i have an appointment for today?
*pause*
second voice: he’s new
first voice: oh okay
I think we should have a turn of phrase for "I'm not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing" because more and more I'm finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.
what i tend to say is “okay, i’m saying this here/to you, so i don’t say it there/to them.” and by god, so much drama evaporates.
and it works whether you’re in the right or not. it works amazingly well when you were right, but it would be unkind/unproductive to say “i told you so.”
“mom, i’m telling you, so that i don’t tell her ‘i fucking told you so.’ but like. i very much told her not to call her ex, and now she’s crying in the group chat.”
How 4,000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino its Worst Week Ever
What happens when several thousand distinguished physicists, researchers, and students descend on the nationâs gambling capital for a confer...
by physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com
Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.
Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.
Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!
When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.
Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.
There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.
All of those places should be regularly subjected to large groups of scientists.
Purdueâs âworldâs whitest paintâ wins 2023 SXSW Innovation Award - Purdue University News
Why this is so important:
Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler when subjected to sunlight or other light sources. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings.
In comparison, the world’s whitest paint reflects 98.1% of solar heat away from its surface.
Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.
Using this formulation to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts, more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses. At SXSW, researchers demonstrated the effects of the difference with two model barns sitting under direct halogen lights: one painted in commercial paint and one in Purdue’s white paint. Judges were able to compare thermometers reading the barns’ internal temperatures and to feel the difference in the roofs. The barn painted in Purdue’s technology consistently held cooler internal temperatures by 8-10 degrees Fahrenheit. The “whitest white” barn roof was also much cooler to the touch, prompting many surprised responses from judges and viewers.
While Ruan’s original paint formula is massively efficient, it required a layer 0.4 millimeters thick to achieve subambient radiant cooling. The newer, thinner formulation can achieve similar cooling with a layer just 0.15 millimeters thick.
The new paint also incorporates voids of air, which make it highly porous. This lower density, together with the thinness, provides another huge benefit: reduced weight. The newer paint weighs 80% less than the original paint yet achieves nearly identical solar reflectance – 97.9%, compared to the original formula’s 98.1%.
This could be an important piece in fighting global warming. Imagine if the city of New York City repainted all the skyscraper roofs with a paint that cools down buildings.
Paint is awesome!
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl was released July 9, 2003 and that last frame has lived rent free in my head for TWENTY YEARS