i never realized cuneiform was made with the corner of a cuboid tool, i thought the wedge shapes were carved such that you would press straight down with the tool at a 90° angle to the clay
i learned that unlike in the movie Die Hard, the escape hatch on an elevator can’t be opened from the inside; by law, it’s bolted shut from the outside. It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out. If an elevator is in trouble, the safest place to be is inside the elevator (x)
Maybe once this is all done we can finally go back to using real brass doorknobs.
Brass is extremely harsh on the outer lining of bacteria and viruses, it breaks them down, thereby making brass a self-disinfecting material perfect for surfaces like hand rails and doorknobs
Another fun fact, the strong odor of brass is not actually from brass. Brass has no smell. The odor is the dead skincells and body oils on your hand breaking down from touching it. It’s literally the smell of it cleaning your hand
There’s been a dude…can’t remember his name…desperately trying to get hospitals to switch from using stainless steel and plastic for regularly touched surfaces to brass and copper (copper is the part of the alloy of brass that gives it these qualities)
In some studies run in a few hospitals, I believe the reduction in hospital-related infections was something like 56%. Just by replacing things like light switches, doorknobs, and bed rails that get touched a lot with copper.
Microbes cannot develop a resistance to copper or brass, and it kills antibiotic resistant bacteria as effectively as anything else.
The resistance to using more copper in health care settings seems mainly to be from the fact that brass and copper will tarnish and go dull, which in no way effects their ability to self-disinfect. Stainless steel LOOKS nicer and cleaner, but harbors germs like a motherfucker.
I didn’t actually believe this (because frankly it sounds too good to be true, but a quick Google search will in fact show that it seems to be the case. That’s kind of amazing.
This also applies to silver, and a brass, copper, or silver pot will disinfect any water kept inside within a few hours
This wind powered cargo ship is set to change the way we ship the goods across oceans. The model is very practical and is looking at a possible launch in 2024. https://ift.tt/2MKA9Pb
Wind powered ships!? What a time to be alive!
we really are in the future
ok i did have a good laugh but the more i think about it the more awesome this is?
i mean, the reason we quit using sail power wasn’t because it didn’t provide good propulsion. it was because sails were fragile, labor-intensive, and subject to the whims of the weather. from an industrial revolution era perspective, being able to know that your cargo is going to be chugging across the atlantic at a constant 10 knots and arrive friday after next at the latest was HUGE. it’s no wonder we never went back, even after fossil fuels became not only gross but expensive.
this design? using aerofoils like plane wings, with full rotation ability and telescoping height, controlled by computer from the wheelhouse? all the problems with sail power are suddenly over, except the ‘how much wind is there’ one. and that one is significantly reduced by modern weather data gathering systems.
i love the age of sail as a fiction setting because sailing tall ships was so fraught and busy and stressful. the captain or bosun was shouting out orders based on what he could see and feel and guess in that very moment, and maybe some clues like the movement of fog or birds in the distance, and a bunch of underfed guys with crippling ptsd would go rushing up and down an enormous jungle gym with no safety equipment, quite often coated with ice or in the pitch dark, and if they screwed up they died. amazing drama.
but for real life oceangoing experiences, give me this. a ship so big it feels solid as a rock, sails like skyscrapers, no mechanical sounds but the occasional hum of servos adjusting their angle, gliding serene across the water like a reflection of the moon. yeah. give me that.
Okay so in LA they’ve had the reusable bag and thick plastic bag for ten cents going on for years but in Vegas they still give you thin plastic bags at every store but they’re these really thin shitty bags that you pretty much can’t reuse because they barely survive the trip from the car to the house.
So basically this is how I tell you that I’ve started making plarn that I’m crocheting into a plarn basket that I will use to hold the plarn balls I make in the future in order to control how many plastic bags are pouring out of our cabinets.
How to make plarn:
1. Flatten out a clean plastic bag
2. Cut off the handles and the bottom
3. Cut diagonally into the plastic until the strand is about as thick as you want it to be. (Probably aim for at least an inch thick, it doesn’t have to be super even all the way around but you don’t want it to get so thin that the strand will break)
4. Cut in a spiral until you run out of bag and then diagonally cut your way out of the final loop.
5. Tie the end of the strand to the end of whatever you were working on or to the last stand you cut.
6. Wind or crochet like any other bulky yarn.
The gray disk at the bottom of this post is the bottom of my basket, I’m using an N/10mm hook in a double-crocheted spiral. (I’ve just started the first layer of elevation)
So far I’m about 10-12 bags in and I’ve been trimming the tails of the joined bags as I go.
(One bag’s worth of plarn goes about halfway around the disk at this point, I think I’m going to do 3-4 more gray bags before I change colors; bags come in 3 general colors around here so this basket is going to be mostly white with gray and brown accents.)
Also save the bag scraps, you can use them as stuffing. I’m gonna make a big fucking pincushion with mine. It’s gonna be a cube made out of the leftover cat fabric that I don’t want to use for masks.
Worked my way through the ball in the first photoset, made some more balls. I’m intrigued by the way the patterns on the white bags show up. I’ve got some Ross and 99 cent store bags in the next white ball to add some purple and blue-green to the mix.
Making this basket might actually exhaust my current supply of plastic bags, so I’ve asked my dad to set aside his thicker bags for me in LA so I can compare working both materials.
Kind of get the feeling that I’m going to be a complete gremlin and make a laundry hamper out of the thicker plastic.
It’s a little ugly, but it’s going to do a great job of holding my plarn and associated projects.
Oh this is totally apocalypse punk! Makes me want to make my own for use in small grocery runs. Or just to write a scrappy band of fictional survivors using them, haha.
NGL, cutting apart a pile of plastic trash and turning it into thread and rolling it into balls and crocheting it into fabric does feel like some variety of cyberpunk Rumplestiltskin shit.
1) every time I see something like this, or photos of wild unrealistic landscapes that really exist, or spectacular architecture, whatever it is, I think again that when we write fantasy, we NERF REALITY. That is, here’s some dude with a special interest and a brain that somehow lacks basic self preservation mechanisms, and he’s out here looking like a super hero. Regular humans are capable of things we seem super human. Real landscapes are more fantastical than our fantasies. Reality is more fantastical than our fantasies.
2) how the fuck did he not kick out any windows that’s the most impressive part of the whole video.
this man is his own zombie apocalypse team, adding anyone else would just slow him down
So as someone who used to teach parkour back in the day, this dude isn’t just talented. His technique is amazing.
It’s not just about not kicking out windows. Controlling how you land is about shock absorption, about minimizing the strain on your joints. It also makes you quieter when you move. A good landing should be as silent as possible, because loud landings hurt. That’s the foundation of everything else you do in parkour. So by the time you’re climbing buildings, if you’re breaking windows it means you don’t have enough control to land safely and it’s time to go back to your ground basics.
ifesbob 