Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I remember during the run of Mythbusters either Discovery or History or one of those tried to launch another show to cash in on Mythbusters’ success, it was called Smash Lab, and it’s clear the creation of this show involved a pie chart titled “Elements of Mythbusters by screen time” and there was one pie wedge labelled “explosions.” It didn’t last long IIRC.



  • To expand on this, the rainbow of colors which start at a straw then turn yellow, red, brown and then that vivid blue, are caused by refraction. The oxide layer on the surface is transparent or translucent, and the thickness of the layer determines what wavelength of light it scatters. The hotter it gets, the thicker the oxide layer forms, so you can fairly reliably tell the temperature the metal has been heated to by eye, and you might use different amounts of heating to achieve hard-but-brittle or soft-but-tough.

    I’ve even seen it done by Chris of Youtube channel Clickspring for decorative purposes. It’s how he made the steel hardware of his brass clock blue.

    Exactly how you temper something the size of a sword using a forge is a bit outside my understanding; I’ve done it with relatively small bits of drill rod to make lathe tools with a gas torch, but that’s about it.








  • Yeah Tom Scott did one of his linguistics videos about that, he had a word for it but some questions aren’t really questions they’re basically just rituals, though rephrased a different way makes them genuine questions, and when you have major dialects of the “same” language like British and American English, we use different ones. “Are you alright?” is basically a noise of greeting in Britain and an expression of genuine concern in America, while “How are you?” is the reverse.