One last thought- Bakelite seems to love dust. I’m going to dust them regularly, but if there is a way to light them well without making the dust show up well, that would be great.

Are you going to listen to the radios or look at them?

If you don’t need to listen to them, so the glass won’t be an issue, I imagine that you could put them in one of those glass-fronted display cabinets that are designed for this sort of thing, displaying china and such.

EDIT: Also, I remember reading that Bakelite does slowly break down. I don’t know if sunlight accelerates that; it does affect a lot of substances. If so, you might want to keep it away from sunlight.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like it.

https://www.beeplastic.com/blogs/beeplastic-information-station/unraveling-bakelite-understanding-its-disadvantages-and-limitations-in-the-modern-world

Extended exposure to heat and sunlight also degrades pure Bakelite faster than more advanced plastics.

Discoloration – Bakelite often yellows with age and extended UV exposure. Keeping items out of sunlight can minimize this effect.

Man survives being lost in California mountains for 10 days by eating berries

I doubt that very much. Anyone for whom 10 days of no food is going to be fatal isn’t going to be voluntarily going on hikes.

It’s a social convention for people to eat multiple times a day, but that’s it. You’ve got enough energy reserves to go for a far longer period of time.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/pdf/postmedj00315-0056.pdf

A 27-year-old male patient fasted under supervision for 382 days and has subsequently maintained his normal weight.

It’s not mentioned in the research paper above, but the guy’s name was Angus Barbieri.

Now, that guy had a lot of fat on him, which he wanted to lose – most people couldn’t go for over a year without food. He dropped 276 pounds over 382 days to get to 180 pounds. But unless someone is emaciated, they could do 10 days easily. I’ve fasted for over a week myself for the hell of it.

sitting by waterfalls and using his boot to collect water to drink and keep himself hydrated.

That may well have kept him alive, though. Can’t go for anything like as long as you can without food without water.

China is already selling two EVs using sodium ion batteries.

Sodium ion batteries won’t be a general drop-in substitute in vehicles for lithium.

It might be possible to use sodium-ion batteries in place of some not-energy-density critical lithium-ion applications (the way lead-acid is currently used for some lithium-ion applications), and that’d free up some materials for EV use.

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/73

However, sodium and lithium atoms have differences, two of which are relevant for battery performance. The first difference is in the so-called redox potential, which characterizes the tendency for an atom or molecule to gain or lose electrons in a chemical reaction. The redox potential of sodium is 2.71 V, about 10% lower than that of lithium, which means sodium-ion batteries supply less energy—for each ion that arrives in the cathode—than lithium-ion batteries. The second difference is that the mass of sodium is 3 times that of lithium.

Together these differences result in an energy density for sodium-ion batteries that is at least 30% lower than that of lithium-ion batteries [1]. When considering electric vehicle applications, this lower energy density means that a person can’t drive as far with a sodium-ion battery as with a similarly sized lithium-ion battery. In terms of this driving range, “sodium can’t beat lithium,” Tarascon says.

In time, sodium-ion batteries will improve, but their driving range will never surpass the top-of-the-line lithium-ion batteries, Tarascon says. He imagines instead that sodium-ion technology will fill specific niches, such as batteries for smaller, single-person electric vehicles or for vehicles that have a range of only 30–50 miles (50–80 km). Weil agrees, but he says that society may have to change the way it views automobiles. “We cannot only point to the technology developers and say, ‘We need more efficiency.’ It’s even more important to stress that we need more ‘sufficiency,’ which is people being satisfied with a small car,” he says.

Yes, my understanding is that this is unexpected behavior. It’s more conventional for these pylons to fall over in groups rather than individually.

For example, last year:

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1812393/eyes-on-heavy-cables-after-binondo-pylons-collapse

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:46 AM August 05, 2023

The sudden collapse of seven power pylons in Manila’s Binondo district on Thursday afternoon not only prompted calls for an investigation into the immediate cause…

https://apnews.com/article/south-africa-pylons-collapse-pretoria-f0189bea0b6ad846e6d66e2be6d6d172

Published 6:14 AM PDT, April 10, 2023

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — At least seven large electricity pylons collapsed onto a highway near the South African capital of Pretoria, causing a multiple-vehicle crash, city authorities and emergency services said Monday.

https://www.news24.com/fin24/economy/pics-another-collapse-of-power-pylons-in-gauteng-20230414

14 Apr 2023

Five electricity pylons collapsed on the R101 in Hammanskraal on Monday night, Eskom confirmed.

This came just a day after seven collapsed on the N4 in Pretoria.

This “lone pylon syndrome” is rather concerning.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity.

Thru.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-LH65WMRWBGCXEN-WM65R-Monitor/dp/B07WT547MM/

Here’s a 65" monitor being sold by Amazon UK. It’s less, though also touch.

EDIT: Though I really hope that that wattage rating is just an error in Amazon’s database.

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-C8621QT-85-6-Touchscreen-Monitor/dp/B0CJ5S18TT

Here’s an 85" monitor.

At 190 lbs, though, that’s getting back into the same “I don’t want to haul that up stairs” territory that CRTs were getting into near the end of their days. I think I’d start looking at projectors with nice screens at that point.

Air defence systems shot down 12 of 16 missiles and all 13 drones launched by Russia at several regions through the night, the Ukrainian air force said.

I guess we’re progressively moving out of the Siemens-Energy-gets-contracts-to-replace-things-violently-interacting-with-Russian-missiles phase of the war and into the Lockheed-Martin-gets-contracts-to-replace-things-violently-interacting-with-Russian-missiles phase.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/04/24/army-has-officially-deployed-laser-weapons-overseas-combat-enemy-drones.html

The Army has officially deployed a pair of high-energy lasers overseas to blast incoming enemy drones out of the sky, the service recently confirmed, marking a major milestone for the U.S. military’s ongoing development of futuristic directed-energy weapons.

The 20-kilowatt Palletized High Energy Laser, or P-HEL, “is currently deployed to support the Army’s mission” in an undisclosed location abroad, a spokesman for the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, which manages its directed-energy portfolio, told Military.com.

I think the bigger concern is enemy UAVs wearing shades.

You can have short term price shocks, like if there’s a huge, unexpected flood of people into or out of an area. Demand for housing can change more-quickly than supply of housing.

However, over time run, supply catches up, and the price of housing is set by two things:

• The cost of construction. What does it cost to get the land, get the materials, and get the labor to build more?

• The cost of capital. How difficult is it to get ahold of capital to do construction?

In cities, it does cost more to get land, but you can also build up, and the land value becomes less and less significant as the heght increases.

In cities – especially expensive places like San Francisco or New York – a major factor is usually that there’s some form of height restrictions. That is, it would be possible for someone to obtain capital, buy land, build a building on it, and make a reasonable return, but there are zoning ordinances or the like that prevent this. Sometimes there are outright height restrictions. In London, there are restrictions on buildings that obstruct a network of views to various landmarks, which has a similar effect. Developers have an interest in building as long as they are allowed to do so. Eliminate height and similar zoning restrictions that prevent construction, and it will show up.

This is an article that I really like, was run in The Atlantic some years back, focusing on why housing is so expensive in New York City, due to a history of planning restrictions on construction:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/

California in particular has seen spread of the YIMBY movement (that is, a counter to NIMBY, where people want to block construction near them) aimed at removing restrictions on housing construction.

I don’t have a problem with Elon Musk as a person or him owning it – I wasn’t on the Elon hype train back when the progressive crowd was glamorizing him, and I’m not on the Elon-bashing train now that he’s making conservative statements and is unpopular with the progressive crowd. My problem is with the platform itself.

Message length

The thing doesn’t have the degree of message length limitation that it used to, but it’s still really short. Being concise is one thing, but this is at the level that it affects the format of the message.

Informality

Maybe it’s just me, but Twitter seems just intrinsically informal. There is virtually no form of communication that has traditionally been more-formal than state communications.

Security

This is the big one.

It really boggles my mind that a state would grant Twitter the status of being the medium for their announcements.

How secure is Twitter? I mean, I’m sure that Twitter’s engineers try to keep in secure, but I don’t believe that they have the kind of emphasis on security that, say, the people who are on TLS (which would secure a state website) do. What happens if someone compromises a state Twitter account, sends out a bogus message, and then manages to cut access off to the account for a period of time? At just the right time, like coups or something, that could have an enormous impact.

Twitter is a private company. Their responsibilities are not the same as a national government’s. Yes, they care about their reputation, and there are bounds on what they’ll do. But they were willing to cut off Trump. I can very much believe that under the right circumstances, they’d be willing to cut off officials or governments abroad. And it wouldn’t even be sanctions-level stuff, where it’s an extraordinary act – like, they can put together whatever ToS stuff they want, block people all the time. If I’m a government, I absolutely do not want Twitter to be able to cut off my communications. I don’t want whatever governments might be able to exert pressure on Twitter – and I guarantee that in a serious-enough situation, many would be willing to try – to induce that the communications be cut off. There are Twitter offices around the world. What happens if there’s a war on and some Twitter employees are taken hostage? Is the CEO going to say “let them die, keep the communications open”? Where are his obligations going to lie?

How vetted are the employees who have access to various levels of administrative access at Twitter? I would bet that there is a larger pool and that there is less vetting than the kind of people who have access to set operations at say, certificate authority operators or to cut international cable access at major ISPs, which collectively is comparable to the kind of control that an individual – who may-or-may-not be acting in line with the company’s aims as a whole – might have.

I strongly suspect that there are ways to manipulate Twitter, given sufficient use of bot accounts, to make material from malicious accounts be ranked highly. I’ve seen disinfo campaigns in the past. This is a problem that search engines share, but Twitter does real-time indexing of all content and I strongly suspect is a lot easier to induce wild ranking changes on.

I watched the four hour WW2 Guadalcanal Campaign documentary on YouTube on the Kings and Generals channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI4eNk69E8Q

It’s basically a bunch of battle videos combined in order.

Some of the writing is not ideal, and I know from familiarity with the subject matter that there were some errors and omissions. However, what I really like about the Kings and Generals visualizations is that instead of throwing old war footage or a talking head or some 3D render up, they spend their whole time looking at a map and showing how things play out on it, which provides for a much more useful sense of geography. Almost every one of the handful of war documentary makers that I really like does the same thing.

I’m not familiar, but:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsMR/comments/18nu45p/hope_for_wmr_on_linux_controller_track_reverse/

This was six months ago, when someone was talking about working on reverse-engineering it. It sounds like the project you want is “monado”.

https://monado.freedesktop.org/

Based on the table at the above link, it sounds like there is experimental support for the display only, and no controller support.

Experimental 6DoF tracking support with external SLAM/VIO systems is upstreamed but still being worked on. Tested with RealSense D455 and Samsung Odyssey+, Reverb G2, Oculus Rift S.

However, Katz later posted on X: “Israel cannot allow the Hezbollah terror organization to continue attacking its territory and citizens, and soon we will make the necessary decisions. The free world must unconditionally stand with Israel in its war against the axis of evil led by Iran and extremist Islam.”

It’s been years and I’m still not over the weirdness of governments announcing major positions via Twitter.

I can believe that they might be bad, but do you have a better alternative?

Like, part of the problem with evaluating the reliability of information online is a lack of context.

I mean, sure. There are animals that went extinct (and that did so in North America and over a century ago; it wouldn’t have been in this list anyway).

But this is saying that from ~1960, a lot of European animal populations have increased.

There’s something off to me about the media exclusively referring to them as gangs.

I think that “strongmen” or maybe “warlords” is normally reserved for people who control a lot more territory than this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gang_war_in_Haiti.svg

Each group here controls tiny patches of territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_war_in_Haiti

By 2022, researchers estimated that about 200 gangs operated across Haiti. Of these, half were located in Port-au-Prince. The more influential gangs control large swathes of territory, including entire municipalities and communes.

Worked for Trump on Muslims.

“Mao suit”.

It’s a trademark for him and his grandfather. Here he is wearing it to meet Trump:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/style/kim-jong-uns-mao-suit-was-business-as-usual-summit-was-historic-1119420/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_suit

The modern Chinese tunic suit is a style of male attire originally known in China as the Zhongshan suit (simplified Chinese: 中山装; traditional Chinese: 中山裝; pinyin: Zhōngshān zhuāng) after the republican leader Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan). Sun Yat-sen introduced the style shortly after the founding of the Republic of China (1912–1949) as a form of national dress with distinct political overtones. The four pockets are said to represent the Four Virtues of propriety, justice, honesty, and shame; and the five buttons the branches of China’s former government (Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Examination, Control),[1][2][3][4][5] which still survive today in the Republic of China government of Taiwan.

After the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, such suits came to be worn widely by male citizens and government leaders as a symbol of proletarian unity and an Eastern counterpart to the Western business suit. The name “Mao suit” comes from Chinese Communist Mao Zedong’s fondness for the style. The garment became closely associated with him and with Chinese Communism. Mao’s cut of the suit was influenced by the Stalin tunic then prevalent among Soviet officials.[6] Although it declined in use among the general public in the 1980s and 1990s due to the increasing prominence of the business suit, it is still commonly worn by Chinese leaders during important state ceremonies and functions.[7][8] The Mao suit was also worn in North Korea by party elites.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Mao suit became fashionable among Western European, Australian, and New Zealander socialists and intellectuals.[9] It was sometimes worn over a turtleneck.

The Mao suit is worn at the most formal ceremonies as a symbol of national sovereignty. China’s paramount leaders always wear Mao suits for military parades in Beijing, even though other Politburo Standing Committee members and other Politburo officials wear European business suits. It is customary for Chinese leaders to wear Mao suits when attending state dinners.[13][14][15] In this situation, the Mao suit serves as a form of evening dress, equivalent to a military uniform for a monarch, or a tuxedo for a paramount leader.

The Mao suit also serves as a diplomatic uniform. Although Chinese ambassadors usually wear European business suits, many Chinese ambassadors choose to wear a Mao suit when they present their credentials to the head of state.[16][17][18] The presentation ceremony is symbolic of the diplomatic recognition that exists between the two countries, so it carries a higher level of formality than other diplomatic meetings.