I guess it makes sense that there's an elevator of the year award, though it's never something I'd have thought of.
The photo of one of the brake assembly components mounted to a welded tubular skid, bolted to a large structure of I-beams, bolted to another I-beam skid which is bolted to the floor, is tickling me as slightly humorous.
I'm sure they thought it was a good idea given the constraints of the time. They also lacked a lot of modern knowledge and so couldn't do it the new way. Likely if someone had tried the new way at the time they would - rightly - criticism how unsafe and unreliable it would be. Modern engineering and electronics have made a lot of improvements in the last 120 years, which in turn makes the modern stuff a good choice now.
Oh, definitely. I just saw a funny parallel with projects even today, where something is done to make something work at the time (and we’ll make it better later), and later never arrives.
I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.
No, you would have to worry about your job being sent/lost to Mexico, Japan, China, etc. Now those jobs are already lost and we have a different vulnerability. Same story, different clothes.
Downsizing and outsourcing hit all non-management positions, the only moat against it was technical expertise, but that's been eroded for quite a while. How much moaning about development being outsourced to India have we heard in the past decade?
When I was in a CS program in the US in 2005 I heard from dozens of people as well as media pundits that it's a bad choice because all the tech jobs would be outsourced to india.
No, in the past you just had the possibility of childhood illness and death, the death of siblings, war, famine, drought, none of which are real problems for university students these days.
I drove ~3 hours to the Vermont-Canada border... and then drove 14 hours home. I'd also do it again in a heartbeat.
I almost signed up for a live-work program for a big music festival happening in Iceland, but the flights (the only thing not covered) were astronomically expensive and I had already made plans with my dad last weekend, and he's getting older so I really didn't want to bail on him.
I would love to sit atop the Rock of Gibraltar (with 47,000 other people) for the next one, Aug 2 2027, but that is likely also a pipe-dream, because NORMAL flights to Gibraltar are already too expensive for me.
I also report strange time anomalies. I blasted to Burlington from Nashua early morning and it took ~3 hrs to get there and ~7 hrs to get home...in a manual transmission. I'd do it again too, life changing experience.
Boston to Bingham, Maine in about 4 hours. I was in my car and headed home about 10 seconds after totality ended and made it home in 5 hours. Totally worth it.
I'm currently reading Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds. In the second book, there's a water-world where there are airships, and a whole city held aloft in the air by "vacuum bladders".
I'll admit when I first read that detail in a description of the blimp-like airship the 2 characters are riding right at the beginning of the book, it took me a second to realize exactly what it meant. My understanding of airships like blimps and such hinges on something being in the gas bladder... But yes, nothing is certainly lighter than something! I haven't yet encountered any technical description of how the bladders are constructed, which I look forward to reading.
You need to construct a sphere that is strong enough withstand 1 atmosphere of pressure but also lighter than the weight of the air being displaced.
In a sci-fi book you would construct your unobtanium shell in space and use them to splash down heavier payload to earth. But the material needed is probably still magic.
I think Reynolds also had smelting in space, where molten metal would be turned into a huge volume of froth using some lighter than air gas. The 'burgs' of metal foam could then gently float down to earth.
I think the 2 funniest I found here are "TT Firebird Ribeye" which just sounds like an incredibly specific steakhouse menu item, and "Privacy II", which I just think is a bit on the funny-ironic side that we're all now looking at their vessel data and violating their privacy.
This reminds me of something I saw on a backpacking blog sometime last year. Project Remote, a family that's finding and hiking to all the "most remote" place in each state of the USA.
Here's some of the statistics:
The most surprising one to me is: Least Remote: Kansas (0.8 miles from a road).
As someone who lives in the very densely populated greater Boston area, Kansas doesn't exactly strike me as a prime candidate for not being able to get away from roads.
Their website seems to have been commandeered by some Indonesian online casino scam thing in late 2024 and is now offline. I'm unsure of the ongoing state of the project.
Kansas is mostly a gigantic farm and there’s farm roads every mile or so. Laying out roads along section (square mile, 640 acres) or quarter section (160 acre) boundaries is probably how Kansas developed its road network. 36 sections make up a township, 6 sections by 6 sections. Most (?) land between California and the Mississippi River is surveyed like this, probably excluding Texas since that was a country and originally held by Spain/Mexico.
I'm extremely surprised that Wyoming is more remote than Alaska! I wouldn't think Alaska has that many back-country roads running through it.
Edit: they have another page describing Alaska. It seems that the linked page might only describe the contiguous US? But also, wow. This seems stupid:
> Thoughts of roadless Alaska came to mind and our amazing, wild trek through the Brooks Range of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We hired a bush plane to drop us off in a nameless valley. At 50 miles from the nearest village or road, we were awed with excitement and healthy fear. We agreed to meet up 9 days and 35 miles later at a flat spot where he could land on the tundra marked by a heap of moose antlers. He looked at us awfully cock-eyed when we told him we had no satellite phone. He asked, “well, why not?” We told him that we were deliberately here to remove ourselves from civilization and contact with it. Watching our pilot fly away, we realized we were as far from towns and roads, and therefore, humans as we could possibly imagine.
I've been to this area and being close to a road does not mean human contact. I drove on that road for nine hours and saw a handful of people/buildings.
"Towns" on a map might literally be a single home up there. It's as remote as can be even alongside utility roads.
I've done some pretty stupid things in my day relating to various activities far* from civilization (my dumbest being an offroad motorcycle trip by myself for which I was not nearly experienced enough, dumped the bike several times, crossed a bridge that definitely wasn't designed to hold a motorcycle, etc.), but I both applaud and receive second-hand anxiety from their massive commitment.
*technically not remote at all in this context as they all took place on trails
Well Kansas has the benefit of being utterly flat and also quite homogenous biome wise. Even though it has no people I' assuming without looking at it that the entire state has been chopped up into square mile sized squares.
Kansas genuinely has a ton of paved and gravel roads all across the state. It's like a gigantic grid. Oddly high amount of street-view coverage too on google maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/EyBFj9BNQa8nhUcE6
The Kansas landscape is very underrated. Just infinite sky in all directions.
I agree about that landscape. The state is not as flat as people think it is either. Very scenic. I worked the southwest corner of the state years ago and always loved topping a local high spot. We were surveying and out there we could set a flag a half mile away and sight off of that easily with plane table and alidade or theodolite. The atmospheric distortion would get you on a humid day or if you were shooting across a wheat field with all the transpiration but otherwise it was clear with minimal shimmer.
Interestingly, I noticed this in aproximately real time. I had been checking up on the visible-light geocolor composite images every hour or so to look at the massive plume of Canadian wildfire smoke that was turning the skies in the northeast dark orange yesterday.
I haven't interacted with the GOES site or cared too much about the image output until the last 2 days, and the it immediately broke. Somewhat humorous to me.
This is a really cool page, never really thought about how much information you can squeeze out of just IR (recommend selecting the dust RGB and reading the PDF it links to explaining just how dust is tracked etc)
I recently started Postcrossing. 5 sent, with 2 traveling to Russia and China (from the US, it's been ~40+ days, I figured those 2 would take a while, but we will see if they get delivered!)
So far I've gotten 2 from Taiwan, and 1 from Germany and Belgium.
I'm excited to find my next stash of cards to send out! It really is such a wholesome activity.
I've been sending postcards to a list of ~15 local friend and family for the last couple years. I travel a lot for work so have a lot to send. I get so few responses, only 2 people have ever replied, and one of those was some random person I met on Discord. I really wish more people would send mail. My mom will occasionally text me to say she liked the card, but she never seems to get the hint that I'd super appreciate a physical response even if it's some scribbles on notebook paper in an envelope. I teared up a little bit when I got my first postcrossing card.
I get all my 2FA through SMS or a Yubikey. It took a bit of wrangling from corporate IT, but it was "Get my yubikey or SMS working or buy me a company phone and pay for service that I won't use for anything else"
I never really did a lot of banking on my phone before, but it really wasn't that hard to let that go. I'd say the biggest hangup is not having Venmo or something for splitting bills with friends, yard-sales, etc, but I've started carrying some amount of cash again for those instances and it's worked out alright.
Been daily driving a dumbphone since 2023. Yes it takes a bit of work, but it's so SO worth it.
The photo of one of the brake assembly components mounted to a welded tubular skid, bolted to a large structure of I-beams, bolted to another I-beam skid which is bolted to the floor, is tickling me as slightly humorous.