2
points
hcrisp
Joined 1,484 karma
- hcrisp parentNot as long but similarly lost at sea, crossing the Atlantic in a life raft: "Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea" by Steven Callahan.
- McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative.
However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World. That was a long slog which, although I enjoyed moments of it, now I wonder if my time wouldn't have been better spent reading something more interesting.
- 4 points
- The government itself self-reports $149B in "improper payments"
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...
- 4 points
- I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.
https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/wisdom-teeth-removal-neces...
- I prefer this video of A* pathfinding on a real map (Chicago and Rome):
- I couldn't find any citations that mention molybdenum as a way to increase metabolism of caffeine. However, I found one reference [0] that mentions, "Consumption of broccoli and brassica vegetables in general and absorption of large quantities of vitamin C increase caffeine clearance".
EDIT: It would seem that the vitamin C paper [1] concludes the opposite of what [0] states. "These results indicate that the elimination of caffeine in the elderly is not affected significantly by the concentrations of vitamin C achieved during this study."
[0] https://www.coffeeandscience.org/health/coffee-and-caffeine/caffeine-and-metabolism [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7064899/ - I have a Hawthorn. My brother-in-law, who is a landscaper, came over to show me how to prune what we thought was a flowering crab. However, on closer inspection, he exclaimed, "Wait, this a Hawthorn bush!"
It has gotten larger over time, and harder to mow around due to the thorns (spine-like protrusions which resemble small branch growths more than true thorns).
It does have one redeeming quality. Every year in early spring, for a brief but dazzling moment, it appears covered in thousands of small, white, lace-like flowers.
- 136 points
- 5 points
- Cool, but I couldn't tell if it reached the point of spaghettification [0].
- 5 points
- 18 points
- I loved these so much that I created my own Mad Scientist's Club with my neighbor friends which held meetings in our (very hot) shed loft during the summer.
I just finished reading some of them to my pre-teen girls, and they enjoyed them quite a bit despite the fact that very few girl characters are part of the plot. A few quotes made us chuckle ("Shut up and stop rocking the boat!" was one). We even figured out which boy was the narrator, even though he never mentions his name.
I guess it speaks to their universal appeal to kids of curious minds who like hearing of scrappy, madcap adventures attempted by smart but hair-brained individuals of their age. The books always gave me the sense of unbridled freedom to invent, explore, and maybe pull one over your knucklehead neighbor or unsuspecting parents.
- Image on Vulcan's homepage says 90% was flown before first launch. Or is that just marketing?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ulalaunch/32854051607/in/album...
- 4 points
- This was a satisfying article emphasizing the engineering ingenuity to build Apollo. I read the book awhile ago and remember a scene not mentioned in the article about when North American went to go make their formal pitch to NASA for the Apollo command module. When the arrived in the room they realized their slide projector had the wrong adapter for the outlet. Panicked they looked for a solution to no avail until someone had the idea to just cut the cord and stick the bare leads into the wall. Problem solved; and they won the contract. Fun book.
- Article says the plane it came from flew 16,239 hours so I'm guessing the photo was from initial certification if it was actually used.
Now that the plane is in Seattle and the engine is in the UK, does that mean it was shipped back after the plane landed? What is on display in a Seattle, dummy engines? So many questions.
- I think he did mean Hugo's Les Miserables. I remember that chapter where he described the city's "cloaca", referring to it as the "third level substage". Goes on for quite a while and was indeed memorable.
So was the long chapter about Waterloo which was seemingly unrelated to the book's plot until the final paragraph or so.
The description of Fantine's life before she fell goes on with florid language, but it captures the "golden hour" of life when youth is at its peak.
And lastly I'll mention the chapter where Marius' grandfather (I think) goes on a terribly long rant about the Jacobins. Those brigands...!
- 3 points