History, Politics And Current Affairs

I've seen parts of Wednesday, and it is very good. The thing I have a real issue with is the casting and characterization of Gomez Addams. Luis Guzman is nowhere near what John Astin and Raul Julia did with the role.

Wonder what the actual efficiency number are for the onboard hydrogen generating system compared to loading hydrogen to the vehicle from an offsite petroleum-to-hydrogen plant. Bet it's significantly less, even with catalyst chemistry. Or, you know, generate the hydrogen by splitting water with powe...

Well, that's not so bad. At least the shrimp were dead. Four radioactive wasp nests were found at Savannah River in July. They were obviously trying to build a reactor, but were destroyed before that they had a chance to prompt critical. https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/08/radioactive-wasp-nests-...

Lordroel wrote: ↑Mon Aug 18, 2025 3:18 pm

Craiglxviii wrote: ↑Mon Aug 18, 2025 4:51 am Please all welcome our new member Georgious!

A new member, new blood, it has been so long, i do not know the three words you say to a new member.

Welcome to Insanity!

{Slides a beer down the bar to Georgius}

{Slides a hedgehog down the bar to Georgius}

Given that it's China, which ship captain gets an invitation to interview, sans tea or jaffa cake, and which one will skip the interview and go straight to re-education?

My beloved partner, of course, laughed until she got the hiccups. I had to sorta bear-hug her. This turned to pacing her breathing via 'mouth to mouth', which soon segued into passion. After, between giggles, we retreated to our nearer en-suite, lovingly wash-clothed each other. I needed several da...

But it still takes a human to turn out such high quality drivel like My Immortal and the Time Cube website.

A UniPower Wolverine 22, the largest 8 x 8 All Terrain Vehicle I'd ever seen, heaved itself out of the distant wind-gap. It rumbled slowly, securely down the steep scarp with both turrets aimed ahead. Not a 'tank', despite fair armour and serious fire-power. Not really an 'armoured car'. The hasty ...

Cheese press, maybe? Or a bookbinding press?

And Tom Lehrer has joined them in the great beyond, at 97.

Is HP the ones that do the reverse Polish notation? Dad had some colleagues that swore by it. Yes, HP did reverse Polish. I knew I was old school in the mid-2000s when I saw a new looking copy of my TI calculator hanging on the wall in the Duetsche Museum. Since I had my (worn) one in my backpack a...

Derringers were almost always in some variant of .22, typically .22 Short. Remember they were intended to be used across a card table. Not so. Apparently, one of the most popular was the .41 Short. It's only more recently that the .22LR derringer picked up popularity, due to size and the improvemen...

There are plenty of options. For selecting the caliber, the US common ones would be 22LR (lacks power), 25 ACP, and 32 ACP. The latter are both Browning designs and would be common. These could all be used in a pocket automatic. Foreign rounds include the 7.62x25 Tokarev and hte 7.65mm Parabellum Th...

A Moore & Wright 1" micrometer. Can read thicknesses or diameters to 0.001". It looks like it has a clip on it so that you can set it to where the thickness should be, then when you turn the stem you can get a quick look without having to read the numbers. The thing with all of the too...

Okay, so they do have a provenance. That's not the usual way things were done, to the best of my knowledge, but it was an unusual situation. It makes this all the more special.

Thank you, I had no idea about that. But someone must have been keeping it up, or it would have been trashed by now. The strange thing is that they left all of the tools. Those would generally belong to the craftsmen, and would be valuable personal effects that they carry from job to job. The builde...

Is the wing chord thick enough to take a machine gun or cannon, or do we have to look at hard points under the wing for missiles and bombs? Looks great! If you ever end up in the New Jersey area, drop me a line. We can consume adult beverages and cause combustion. Belushi TD The wing chord is about...

Yes, I can see electronics with any sort of chips being fried by a strong enough event. But one that demagnetizes refrigerator magnets is enough to do very bad things to living beings. Plus, there's all kinds of gear that should still be capable of running. Many older farm tractors and older diesels...

Exactly. The US Expeditionary Forces were using the French Chauchat machine gun, the French 75 artillery, and both British and French planes. They may even have been using French and British shovels. Industrial production was still ramping up after the war ended. The biggest thing that the US brough...

Ever since the demotion of Pluto through the use of criteria specifically designed to do so, the whole question of what is a planet makes all of these classifications absurd.

This is number 13. Or 14. Or 12. Who the hell knows, because Ceres is too small and Pluto and Eris are big enough.