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[DeVaultSetter]

One giant leap for a cone – and 1.5 tonnes would make for some serious vibrations!
Strange happenings described as resulting from no other than a psychogenic effect. The spelling of busses led onto Mrs. Steven’s Classroom Blog. 😛

[Spastic Hamburger]

Yep! Let’s just not use it for a lot of explosions or a documentary on space flight. Things may…break 😛

Lots of good stuff here!

Every so often, I get in the mood to look into Earth heightmaps. Unfortunately, for the fifteen years or so of looking, I haven’t been able to find a good source.

[DeVaultSetter]

The War of the Worlds radio broadcast was a hoot! 🙂
You want the side-on section as opposed the top-down?
Have you checked out arcGIS, although things probably won’t work all that well without an account/subscription, same with Intermap
There’s also this elevation model, Tangrams looks interesting, but couldn’t extract much detail from the zoomed sections. Sorry not much else, this or this may contain something useful.
The Give Yourself Goosebumps series had branching endings in different parts of the book, funny it was never tried before – or was it?

[Spastic Hamburger]

Yep! Listened to it a few years ago and Welles’s has the perfect voice for the voice over.

My favorite on the list is where all the nuns started acting like cats 😛

No idea. Is there a difference in usage? That may be why I’ve had trouble looking. 😛

Ugh, ArcGIS is expensive!

Yeah, ideally, something cheap or free.

TessaDEM looks like an interesting project. Not sure of the logistics of using it as a heightmap though. Would need to do some more research. At almost 500 GB, it’s enormous! But requires special access permission to download 🙁

Thanks for the post on the USGS! One of the pages I found earlier didn’t allow downloading but that one does. Would need to do it piecemeal, though. Still, worth looking into once I learn more about heightmaps. No idea what my intention is, honestly. It started off ages ago as me wanting to possibly import the Earth into 0ad for fun but now I haven’t the slightest idea. But, still, could be fun to do something with!

Remember the Goosebumps books but never read them myself. At the point, I was reading old Hardy Boys books from the used bookstore. Very formulaic but I enjoyed them a lot and still read through them from time to time. The older ones are better before they rewrote the stories to shoehorn modern technology in them. Once they did that, things became a bit sillier and a lot more nonsensical

[DeVaultSetter]

Was thinking about the the CS, and CK where there’s a good 3D view on the terrain from any angle just about. 🙂
Don’t think I’ve attempted anything like a 500gb download, ever. They would have to split it wouldn’t they?
Another pat on the back for another Tripeaks trophy:

Funny, as the game froze early on and consequently lost around 1:20 – which might have been significant if LULU5796 had a better line of focus. Mind you, this is a fairly ordinary score, most of the speedy Gonzalezes come in at the late thirties – even early thirties for the challenge. There is yet some ground to cover!

[Spastic Hamburger]

I think the heightmaps need to be processed before they can be used in the tools for the Elderscrolls but I’m not entirely sure how that works. Can try to find out, though!

Not necessarily! In theory, archive formats support sizes of several exabytes. As for downloading speed, it’d be a pain on anything but a 1 Gbps fiber connection (would only take an hour there) but a download manager would help with that. Storage would also be an issue, as well as unpacking the archive. To work with it and to process all of the files, it’d probably take at least a workstation class system running Linux to do things efficiently. A lot of it depends on how their data is laid out

Excellent! I’ve gotten pretty good at minesweeper over here. Took a while to truly get the hang of it but it’s pretty enjoyable!

[Spastic Hamburger]

Sculptures With True Creativity (10 Photos)

These are wonderful! I do wish they provided locations for more on the list to help with sightseeing, though

[DeVaultSetter]

Absolutely, it links onto others as well, the Abstract Bronze Seated Figure is striking.
Good idea for our own gardens is something like the Oversized Paint Tube Garden Installation or the Wheelbarrow Farmer Sculpture. Equipped with defence mechanisms in case passersby become abusive. 😛
The Lamp Post with an Umbrella idea has excellent practical purposes for rain, sunshine and dark, the Book-Shaped Benches may not accommodate for every posture though.
No doubt Google Maps et al have all these marked as features of interest, extending the license on the descriptions to Galoshopoodle, Oarsome Highrise, The Building that won’t Zip Up etc.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Really like the floating rock sculpture. And if I had a yard, the tube would be a wonderful idea!

In Vermont, they have this filing cabinet. Quite a story, too!

[Spastic Hamburger]

Used books are fun. Each one has a history to it. Sometimes you’ll find little love notes in the margins. Other times you’ll find some notes regarding what 8 tracks someone planned to get while other times you get to see how popular they were in various libraries.

[Spastic Hamburger]

So I just came across this obscure piece of equipment: https://breadbot.com/

Pretty awesome and would be fun to watch in action but I’ve never seen one before! Not even in our tourist districts where you would expect to see them!

Speaking of, I haven’t played tourist in a while 😛

[DeVaultSetter]

Missed that! Place it on a rotating base and spin it around for a truly turnary file operation!
Do enjoy fruit loaves- can the bot do those? Muffins anyone?
Colossal Biosciences claim copyright on images of their creations apparently. Hopefully not artists’ impressions or even cartoonery – interestingly over here there’s Dodo which often runs ads showing an appropriate image as a logo. If CB sued them and Dodo lost, they would become extinct- thus their image should remain, no? 😛

[Spastic Hamburger]

Not sure how mix-ins would work but it does work with your custom recipes. Mix-ins might clog things up but they don’t give any mention of that so maybe they’ll be fine? In theory, it wouldn’t be hard to make a new piece of equipment that handles general baked goods based on that design. Cakes would be harder so that they don’t get too tough during beating but muffins, certainly!

Ironically, Crichton wrote a piece detailing the opposite views towards the patent system. The full essay is behind a paywall and is also featured in a later edition of Jurassic Park (which is where I read it) but this page has more of a blurb than the NYT preview: https://greghowley.com/269

It’s a pretty interesting read if you can get the full essay.

Ah, found it! Looks like the estate uploaded it to his website profile 🙂

And the wooly mice are adorable! Saw the original article a while back 🙂

I think it’s different as Colossal is an American company as opposed to Australian. While we do have agreements, I don’t think they can go after Dodo of Australia for that reason but I’m definitely not a trademark lawyer 😛

[DeVaultSetter]

Clog? Well then, a self cleaning unit, else a plugin or daisy chained robot with a vac and broom – wearing a toque blanche preferably. 🙂
Something like Clyde?

Just as our Admirable Crichton had seen on the final evolution of Mediasaurus, only the true visioneer would ever conceive of Social Mediasaurus, and we hope his estate has filed a patent request for the concept accordingly. He never did turn the torch to full blown comedy by tipping his hat to our beloved institutions and inventors with such titles as The Infirmary Patent, Low Patency, A Patently Patinated Portent of Patent Pending, The Andromeda Patent Brain Strain Drain – need we go on?

[Spastic Hamburger]

I miss CLYDE! Only saw a little bit of it at the time. I wonder if there’s a CLYDE figurine somewhere…

Anyways! Depending on the design, it may be possible to run a snake through the works to clean things out. Would need to see it in person, though. From the research I did, it doesn’t appear that Florida has any yet 🙁

Yeah, Crichton’s works were much more serious than, say, John Scalzi’s works (which I highly recommend) are. He mostly keeps his cracks in his forwards but I do enjoy his books. The Andromeda Strain was a weak one but it was also one of his earliest.

I know I’ve mentioned this before but we really should bring back airships for shipping, at the bare minimum. As they’re in the sky, we can build them to immense size and then offload the goods by way of conveyors and the like. There are a lot of benefits to such a system, even if travel time is much slower than more traditional methods

[DeVaultSetter]

What’s your favourite Scalzi title? Here’s a quote attributed from Scalzi:

I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have inside your head,

Sounds like a retort in haste – he’ll probably deny ownership. The version template of Scalzi in his own mind must have a set of immutable characteristics translatable to the mind of another (preferably non-schizoidal specific) individual. One assumes it’s the imaginary actions of this imaginary version of himself in focus. Could there indeed be more than one version of him inside our heads – including one real, and another imaginary? Are both versions capable of real and imaginary actions? And can we infer from the quote that he is happy to claim full liability for any actions by the real version of him inside our heads?
Airships are a super idea – have the advances in technology since their heyday capable of making a difference in their safety I wonder?
What We Can Know is on the list here – will a future 100 years hence be as he describes?
The mysteries of Brood parasitism are manifold and complex – for instance the time the hatchlings leave the nest before the hosts detect the hijack.

[Spastic Hamburger]

As much as I like Redshirts, it’s probably Starter Villain. While it’s a James Bond parody on the surface, it runs much deeper than that.

It may be, too, that he’s referring to the trend in school where instructors insist that you over analyze works and everyone comes up with something totally different. He’s got some other good quotes, too!

Materials science has a come a long way in ninety years. For instance, we now have Kevlar which could help keep the balloons from ripping and is also incredibly lightweight.

We really don’t have enough books that go over futuristic anthropology. It’s such an interesting idea, too. 🙁

One of the science fiction stories I’m currently reading is actually about how extraterrestrial cuckoos play dumb to take over a space station. It’s a pretty fun read. It blends pop culture, a murder mystery, and humor altogether.

Been looking into sand batteries this morning: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/21/making-a-do-it-yourself-sand-battery/

They’re using them on a much larger scale, too. Or at least experimenting with it. In theory, they can be used to store excess capacity to generate electricity later. There would still need to be voltage regulation, though, as they work differently from traditional batteries in that they store thermal energy instead of electrical energy.

[Spastic Hamburger]

On Spastic Hamburger said

I think the heightmaps need to be processed before they can be used in the tools for the Elderscrolls but I’m not entirely sure how that works. Can try to find out, though!

Not necessarily! In theory, archive formats support sizes of several exabytes. As for downloading speed, it’d be a pain on anything but a 1 Gbps fiber connection (would only take an hour there) but a download manager would help with that. Storage would also be an issue, as well as unpacking the archive. To work with it and to process all of the files, it’d probably take at least a workstation class system running Linux to do things efficiently. A lot of it depends on how their data is laid out

Excellent! I’ve gotten pretty good at minesweeper over here. Took a while to truly get the hang of it but it’s pretty enjoyable!

Here’s another source: https://opentopography.org/

It’s not fully global, though. Some of the access requires a subscription, too.

[DeVaultSetter]

There’s a good list of energy storage power plants here.
Because of copyright considerations, cross linking on The Atomic Cafe to Wikipedia talk regarding the appearance and location of the original cafe.

The_Atomic_Cafe movie courtesy of Youtube has the above shot of the vertical sign here, which appears similar to the sign on the Downtown Deco The Atomic Cafe DD56 Hydrocal Kit found at resellers like ebay and Amazon. Downtown Deco may indeed have the original image, along with the details of date and location, it may not be available in the public domain for some copyright arrangement, who knows?

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by DeVaultSetter.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Good list! Yep, many of the sites are definitely recent. I do notice that they leave off artificial lakes that store power for hydropower plants.

Found it! I see that that kit comes in O-scale. Model trains, anyone? Still want to get into the hobby, just don’t know where I’d put the table! 😛

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