DDE

Korona SSTO has been making rounds in the press again. I find it alarming that it's still a thing alongside Amur-SPG (Falcon-Methanski) and is getting more and more official endorsement. The last thing Roscosmos needs on their plate is a Korolev-Chelomei situation, but instead they're just throwing more and more things at the wall (Angara, Soyuz-5, Bartini's Krylo, even Don/Yenisei SHLV is still making noises).

During the closing days of WWI, the Germans developed the B-1E Elektronbrandbombe, a 1 kg incendiary bomb with a thermite payload in a casing of an aluminum-magnesium alloy known as Elektron. It was the predominant Luftwaffe incendiary in WWII, leading to many raised eyebrows as contemporary materials keep referring to "electron(ic) bombs".

Ah, a six-day work week due to upcoming Labor Day. I only learnt about it on Monday. It's a barrier that never goes away. Frankly, I think the bigger problem is the pathologization of any eccentricity. You're expected to be "quirky" in ways that are seemingly harmless (and easily commoditized), but that genuine strangeness is actually a lot more dangerous and untolerated in this ultra-connected, hyper-socialized world than it used to be. It has become an impairment. Although I do sense there used to be a pretty severe asymmetry of tolerance based on the sex (will this get censored?) of the individual, guess we achieved equality of discrimination. I can't promise it will get better. Maybe take a gap year while you can, because afterwards HR will look at you funny for having a hole in your resume. Then months will start to fly past like days, and you'll be headed to an early midlife crisis, just like me. ****...

As someone who experienced the lockdown in a city of twenty million... you will quickly find people not wanting to ever be in a crowd. Intsead, they could likely succumb to parasocial relationships...

Rebel Moon's premise belongs here. An interstellar-capable empire bullies peasants to give up grain.

Bunch of mission patches https://t.me/fotozak/6529

Don't forget "pharmacological cash cow" in case with ADHD. It's the reason why I'm really skeptical of its prevalence, much less so with autism where the pharmacological remedies seem non-existent and misdiagnosis is nowhere near as likely.

What if they were told it was perfectly safe?

I know the feeling. Last week I found a non-material typo in the heading of a report we've worked on for a year. Cringe.

Hm. I wonder whether this affects the ultrarich more or less. Without research, the feel I get is decidedly ambivalent - there's this one billionaire playboy philanthropist that's sired almost a dozen, but one anecdote doesn't indicate whether they buck the trend or not - and then there's their tendency to live for themselves, children be damned. Maybe the Moon can have highly preferential divorce legislation...

Sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sections? Well, here I was scared of sub-sub-sub-sub-sections in Russia's rendition of the Basel III standard.

"What if Jaws and Saw had a crossover?" - evolution, 270 mln years ago At the turn of the previous century, a rather unusual Permian-era fossil was spotted by an ethnographer Alexander Bessonov in the literal town of Perm and referred to Alexander Karpinsky It was quickly concluded that these are teeth, shark teeth to be specific (although the various early sharks have been further broken down and this is now deemed closer to a ratfish). The "teeth whorl" and its owner were dubbed Helicoprion bessonowi, and an elephant in the room remained: where did this thing go on the animal? Not pictured is one tentative suggestion that this thing was rotary. And yes, Karpinsky did end up sticking it on every imaginable part of the beast. The latest view by the guys interviewed a decade ago by NatGeo suggested a single file of teeth on the lower jaw, growing from the mouth outwards, and with the jaw closing they would very much perform a buzzsaw motion. Edit: ah, found the artist's webtsite. Perfect.

Mudskippers are evolution's gift to evolutionary biologists. They're basically Amphibia, take two, a form of fish that have developed adaptations for an almost entirely terrestrial lifestyle (their gills are mostly non-functional), but completely independent from the original amphibians, and using very different solutions. These solutions allow them to be a lot faster than our tetrapod ancestors, which is important because they're not nearly as alone on land as they were.

Oh, wait until I fetch you US's first UCAV. Same energy

Until individual tank ECM and micro-flak are perfected, nerds are going to be subjected to aesthetic suffering That thing looks like solid sheet metal, not nets

Shower thought: the Halo franchise has plenty of AIs, but there's not even a whiff of humanoid robotics - only incorporeal avatars. In fact, UNSC seems to have more "smart" AIs than they have Spartan-IIs, and they have no trouble putting the AIs in charge of extremely powerful armaments. At the same time, their power armor tech suggests a pretty extreme level of robotics-adjacent technology. So why bother with the ethically dubious Spartans at all when you can build AI-driven Myrmidons? It's particularly laughable in hindsight, when you know that the later armor variants are able to accomodate both the wearer and the AI melded with their mind. Why even bother when you can have an extra set of metal hands? Morning edit: to clarify, I don't even mean "human-passing" androids. When UNSC committed to superhumanly tall - never mind socially stunted due to abnormal upbringing - Spartans and power armor tech, they gave up on blending in with humans for infiltration purposes.

Well, by that definition, we get to Rutland of Jutland

Meanwhile, we had to consider whether we needed to move the middle cat back to town about 40 miles away because he wouldn't let his claws get trimmed...

My father apparently had something of roughly this category rigged into one of his first, late Soviet cars, alongside a loudspeaker under the hood (an Oka had a lot of space under the bonnet next to the anemic engine). Then of course there's this classic.

I realized there's one thing that's particularly endearing even over CoD2 - the loading screens. CoD2 started to style them like diary entries, whereas CoD1... And for the D-Day missions, entire obsolete sections are crossed out and replaced with hand scribbles.

And smoke. An immediate thought is that this would make aircraft devastatingly effective unless one combatant had VT fuses. Main gun fire would usually sweep away or kill anyone manning the open anti-air mounts.

How to taunt a cat owner: (not mine, because some people got confused in the past)

Meanwhile, I'm playing Call of Duty. And I mean the one that didn't have a number to hide.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/eye-injuries-solar-eclipse-surge-following-phenomenon Speaking of staring at the sun...