Friday, October 30, 2026
10 Short Videos #6301
- Toilet Roll Shrinkflation
- Everyone is "cheating" (part 3) - F1
- World Land Speed Record Cars (1898–2026)
- This octopus outsmarted me in the worst way possible
- Why the V8 RC Truck is REAL
- be careful in texas
- Why The Wright Brothers Didn't Build The First Airplane
- Bambu X2D - Spherical Flexure Joint - Stabilized Pointer
- With a head that big, what kind of dreams must he have when he sleeps? - Whales
- Super Beautiful Disco Ball Manufacturing Process in Korean factory
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Cheap Isotopes
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| Nuclide chart, via link. |
Construction Physics has a longish post about nuclear isotopes:
A New Kind of Chemistry by Brian Potter
He starts with an explanation of basic chemistry and leads into making nuclear isotopes. It seems making isotopes is expensive, but since there seems to be an insatiable demand, the whiz-kids are thinking up new and cheaper ways to make them:
One way to do this is with nuclear fusion. Much has been made about the difficulties of creating a fusion power plant, but fusion has always been a problem of efficiency: getting more energy out of your reaction than you put into it. Creating the fusion reaction in the first place has never been the issue, and fusion reactions have been created in the lab as far back as the 1930s. And these fusion reactions reliably produce high-energy neutrons. While fission can produce high-energy neutrons, only around 0.1% of them will be above 10 MeV. By contrast, neutrons produced when fusing hydrogen-2 (deuterium) and hydrogen-3 (tritium) are 14 MeV or more. Fusion has historically not been used to produce isotopes, but today a variety of startups and organizations are pursuing the idea. SHINE Technologies is currently building a facility, Chrysalis, to create Mo-99 via a complex process that requires a particle accelerator, a fission reaction, and a fusion reaction. Italy’s SORGENTINA-RF program similarly wants to create Mo-99 using fusion-generated neutrons. Marathon Fusion wants to use fusion neutrons to create a variety of different isotopes, such as terbium-149 and actinium-225 for cancer treatments, as does New Zealand fusion startup OpenStar.
The final section looks at the possibilities cheaper isotopes might enable.
Pic of the Day
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| The Statue of Liberty National Monument stands on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. The industrial cranes in the distance belong to port facilities across the water in New Jersey. |
Picture came in on my newsreader on a story from Valdai Discussion Club, but it does not appear on the Valdai website, so nobody gets credit.
The Devils - Fox Tower Theater Movie
The Devils (1971) | Modern Trailer
Mackenzie Parker
Not an enthralling movie. It's basically a real life horror story from France in the middle ages.
It's 1634 and Cardinal Richelieu wants to unify the nation and the church, to that end he wants the walls about Loudon torn down so no Protestant rebellions can hide behind them. Grandier, a Catholic priest and local big cheese, opposes this. Richelieu sends his minions. They hear about the visions (erotic dreams) the abbess has been having and conclude she needs an exorcist, so Laubardemont brings in Philip Barre. The exorcism, basically interrogation / torture, leads them to conclude she is possessed by devils, and this possession is the work of Grandier, which leads to his interrogation / torture, trial and brutal execution.
When Barre appears it is a bit of a shock. With his long blond hair and round lensed eyeglasses he looks like a modern day, or at least a 70's era, rock star. Totally incongruous when everyone around him has dark hair.
And oh yeah, the Black Plague has reappeared in Loudon and we have men pushing carts around town collecting bodies (bring out your dead) and dumping them in a pit. Just so you know where and when we are.
I sometimes wonder why women would become nuns. The Abbess answers this question while speaking to Madeline:
Most of the nuns here are noble women who have embraced the monastic life because there was not enough money at home to provide them with dowries. Or they were unmarriageable because ugly, a burden to the family. Communities which ought to be furnaces where souls are forever on fire with the love of God are merely dead with the grey ashes of convenience. Here is a book written by the founder of our order, Angela Merici. When you've studied it, come back and I shall question you.
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| Flintlock pistol with iron stock |
Looking for information about the pistol used in the movie, I found this one. It looks very similar, but no information about whether it was used in the movie. The website where I found it offers this flowery description, but no real information like where it came from or who it belonged to.
Description from europeana:
All-iron flintlock pistol; part of a pair. The locking mechanism is located entirely on the outside; the pan and spring are concealed behind a housing engraved with a blossom branch. The three upper faces of the barrel are engraved with tulips on the rear. The stock consists only of an iron grip that forms an extension of the barrel; the grip is deeply incised with two pairs of oblique lines that intersect, and with two blossom branches at the bottom; the buttock is decorated with a pattern of radiating ribs. The iron fittings consist of three knob-shaped eyelets soldered to the barrel as ramrod sleeves, and a flat trigger guard engraved with a rose; the ramrod is made of steel.
The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971) Making of Documentary
Journey To The Center Of The Cinema
This video has some explanation of the story.
Dementia
Hannah Fry on The Nun Study
The Royal Institution
I sent this video to my cohorts and Uniberp replied:
So do I need to go on endlessly, prattling about all my dreams and aspirations and plans and ideas and thoughts and prayers and wishes and more dreams and how I really planned on proving the worth of the work I did on that 60 year old Volvo by driving it across the country, over the mountains, in order to reach a more lucrative market, work that most recently included replacing one of the front trailing arm bushings, which I did without disassembling the entire side of the suspension and using a clever bit of levering including wedging the bushing into place using parallel putty knives and a sort of gravity assist forcing of the arm into position, all in order to eliminate a clunk when leaving a stoplight, which it did and now does not do, thus corrected, although the plan to drive it across the country is now all but consigned to ridiculous notions?
Like that?
The connection between the video and Uniberp's response might be tenuous, but there is one.
Techno Trousers
Wallace & Gromit The Wrong Trousers (1994 UK)
INTERNET ARCHIVE
Bayou Renaissance Man is having back problems, like most every old person, and he's wondering if an exoskeleton might help. Then Phil B comments with a link to the above video and I spent a lovely half hour revisiting Wallace & Gromit.
Lightweight and accesible! Chinese exoskeletons shine at CES 2026
ShanghaiEye魔都眼
Previous posts about exoskeletons. Some of them are pretty old.
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