Pergelator

Sunday, April 12, 2026

10 Short Videos #6100

10 Short Videos #60100

NASA's Coffee Cup That Doesn't Spill In Zero Gravity

The Mighty Ural-5920: A Soviet Snow and Swamp Conqueror

Extreme Poor Man’s Process Shot

it's called pykrete

This 787 Dreamliner only flew for 13 hours. We found it being demolished.

He was late for work

Eşeğin Genetiğine Bakılmalı [The Donkey's Genetics Should Be Examined]

Can something go faster than it’s pushed?

Are you ready for this service ? Uber fancy jetski / car-boat.

70,000 LITRES OF PROOF [paint]

Saturday, April 11, 2026

The Night Agent: Season 3 - Netflix Series

The Night Agent: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

I knew we watched the previous seasons and I sort of remember thinking it was okay. After all, looking at the Episodes on Netflix, it shows that we watched both seasons, but it's been a year so my memory was a little hazy. Should have read my blog posts about Season 1 and Season 2. It's dumb, dumb, dumb. I don't know if it's any worse than the first two seasons, but it certainly isn't any better. But my better half is enjoying it and there is a fair amount of action, so it's tolerable.

Dinosaur

Spotted at Costco

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton

1958 The first prototype ammonia maser in front of its inventor Charles H. Townes. The ammonia nozzle is at left in the box, the four brass rods at center are the quadrupole state selector, and the resonant cavity is at right. The 24 GHz microwaves exit through the vertical waveguide Townes is adjusting. At bottom are the vacuum pumps.

This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.

I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.

The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.

Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:

"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Algeria
Blue are mentioned in the book. Purple are old fortresses.

I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.

Notes:

Chapter 1 Page 1 Adrar Algeria
Chapter 3

GAZ-69

Page 13 GAZ 59A Russian four-wheel drive field car does not exist so we have GAZ-69
Page 16 Dornier Skyservant

Desert Tour in a VW Bus

Page 17 bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours

Chapter 4

Page 19 Washington Square New York University

Fats Waller plays Alligator Crawl (piano solo, 1935)
gullivior

Page 23 Alligator Crawl

Chinoiserie

Page 23 "it was all chinoiserie and high camp, with lanterns and gold-plated Buddhas"

Chapter 6

Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2
The Wicked North

page 43 Shostakovich. Soviet composer and pianist.

Pulsar P3 - When a Digital Watch cost more than a Rolex - 1970s LEDs
Techmoan

Page 49 Pulsar wrist watch

Blazar CTA 102

Page 52 Quasar CTA-102,
Page 52 1924 Society - There are a bunch of 1924 Societies, but no UFO related ones. However, 1924 is the year Edwin Hubble proved there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way. Gawd, why do we have such a pansy ass name for our galaxy? Shouldn't it be something like 'The God King Galaxy', but in Latin so it's impressive.