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| Nick and the boys going fishing |
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole [Official Music Video]
Muse
I like the tune, the video is odd. It's 19 years old. Never heard it before.
10 Short Videos #6302
- K9 Parachute Jump From a CH-47F Chinook — Loyalty at 10,000 Feet
- Now I’m convinced it has a very strong paternal instinct - Darwin's Rhea
- The Most Unbelievable Coincidence in Baseball History..... - Brady Feigl
- This Winter Sport Looks Like an Absolute Blast 🐴🎿 - Horse pulls skier
- The Duke’s swing had Kevin Kisner in shock - Golf
- Is that a grenade??? - open cockpit, homemade airplane
- 🦌🦁 - deer escapes leopard
- WD40 Flosser
- What if you dropped 10kg of tungsten from space?
- Security asked for my badge. I showed them my knees. 🕺
Friday, October 30, 2026
The Diplomat: Season 4 - Netflix Series
The Diplomat: Season 4 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Episode 1 starts with a motorcade carrying the American President and Vice-President (Hal) being diverted to Windsor Castle because of protests at the airport. They hang out for an hour or so and just as they are loading back into the cars the President gets shot. This might be the most secure place on the planet being as the place is surrounded with high walls and is swarming with police, secret service and soldiers. So getting shot here should be impossible, but it happened. The President gets airlifted to a nearby American aircraft carrier where a surgeon repairs the damage. Meanwhile the manhunt for the shooter goes on.
Sounds like an inside job, the stop at Windsor Castle was a last minute deal, unless the protest was designed to force a delay and someone who was in on the plot managed to get the motorcade diverted to the castle where the assassin was waiting. Terrible assassin. There was one shot from a suppressed firearm and they didn't kill the President, they only wounded her.
Windsor Castle is impressive. Wikipedia has a fine collection of pictures.
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| Windsor Castle - Google Earth |
You might consider President Grace Penn (a woman) as a stand in for President Trump. They are both blond, they both get shot, and once Grace gets shot she becomes blunter, more confrontational, and according to all the career diplomats, more erratic. If you like her style, which I do, you might be a Trump supporter. Weasel words don't impress me. Say what you mean and follow through on what you said. In any case, they all spend all their time swaning around all the fanciest places in Europe, places where mere peasants are not allowed. Everybody thinks they are important, but they can never come to an agreement to do anything useful. The just issue statements and pray. Useless bunch of twits.
On the plus side, all the petty bickering can be pretty entertaining. I laughed out loud many times over the eight episodes.
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.
10 Short Videos #6300
- Rate my landing. 👨✈️👩✈️ Number 3 is my best, what’s yours. - Waterfowl
- Why Hot Air From This Fighter's Belly Pushes It Forward | P-51 Mustang
- WHAT I FOUND IN THE INTERNET - Telescopic 3D print
- 3:2 pulldown vs speed up for conforming film frame rates for TV - Cleverly done
- Diabolical and too much time on ya hands - Smoking forklift
- Why This Plane Drags a 5-Mile Wire Behind It - VLF
- Technically not cheating... - F1 carbon fiber flexing
- This trench is not a landfill. It holds reactors from 130+ warships.
- So startet ein Profi einen Lanz Bulldog - Old tractor
- China inflates its first 10,000-tonne grain silo in Jilin
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Blocks
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| 6 pieces, 3 pairs with mirror symmetry |
Last week Dennis and I were talking about a Matt Parker video about folding paper shapes into different size boxes (video at the end). Dennis went home and dug through his archive and found this set of puzzle blocks that can be assembled into three different boxes. He brought his blocks to lunch yesterday. The idea here is that these six pieces can be assembled into a rectangular block three different ways.
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| Left and right hand pieces assembled into similar shapes |
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| Assembled into a 3 x 4 x 5 Block |
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| Assembled into a 3 x 5 x 4 Block |
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| Do it wrong and you get a block with missing diagonal corners |
The Matt Parker video:
Can the Same Net Fold into Two Shapes?
Stand-up Maths
Lackey Meet Lickspittle
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| Terry's Backyard, maybe |
An excerpt from a post on New Notes from a Commonplace Book by Terry Cowan. It's quite lovely:
I recently condescended to read a recommended story from the Atlantic, a magazine I avoid. The piece was a conversation between two writers I also do no follow, Jeffrey Goldberg and David Brooks, in which they reminisce about their lifetime of writing about politics. They are old friends, and the former is now, technically, the boss of the latter. If you are wondering exactly what it is you are supposed to believe, then the Atlantic is your go-to magazine. There is no better conveyor of the conventional wisdom. In that regard, I’ve recently learned that there are actually 57 shades of beige. To that list you could add Goldberg and Brooks, I would think.
In reading through their conversation, it is hard not to come away with the sense that they both realize that their life’s work–fun, fascinating and monetarily remunerative–was in the end, something of a waste. They bemoan the over-politicization of our culture, noting the pitfalls of transforming politics into a religion, as opposed, say, to having a real religion. Goldberg and Brooks rightly note that while politics knows how to define and draw lines, it has no mechanism for compassion and humanity; all judgment, no mercy.
That all sounds well and good, but then as example, they use a primary election in my state, where they conclude voters applied the “partisanship lens” instead of the “character frame.” In this case, Goldberg and Brooks define a person who has character as one who holds to their articulation of the received conventional wisdom. Someone like myself, outside this bubble, looked at these candidates, and strained to detect overt signs of character in either one; lackey meet lickspittal.
Politics is all noise and froth. Our biggest problem is continuing rampant inflation, the biggest driver of that is the outsized cost of taking care of old people like me. Social Security and Medicare together consume roughly two-thirds of the total U.S. federal budget and nobody seems to have any idea how to tackle this problem.
Bonus: footnote from Terry's post:
Back in the 1970s, a Texas political figure, at the time chief counsel for Common Cause, lifted the phrase “lackeys and lickspittals” from an old English speech and, in a fiery oration, flung it at Texas legislators who had just shot down their bill. To be so characterized ruffled the feathers of our own State Senator to the point that he sought to have the attorney’s girlfriend (later wife) fired from her lobbyist job. This, in turn, earned him a “Bum Steer Award” from Texas Monthly magazine. (My memory recently refreshed on this from the aforesaid lobbyist herself).
10 Short Videos #6299
- A Brush With Death - Chris Boden
- Ty Murray Admits to Bulldogging a Wild Elk - PBR Professional Bullriders
- Little bit of boxing history.
- Australia's First “Portable” Phones Cost $5,000
- This is the funniest clip I’ve ever seen - Homework
- Don’t mess with seniors
- They ACHIEVED the Flow State
- No screws, no glue—just seconds of heat: How does it hold tons of cutting force? - CNC Machining
- The Secret that made McLaren Fastest in 2025 (Part 3)
- GALILEO'S RING II - Patterns with 120 degrees symmetry
Vote As If Your Toilet Paper Depended On It
Stolen entire from MOTUS A. D.
A pre-midterm reminder of how socialism actually works, compliments of Venezuela. It didn’t happen overnight but just as Reagan warned, it did happen in one generation.
2,600,000 bolivars
14,000,000 bolivars for a chicken
History will repeat itself if it’s ignored.
VENEZUELA: how one of the richest nations on Earth collapsed in one generation
1992: Venezuela is the 3rd richest country in the Western Hemisphere, powered by oil and a growing middle class.
1997: Venezuelans become the 2nd largest buyers of Ford F-150s—a sign of widespread prosperity.
1998: Hugo Chávez is elected, promising to “redistribute wealth” and fix inequality.
2001: The country votes again for socialism, framed as compassion and fairness.
2003: The government imposes price controls and currency controls. Black markets appear. Shortages begin.
2004: Private healthcare is fully socialized.
2006: Inflation rises sharply as massive welfare programs expand without real economic backing.
2007: All education becomes “free.”
2008: Key industries—oil services, steel, cement, telecom—are nationalized. Production drops almost immediately.
2009: Private gun ownership is banned.
2010: The currency is devalued by 50%, crushing savings and accelerating inflation.
2011: Oil production begins a steady decline due to mismanagement and lack of investment.
2012: American politicians, like Bernie Sanders, publicly praise Venezuela’s model.
2013: Chávez dies. Nicolás Maduro takes power and tightens state control.
2014: Opposition leaders are arrested or silenced.
2015: GDP collapses. Hyperinflation begins.
2016: Severe food and medical shortages spread nationwide.
2017: The constitution is suspended. Elections are no longer meaningful.
2018: Inflation exceeds 1,000,000%. Maduro “wins” a widely fraudulent election.
2019: Unarmed civilians are killed by their own government.
2020: More than 8 million people flee the country to escape hunger and repression.
2023: Minor economic improvements fail to relieve mass poverty.
2024: Disputed elections trigger protests and global isolation.
2026: Maduro is removed by force. Venezuela is liberated after decades of ruin.
History shows that you can only escape socialism by collapse, violence, or foreign intervention.
Ask yourself: if America falls to socialism who will come to save us? Vote accordingly.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
10 Short Videos #6298
- Amazing Robotic Automation Technology! Manufacturing Process of Wooden House
- Milligram Analytical Scale - Chris Boden
- This invention just won 2026 Nobel Prize for keeping Teams status online 😍
- Volcano POV, No Looking Away | DJI O4 Air Unit Pro
- Why One Ohio AI Data Center Needs a 9.2-Gigawatt Gas Plant
- DIY Sarcastic Smart Door Lock Automaton
- Married life is like..... | Nate Bargatze
- Martinator on the edge at Turn 5 in Barcelona (again) 🦾 - Motorcycle racing
- POV it's your 1st day as a welder
- The whole world agreed on a paper size, except America - Paper Sizes
P. S. Blogger, oh Blogger, how I do love thee, except when you erase the scheduled time because I reopened this post to copy the title for the next post. Except it doesn't always do that. All hail oh mighty Blogger.
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