Doom and Gloom

Bring Out Your Dead - Monty Python And The Holy Grail. Remastered [HD]
The Channel That Can't Take Anything Seriously
The news seems to be all bad, all the time. Count your blessings cupcake, things could be much worse. From page 200 of The Verge:

I knew the plague killed a bunch of people during the middle ages, and I sort of knew there was a period when the weather was considerably colder for a while, but I didn't realize they happened at the same time.

But around 1500 things started picking up, people got a handle on what you could do with money and the printing press appeared. Things started changing, and the changes became ever more rapid. Two hundred years later, a watchmaker in London is lamenting that he gave up the trade because he got tired of keeping up with all the technical advances being made in his trade.

Update May 2024 replaced missing video.

Fun With Roman Numerals

How Roman numerals broke the official dog database.
Stand-up Maths
I enjoy this guy, Matt Parker. This is a pretty silly video, but fun. I mean, who knew Roman Numerals could be so amusing?

Vichy France

Napoleon III Celebration in Vichy France
300 piece jigsaw puzzle

This was one of the hardest puzzles I've worked recently. On top of having 300 pieces, the pieces were all randomly rotated, so it took me a while. I was feeling a little under the weather yesterday, not up for doing much of anything productive, so a jigsaw puzzle was just my speed.

These people must be having a real good time, you'll notice that they are all floating on air. The photo was taken at the annual Napoleon III celebration in Vichy, France. Napoleon I (Bonaparte) was the one who put an end to the French Revolution and then attempted to conquer Europe and got his butt kicked by the Brits at Waterloo. Napoleon III was his nephew and lived like 50 years later. He managed to get France moving in a positive direction, but then he got the war bug and ended up getting his butt kicked by the Prussians at Sedan.

Never knew there was an actual town named Vichy, I just knew it as the portion of France that the Nazis didn't bother to actual conquer, they just put it under control of a puppet government.

Half Alive - Still Feel

half•alive - still feel. [OFFICIAL VIDEO]
half•alive
I dunno about the tune, it's okay I guess, but the choreography is amusing. It's not spectacular like you might get from professional dancers, but it's clever in a geometric kind of way, clever enough to rate posting here.

Kruzenshtern - Russian Sailing Ship

Kruzenshtern - Russian Sailing Ship
120 piece jigsaw puzzle

Never heard of Russian sailing vessels, at least not since I read about Peter the Great's exploits in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, so I was a little curious. Turns out it's actually a German ship that was turned over to Russia at the end of WW2. The Russians use it as a training vessel. This is second post about sailing ships used as training vessels in less that a week.

FM Audio

Turning Sound Into a Laser
CodeParade
FM - Frequency Modulation - usually refers to radio's technique for encoding an audible signal within a radio signal, but here Mr. Parade is mixing an audible signal with an ultrasonic sound wave. The results are unexpected. You don't want to turn the volume of the ultrasonic signal up too high, it can give you a headache. Reminds me of the SAW - Surface Acoustic Wave - Filters which are also weird in a somewhat similar way.

There Be Dragons

A view of Mariupol as war in Ukraine rages, on April 9, 2022 [Leon Klein/ Anadolu Agency]

That's odd, an apparently untouched sculpture of a Chinese dragon in a scruffy looking street in Mariupol, Ukraine. I was going to say a bombed out street, but looking a little closer at the image the only damage seems to be the trash lying on the ground and the fallen tree branch.

But it's a Chinese dragon. The East and the West seem to have very different versions of what a dragon should look like. The Chinese seem to prefer a snake-like body with a couple of tiny arms, while the West seems to prefer one that is structured more like a horse or bear, but with scales and wings. Some people think stories of dragons come from far away encounters with crocodiles.

A statue of Zmey-Gorinich in Lipetsk region, Russia

There's a more Western model a couple of hundred miles northeast in a family theme park. MY MODERN MET has a page devoted to this concrete monster.

Kudykina Gora theme park is about 350 miles north of Mariupol

A-10 Warthog

I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.