dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

Matthew 24:36.

RTFM, noob.

The game was, you’d put one kid in the middle and then everybody else would do their level best to spin the damn thing so fast it would either drill into the Earth’s mantle or take off like a helicopter.

That’s because on some ranges the drawer is a dedicated warming drawer, with its own heating element and independent temperature control from the oven. But some people see that once and then assume every range in the world is like that, but they aren’t. The feature appears to have been more common historically than it is now, as well.

Gas ovens pretty much exclusively these days, and that’s a cost cutting thing for anyone wondering. On cheap models, the manufacturer uses the same burner for both broiling and baking so they don’t have to pony up to include two separate burners, valves, and igniters. In broil “mode,” you just put the food item immediately below the burner in the drawer so it’s much closer to the source of the heat which is now also conveniently above it rather than below it.

My grandfather never really used his oven for anything, only the stovetop, so he stored boxes of cereal in his oven. You know, cardboard ones.

But when he hosted for the holidays, other people would show up and use the oven… We figured that out PDQ, but not before at least one box of cereal went up in flames.

As Dave Barry famously observed, the box a Water Pik comes in bears the warning, “Do not use while sleeping.”

Guns already have lengthy safety warnings etched into them. Unfortunately, there definitely isn’t enough space to describe every moronic thing people could do with them.

It did. That may have influenced the naming convention. The LaserDisc was actually originally conceived as the “DiscoVision.” And if that name isn’t a veritable time capsule of its era, I don’t know what is.

“-Ette” is a common diminutive used to imply that something is a smaller version of something else. Like many things, we nicked it from the French.

Cigarette, a little cigar. Featurette, a short feature. Novelette, a miniature novel. Etc.

So, diskette, a little disk. Quite separate from the ones spinning in your company’s mainframe at the time. Those ones were two feet in diameter locked in a steel cabinet that weighs two tons. This one can fit in your shirt pocket. You get the idea.

But they’re still referred to as “drives” when arguably they aren’t that anymore, either. It’s really tough to ditch a moniker sometimes.

At its root this was originally a British vs. American English thing. However, the spelling of “disc” with a C has been used specifically as the trade name of various brands including both the throwable and optical media varieties, which have since become genericized trademarks.

For the optical media side of things, the name was coined by Phillips while they were consorting with Sony to develop the standard and named it the “Compact Disc” to compliment their already existing “Compact Cassette” product. They developed an official logo for the format which spelled it “disc.” That’s been with us ever since.

Volumes of computer storage are now colloquially referred to as “disks” because A) a significant majority of the early computer development milieu in general happened in America where we, or at least IBM, spell it with a K, and B) for a very long time, that’s exactly what they were. Tape and magnetic core memory and wire loop memory were all early developments that ultimately gave way to the longstanding popularity of magnetic platter/disk fixed storage… With some exception granted to tape, which hung around for a very long time but definitely was not a random access storage medium suitable for general purpose applications whereas disks were. It’s probably pure happenstance that the dominant non-fixed computer storage media also wound up being disk shaped, namely the various sizes and types of floppy disks. Computers handle linear tape based storage and random access disk based storage very differently, and nowadays random access permanent storage still has the “disk” moniker stuck to it even though it’s now likely to be solid state.

As a generalized descriptor of a flat circular object, either “disk” or “disc” is appropriate but which is preferred seems to be largely depending on which continent you’re from. The root of the word is indeed the Greek “discus,” as in the object yeeted across the playing field by Olympic contestants.

Granted, but if moonlight level is all you want I can already illuminate my surroundings to that benchmark with the flashlight in my pocket. We don’t need to park shit in space to accomplish that. And as a matter of fact, we already tried the “illuminate the entire town like the moon” model in the past as well. It turned out that even on a terrestrial scale it wasn’t actually a great idea because, you know, people in the vicinity who want to maybe turn it off… can’t. (Except in the latter case, maybe with the aid of a rifle.)

I am positive this is just an investor scam of some kind. If anyone is actually stupid enough to launch anything towards this end, it’s a mathematical certainty that they will be murdered in the street by either an amateur astronomer or a chiropterologist. It’ll be a toss-up who gets to him first.

This right here. Never mind the dystopian Mr. Burns style subscription based sunlight control bullshit that’s inherent to the very idea. That’s just to sucker in the investors who won’t know any better. Not enough people are talking about this.

I guess they could try to put the thing into some kind of geosynchronous orbit, but essentially the surface area of their mirrors will have to be equivalent to the area on the ground they plan to illuminate in order to achieve “sunlight” levels of illumination. There’s no way around that. So motherfuckers are going to start spouting off about “parabolic dishes” and “lenses” and shit any minute now. This is a red herring. No amount of optics can overcome the fact that the amount of light you can reflect will never be more than the amount of light that hits the mirror. Period. You cannot, now or ever, defy the laws of physics.

The International Space Station is basically the biggest thing we’ve ever managed to permanently put into orbit, yeah? And you can barely see it with the naked eye in the night sky, let alone measure any meaningful amount of light reflected off of it hitting any square inch of ground anywhere, with any instrument you can come up with. And it’s covered in reflective shit already – in fact, most manmade orbital objects are, in order to prevent the direct sunlight baking the fuck out of them in the vacuum of space where they can’t rely on the atmosphere to carry the heat away.

At best, even if they manage to deploy a massive Mylar foldable mirror in orbit that’s hundreds of feet across, they’re only going to be able to light up a small patch of dirt like wussy old moonlight, and even then they’ll only be able to do it in one place. Adding more targets will by necessity divide the light output in a linear fashion even if they somehow make it work like a huge DLP mirror array.

This simply can’t work.

As your attorney I advise you to buy a Hayabusa. It’s the only way.

Quite a few cities in the Northeast are designed this way, because they were done so in the 1950’ swith the intent of highway traffic doing 40, maybe 45 MPH through town at maximum. To conserve expensive urban land, they have short ramps and merge areas that were appropriate for those speeds, not to mention the lower overall volume of traffic in those times. And now we’re stuck with it, because it’ll be a 200 year long court battle to eminent domain the 427 landowners who are all clinging to five square feet each in the patch you’d require for a longer ramp, all hoping for a fat payout to let go of it.

And nowadays, of course, everyone takes it as their god given right to do 90+ MPH on the freeway at all times, and get frothingly pissed off if they can’t for any reason whatsoever. So the ramps aren’t long enough anymore because no one is using the highway as designed.

stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me

The world would instantly be a better place if all the mouth-breathers in it could figure this out simultaneously. Wow, you’re pissed off at someone being “in front” of you. That’s because there’s totally an Earth-shakingly significant difference between having 9,784,326 cars in front of you vs. 9,784,325.

And a Nike logo hidden in the cloud?

That, and different editions and prints of the same book can and will have different covers.

You forgot one: Fasteners, i.e. nuts and bolts, when all the rest of the world has been metric for decades and whatever it is you’re taking apart almost certainly uses metric bolts (car, appliance, electronic device, whatever). But your local hardware store still gives you attitude over metric being ‘’‘’‘’‘‘specialty’’‘’‘’‘’ and the majority of their selection of bolts and machine screws are fractional inch which will not fit approximately 99.8% of all manufactured goods from the last century, let alone this one.

want to fix an american car–hope you have both metric and “standard” wrenches

I will point out that with the singular and shining exception of lugnuts, at least this one has not been the case since at least the 1970’s. All fasteners on current(ish) American cars are metric nowadays and have been for quite some time. I’ve never seen a single one that isn’t on any car that’s not old enough to qualify for historic plates.

This used to piss off the oldheads to no end back when I managed a hardware store because they would absolutely insist, sometimes literally screaming in my face about it, that their dang old good old boy red blooded American Ford that they just bought didn’t have no Jap pinko metric bolts in it anywhere not nohow, and 100% of the time they were wrong. (This annoyed me only slightly less than the people who showed up needing a bolt, didn’t know what it was, didn’t bring the old one with them, and the only information they had was “I took it off with a 9/16 wrench.” Hombre, the head size tells me absolutely nothing about the diameter, thread pitch, or length. Then they would claim that it’s just a “standard” bolt, as if there’s any such thing. Also, a 9/16" wrench will usually fairly easily remove a bolt with a 14mm head, so that really tells me nothing. Or 5/8" on 16mm. Etc.)

Harleys, however, take it as some kind of point of pride that they actually do use fractional inch fasteners everywhere.

Nope, it’s a USB drive.

Quite a few of the usual memory device manufacturers make drives that have a Type A USB plug on one end, and either Micro USB or Type C on the other. They’re specifically meant for one end to easily plug into your PC, and the other end to go into your phone. Not, obviously, both at the same time.

Example: https://www.pny.com/duo-link-usb-3-2-type-c-dual-flash-drive

Or: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/usb-flash-drives/sandisk-ultra-dual-drive-m30-usb-3-1-type-c?sku=SDDDC2-032G-G46

I have one sitting in my desk that’s so old it still has a Micro USB connector on it and is therefore not terribly useful in this day and age.