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Interesting Stuff You Saw on the I-net Today


crp

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abarbarian
9 hours ago, crp said:

I don't see how GPS makes lighthouses unnecessary.

 

With all the satellites up in the air and modern electronics you should be able to pinpoint your location anywhere on earth to within several meters at any time. Even if all the ship electronics went west as long as someone had at least one modern phone it should be possible to figure out where it is. Not a 100% method but almost as sure as a man on watch in any weather looking for a flashing light that may or may not be working.

Yet another example of tech taking away folks jobs.

😵

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If a GPS is off by a few seconds, that could be disastrous. And I don't think it is such a good idea for people to assume that their boat's electricity will always be working flawlessly, even without taking weather conditions into consideration.

 

and lighthouses aren't something that are not setup to have lights that may or may not be working. and they don't have keepers anymore anyway. lighthouses are sophisticated buildings and in places where there is not a good spot to put one where it is needed, lightboats are used.

 

 

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The house of the future could be built with dirty diapers

 

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Zuraida couldn’t collect dirty diapers from other households during the pandemic, but fortunately, she didn’t have to look far. She washed and disinfected her daughter’s dirty diapers herself and then left them to cure for 28 days, drying them in the sun. She then enlisted a brother’s help to manually shred them with scissors.

This shows that households in rural or low-income areas could potentially replicate this DIY project on their own, she says.

 

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That’s how they found that diapers could displace up to 8 percent of the sand used to make concrete and mortar in a 36-square-meter home (387.5 square feet). That includes 27 percent of the sand used in concrete columns and beams and up to 40 percent of sand used to make mortar for partition walls.

All in all, that home could divert 1.7 cubic meters (60 cubic feet) of diaper waste from landfills. The study doesn’t calculate how much greenhouse gas emissions that could prevent, but landfills emit a potent gas called methane, and diapers are a major source of plastic waste and pollution. The global construction boom has also triggered a looming sand shortage. These problems have only grown with urbanization and population growth, particularly in Indonesia, where this study was conducted.

 

😷

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  • 2 weeks later...

Stamps celebrate Terry Pratchett's Discworld saga

 

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A set of stamps celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sir Terry Pratchett's first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, has been published.

The author, who lived in Wiltshire, wrote 41 books in the Discworld series, the last of which was released after his death in 2015.

The set of eight stamps will go on general sale on 10 August.

 

😋

Edited by abarbarian
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Suffocating babies in Cellophane! A bunch of infants tied up in clear cellophane packaging is pretty frightening to modern viewers, but at the time, these ads were just plain cute.

 

cellophane1.jpg

 

What Were We Thinking? The Top 10 Most Dangerous Ads

 

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In fact, the effects of lead poisoning (brain damage, seizures, hypertension, etc.) were known long before the Consumer Product Safety Commission finally banned them in 1977; the industry had simply refused to acknowledge them. 

 

dutch-boys-lead-party-1923-big.jpg

 

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Particularly disturbing is the image of a mother and infant, above the caption stating that DDT “helps make healthier, more comfortable homes.” Not quite.

 

pennsalt.jpg

 

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The spread of DDT across mid-century America is mirrored today by the success of Monsanto (one of the companies that originally manufactured DDT) in placing its genetically modified products on store shelves before researchers have a full understanding of their larger ecological impacts.

 

The good old days. Don't you just miss em folks. 🤓

 

Mind you DDT is not so bad, in fact it helped me to earn quite a reasonable amount of loot back in the day.  I ran a small specialist company with my partner Peta which we called Dragon Defence Training. The signature line for our letters sent out seeking contracts read " DDT helps get rid of pests" . Almost everyone including Peta did not feel that this was a good signature line and would put of prospective employers. I insisted on its inclusion and was proved right by the fact that over half of the folk who employed us had their attention and curiosity stimulated by the line and our company name which was why they wanted to met us in person. Once we were in the room with prospective employers a contract was almost a certainty due to our subtle and expert implementation of Neuro Linguistic Prograding techniques. 🫣

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This is a most fascinating read. I was five years old when some of this hardware was sent into space and it is still working. 🫣

 

The ancient technology keeping space missions alive

 

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Launched almost 46 years ago in 1977, the twin Voyager probes continue to send back data from beyond the Solar System.

 

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"We've developed a complicated setup where we have modern Linux servers running a virtual environment with an emulator of the old operating system," says Sousa. "The person running the software is part of the original team, he’ll retire when the mission is over."

 

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Like their colleagues, controllers have also had to cope with elderly computer systems. Following a glitch with its onboard computer, for instance, engineers worked out a new way of loading commands into the spacecraft's 2MB RAM memory.

They also discovered that the original software for part of the onboard navigation system was running on a Windows 98 PC that no-one could find the password to

 

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In 2018, they prepared to upload the software and reboot the spacecraft. "The spacecraft hadn't been restarted from cold for 12 years, so it wasn't without its risks," Wood says. "It works better than we ever dared hope and we now have a mission extension until 2028."

 

Space 1977 The Documentary  Space probes Voyager One and Two are still operating after 40 years in the depths of space.

 

Living in space The Documentary  Human beings will soon be living in space - but who will go and what will it be like?

 

The Engineers: Lunar exploration The Documentary  Space engineers discuss their return to the moon and what that entails - a powerful rocket and capable spacecraft, a space station in lunar orbit, and a permanent moon-base.

 

A neat way to download and listen to the BBC broadcasts is to use get-iplayer. As an example for the Space 1977 documentary, you could use after cd'ing into the folder you want to download to,

 

get_iplayer --type=radio --pid=w3csvntg

 

You find the pid from the url.

 

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An they told me staring into space was a waste of time when I was a lad. :hysterical:

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  • 2 weeks later...
3 hours ago, crp said:

 

still not so sure if this is complicated or not.

Believe it or not, it is to tell them if they are coming or going.  Red, right, returning.

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