This Visual Machine

Pragmatic. Anachronistic. Jaunty. They/them. Photographer. Nj, USA

[eloiscbridgerton]

HACKS 5.06 – Quik Scribbl

[wuntrum]

utility pole paintings for april / may / june !

[whitepeopletwitter]

[blanketfortarchitect]

[rebloggingistheenemy]

[inviernodel95]

Thank you. I hope everybody thinks this

[exxos-von-steamboldt]

[delicatefury]

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

[beardedmrbean]

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists shocked to find lab gloves may be skewing microplastics data

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics, U-M study reveals

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

An Embarrassing Mistake May Have Skewed Microplastics Research All Along

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

[grey-gryphon]

From the article:

The researchers emphasize that this does not mean microplastics are not a real problem.

“We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none,” said McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering, and the Program in the Environment. “There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem.”

Please don’t think that this means microplastics aren’t something to be concerned about.

[yodaprod]

[dietspam16]

[foone]

Hi, Foone here, I'm a retrocomputer educator! I'm here to explain the real reason this laptop is like this.

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

Next question!

[saltoncity]

work tomorrow is one of the worst things that can happen to you

[bob-artist]

I met a nice robin at the Morton Arboretum.

[fleximusmax1mus]

Okay am I getting emo watching a documentary about wishbone??? You better believe it

[lhedoniste]

[hotvampireadjacent]

https://twitter.com/birdtickler/status/1552657242909904897?s=21&t=q4JEDIALmV-cAjcoEOypdw

[littlemisspipebomb]

ok so I looked it up, and it turns out they made a track out of PVC pipes, down a hill. The owner didn't realise PVC expanded in the heat, so on a turn the track just fell apart and the dude inside went over a fucking free way and into a swamp.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

The funniest part is that the inspector was watching the whole time, and once the ball stopped he left without saying anything. Park management just shut it down then and there.

[baronfulmen]

"The ball cleared a small hill, briefly going airborne, then zipped right across Route 94, the two-lane road splitting the park. Cars honked and slammed on their brakes. If there had been opposing traffic, Frank would have become part of a real-life game of Pong, volleying from one bumper to another.

Still in pursuit, we followed the ball toward a small lake in Motor World that had been earmarked for a fleet of tiny bumper boats for children. The area wasn’t open yet, but the empty boats were being tested and floated on the surface. The ball soared over the grass and smashed into several of them, scattering the others with rippling waves from the impact, which launched some of the boats several feet in the air.

Charlie and Ken waded into the water looking for the hatch. After some difficulty, they got it open. Charlie pulled Frank out by grabbing him under his armpits like a baby. Frank crawled up the bank, coughing and sputtering. He splayed across the grass as we all stared at the ball, which bobbed in the water like it was attached to a fishing lure.

We did not ask for the inspector’s report, nor did we ever hear of one being filed. Ken Bailey returned to Canada. The snow-makers cleared away the PVC. Told to dispose of the Bailey Ball, they rolled it into the woods, where it remained for many years."

I don't know that this beats the teeth story, but it's pretty great.

[nevver]

[nevver]

Seeds of self-destruction, Gregory Halpern

[julietscrying]

[shitgw3playerssay]

The Future of the Guild Wars Franchise: Our Commitment to Tyria – GuildWars2.com

Hear directly from our leadership team about our plans and how you can help shape what comes next in Guild Wars 2.

New post on guildwars2.com and video about the future of the franchise!

[overseer-picard]

It’s difficult to fully articulate the hold that Patrick Stewart had on audiences when TNG was airing. Between the hundreds of magazine covers, the talk show circuits, and the paparazzi nonsense, the amount of baldness puns editors were compelled to create was astounding.

It was like the media fixated on this man because he had catastrophic levels of charisma and audiences were losing their minds over him (TNG was regularly beating network shows in ratings), yet he was so far removed from the narrow Hollywood standards of beauty that it vexed and haunted these people for years.

Baldness was a joke in Hollywood. 75% of George Costanza's identity revolved around bald jokes. If you were a bald actor, you were cast as a villain or a buffoon, never the hero. And if you were losing your hair, you had to slap a wig on or risk losing your career. Yul Brynner was somewhat of an exception but he was from a much different generation of Hollywood and even Bruce Willis didn't fully shave his head until 1994 (post TNG success incidentally).

In Patrick Stewart's case, there was often an undercurrent of snide putdowns with many interviewers, drawing focus to his baldness over and over and over again with low hanging jokes. It was like you could see their vanity-based paradigms cracking in real time and it was strange to witness. Imagine how bizarre it would be if talk show hosts today could only ask The Rock, Vin Diesel, or Jason Statham about their bald heads.

But karma swooped in to the rescue. In 1992 Stewart was voted TV Guide's "Sexiest Man on Television" with a whopping 54% of votes. He beat out the likes of Luke Perry, John Corbett, A. Martinez, and even Burt Reynolds (with a total of 20 contenders).

The middle-aged bald guy in the syndicated sci-fi show beat out the hottest of the Hot Guys™️ and it wasn't even remotely close.

^ Bald joke

So yeah, today he's an old, revered thespian who is occasionally Charles Xavier, but not only did Patrick Stewart pave the way for other bald actors to be considered leading men, he discombobulated Hollywood with his unconventional attractiveness and it was amazing.

[churrotowns]

since it’s pride month, throwback to this beautiful cover and this wholesome interaction between two icons

[brightlotusmoon]

[anxeious]

bathe in your own sunlight !!!!!!

[systlin]

One of the contractors at work is a dude who recently moved here from the Bay Area. He is used to Northern California, which is to say that he is NOT used to the general Tornado Alley attitude towards Thor dragging his dick across the plains and causing massive destruction on a semi-regular basis.

Namely, the fact that we get them at all, and the fact that the general Midwestern response is to wander outside to see if we can see it.

We have bad weather forcasted the next few days and I had to talk him through the site tornado plan and storm shelter locations (we have six on site, my office is actually inside one) to head off the poor guy's anxiety and also I had to admit that yes, I also share the general Tornado Alley brain damage and go outside to try and see it when the sirens go off.

Poor man thinks everyone in tornado Alley is out of their minds and as one of those people I can't even deny it. 'I seek shelter if it's heading this way' did not reassure him, he's convinced we are mad.

[systlin]

To answer the question in the notes, @what-about-second-tmblr ; when I visited Sacramento and LA some years ago, the sensation of a minor earthquake shifting the ground around just barely enough for a human to feel it had me freaked out and basically lying flat on my back outside going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA while the Californians looked at me like I'd lost my mind.

So yes it is reciprocal.

[verschlimmbesserung]

[systlin]

Thor's dick what's not clicking

[the-whitmore-excursus]

Two?!?

[systlin]

This particular image is of the famous (among people fascinated by weather, anyway) Pilger Nebraska twin tornados! Two EF4 tornados from the same storm on the ground at the same time. This footage was captured by storm chaser Hank Schyma, better known as Pecos Hank, who is a fabulous nature photographer and provides data to weather researchers to better predict storms and severe weather. The smaller twin at this point is setting the land speed record for a tornado as it orbits the larger tornado; it was clocked at a foward speed of 94.6 MPH (sustained for only 5.3 seconds)

Anyway, yes. Two. Supercells can do that.

Storm chaser Stephen Jones got this image when both twins were at their maximum size.

[slytherkins]

Saw this on FB just now and felt it belonged on this post.

captured by storm chaser Brett Wright