Got a great ad encouraging people to dismantle surveillance equipment and then sell the guts at a pawn shop

Product Placement

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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

#extradirty
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Cosmic Funnies
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
taylor price
Show & Tell
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@thotboyfriend
Got a great ad encouraging people to dismantle surveillance equipment and then sell the guts at a pawn shop
There are a lot of reasons to oppose monarchy but one of the most overlooked is that the king is always getting stuck in some kind of hazardous puzzle chamber filling up with gravel or lava or something. Do your fucking job man
Achewood - Cartilage Head (2005)
Otto Dix (1891ā1969), etchings from āDer Kriegā series, 1924
āLice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, grenades, bombs, holes, bodies, blood, Schnapps, rats, cats, gas, guns, dirt, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: thatās what war is. The Devilās work. Nothing but the work of the Devil!ā ā Otto Dix
Salt was hugely important before refrigeration, and one of the ways of getting salt was from the sea or from brine springs. There were a few ways of doing this, which depended on the natural resources available in the area. You could put the saltwater into a large, flat pool and wait on dry air and the sun to do evaporation until there was no water left and you just had the salt, or you could boil saltwater using enormous quantities of fuel to get rid of the water.
But in places where big pools weren't feasible, they did everything in their power to reduce the amount of fuel required for the production of salt, because fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect and drives up costs.
Enter the graduation tower!
The idea is that you take some source of salty water, pump it up to the top of a wooden tower filled with brushwood (typically blackthorn), then let it trickle down, which greatly increases evaporation by maximizing surface area and exposing the water to the wind along the way. When the saltwater reaches the bottom, it's saltier than it was, and you can send it through again until it's reached the point of saturation. If you do this with ocean water, you can reduce the amount of fuel needed by a factor of ten.
Plus it looks and sounds awesome - these were sometimes called thorn towers.
And at the start of the 20th century, when other forms of salt production had skyrocketed in efficiency, the graduation towers began to be used for healthcare, because as you might imagine, the air next to the graduation tower is very salty, more than it is next to the seaside. From what I can find it seems like the main thing it does is thin mucus, though there are a lot of other health claims.
There are still a few working thorn towers that you can go visit, mostly in Germany or Poland, but they're either historical curiosities keeping a tradition alive, or health and wellness centers, distilling down a brine spring for supposed special properties.
LOOK AT MY PLASMA BABYGIRL
someone asked why it looks like that so heres my attempt to explain the current state of fusion research in sparknotes format
fusion happens when atoms hit each other really hard, but they dont usually want to hit each other. they need to be forced into it. you can do this by getting them really hot, which makes the atoms move faster, which much like cars doing 90mph in a 65 zone increases the chance of collision
really hot atoms in a really hot gas become what's called a plasma, where all their electrons fall off so the leftover positive nuclei are floating around with negative electrons
therefore, fusion research consists of trying to get plasma hot enough to fuse.
two problems
it has to be really really really hot to fuse
really really really hot plasma is bad for nuclear reactors, humans, and everything that isnt the sun
solutions arise
plasma is electrically charged, so we can control it with magnets. magnetism and electricity happen at right angles to each other, like if an electron is moving vertically a magnet can pull it horizontally, and vice versa
if we get the plasma to whirl around in a circle, we can hold that moving plasma flow in place with magnets
behold! the tokamak
it would be nice if it worked out that neatly, but plasma is really messy and ends up drifting all over that place. it turns out that doing the spiraling helical thing in the diagram is the best way to contain it, but it's not 100%
and even trying to confine it like that needs a huge amount of energy to get a huge amount of electricity flowing through the plasma to get it magnetically active enough for the magnets to hold it in
when people speak of "nuclear fusion in ten years!" they mean that we will achieve "breakeven", when the amount of energy used to just run the thing is "worth it" because we get more energy out
but plasma remains messy, and every time it messes up it costs energy and damages the reactor. an early tokamak had a hole melted in it by what we later understood to be very similar to a literal lightning bolt
the tokamak is a somewhat brute-force approach. what if there was a more elegant method
though we don't yet understand all the messes of plasmadynamics, we understand many of the biggest ones, so we can come up with ways to cancel them out.
one of the easiest ways is rotation: if the plasma drifts left, let it get halfway and then flip it upside down so it drifts back right. or constantly keep rotating it. you can see the same idea on the helical magnetic field in the tokamak diagram from before
so in a stellarator, we've switched our focus: instead of relying on flowing plasma current to respond to the magnets holding it in place, we've reshaped the magnets to catch plasma drifting outwards and redirect it back inwards.
pros: no messy, power-hungry plasma current to force. a stellarator can operate in "steady-state": instead of constantly touching it up like pottery on the wheel, it just goes until you turn it off (or it runs out of fuel or explodes of whatever). since we're already fucking with the magnet shapes, we can also put in extra little twists to trap plasma messes, smooth out the more obvious tangles, etc.
cons: all that magnet fuckery is complicated. it's harder to calculate and design, harder to physically build, and harder to maintain. depending on the design you can make it so the magnets are movable, so for a research stellarator you can try new magnet designs a little easier, for example, but that movable magnet will never be as good as a properly fixed magnet. also the magnets have to be quite close together so there's not really space to build, like, a door into the interior for maintenance or access
and the real con: tokamaks are better. they quickly got much closer to breakeven as we just continued to refine our plasmadynamics alongside brute-forcing the plasma current
BUT
stellarators are getting better
i almost wrote that theyre getting beautiful. they are. just look at her
hope unfounded is a virtue
The OP image is Wendelstein 7-X, currently the most advanced stellarator in the world. This is her older sister, Wendelstein 7-AS, who operated from 1988 to 2002.
Both of them have five repeating field periods, which give them their iconic pentagonal shapes, but W7-X is more than twice the size of W7-AS, and was designed with much more advanced computer optimization.
Your dad was a pomelo and your mom was a mandarin so you're an orange
You're a fucking bitter orange you son of a pomelo
pear of ducks
pig iron freak
Im extremely sick of u and your nasty shit u have never been nice to me ive been trying to hand out grape vines and other shit and be the bigger bitch but u never give me anything in return cold ass bitch fuck u nasty ass bitch u always bully me because u can and never because u should fucking nasty bithc i want u to go fuck yourself and do something beside torture me well u cant because u arent talented like me and u dont have no rocket boots or nothing at all poor ass bitchhh im honestly fed up and tired with this shit and im done im just done ive been havcing lots of problems with myself and my image especialy how my skin is made of metal its so cold and i never feel good about it its all because of your sick little venom tongue which was made to suck dog dick cuz well i cant ever imagine u ever doing anything else with that nasty ass dracula tongue since u just have to always be harasing my ass and making me feel so bad bitch be sayinbg shit all the time always being negative cuz u mad u dont have my life i have so much fun and im always feeling really good and i love my alloy body and what u say doesnt do shit to me cuz im more mature than u little freak stupid little nasty freak ius jealous i make money and u dont i get men much sexier than anything u could ever pull and its because i have a delightful style that keeps me in the loop with lots of good fun ppl who care about me and well your the only person in my liufe thats nasty as fuck and always a dick to me for no reason i have lots of friends but i bet u have more enemies cuz i sure im one of many tortured angels u touch with your rotten finger
the funniest things about liberal cries of "what about the uyghurs" etc isn't even that the accusations of communist countries committing genocide aren't true. it's that liberals will acknowledge that the US is built on genocide, then uphold that country while condemning communism, with seemingly zero self awareness. and it's not even like the genocide of native americans was the last genocide the US participated in. they're doing it rn through their Israeli vassal state, they were arming Indonesia during its genocide in the 1960s, the US exterminated at least 15 percent of the DPRK's population during the Korean War, they killed up to 3 million Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War, including by spraying chemical weapons over large swathes of the country. the list goes on
at some point you have to admit that if you're really against genocide then you can't be a supporter of the United States. all its talk of spreading freedom and democracy is just propaganda covering a brutal force in the world
I keep thinking about this tweet and laughing
Scar Tissue That I Wish U Saw
āI donāt like this expression āFirst World problems.ā It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesnāt disappear just because youāre black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Hereās a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.ā
ā Teju ColeĀ (via feminizt)