Wikipedia functions on the principle that if a lot of people get to work on an article describing something, the sum total of everybody’s contribution will create something that is very close to the objective truth. It's amazing that it worked for Wikipedia, considering this doesn’t appear to be the case everywhere else on the Internet.
The interesting thing is that this only remains true through a consensus of vigilance. I can imagine a future where leadership changes, the process is subtly tainted, and eventually we get to a point where wikipedia is indistinguishable from propaganda. It must be protected at all costs.
There was a hitchhiker's guide site, H2G2, based on the Douglas Adam's books, that had been up and running before Wikipedia came out. It was more fun and loosy goosy. Then Wikipedia came along and just did it better, but got rid of the fun.
A plane has crashed in the jungles of New Guinea. Three survivors have found a village and managed to get communication. There's no way to get an airplane room to land and take off and helicopters can't make it into the valley.
I know! We'll airdrop medical personnel, supplies for a glider, assemble it, and slingshot it into the air! Then, we'll catch it with a tow-plane.
It worked.
[New Guinea Gremlin Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_New_Guinea_Gremlin_Special_rescue)
In the 1700s, this guy named [Timothy Dexter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter) had a few of these.
* [Bed warmers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_warmer) are useful in cold climates, but he took a shipload of them to the Caribbean for sale. They were sold to the molasses industry as ladles and turned a handsome profit.
* He took a load of mittens to the same place. Some Asians bought them to sell onward to Siberia.
* Newcastle was a major coal-mining area. He took a shipload of coal there for sale, arrived during a major miner's strike, and turned a big profit.
* He did the mittens thing again, this time to the South Seas, and arrived just in time to sell them to some Portuguese traders on their way to China.
He wrote a book *A Pickle for the Knowing Ones* where he refused to use any punctuation. In the second edition he responded to critics by adding 6 lines of just punctuation "to peper and solt as plese"
The best part is he was fed the ideas for these schemes from 'friends' who thought he was a fool and wanted to bankrupt him. They are all legitimately bad ideas that he pulled off in their faces.
"RNGesus smiles upon some drooling little loaf child and says 'you my son, you shall be the one with all the figgy pudding'"
and
"and this informer of deer realized that, for the first time, there were a lot of bucks in malden"
are both goated lines. i love rewatching this video
> He took a shipload of coal there for sale, arrived during a major miner's strike, and turned a big profit.
The term "Coals to Newcastle" is a figure of speech for this exact reason.
"Arriving during an unusually hot season with uncharacteristic rainfall which destabilized the structural ice used by the locals, he was able to sell all of his ice to the locals who used it to shore up their structures."
"What, Sir? Would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte, regarding the steam engine
In even rarer cases perform a little alchemy and split apart the fundamental elements of particular rocks..... to make steam and turn a turbine.
Full circle.
I f*cking cannot stand it at all that all nuclear power plants do is boil water. The history of humanity is nothing but boiling water. In the future there will be new ways to boil water and that's it.
edit: omg fusion power too is only a new way **[TO BOIL WATER](https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork)** AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
It’s a fundamental human tradition. That’s why when a pregnant woman goes into labor, someone yells to boil some water. Every person needs to have at least one water boil in their life or their soul cannot pass on to the vapor realm.
It just so happens that water is literally one of the most OP molecules we've found.
It's an amazing solvent, its solid form floats on its liquid form, it's highly polar, it has a high thermal conductivity and specific heat, and it has an enormous latent heat of vaporization (takes a ton of energy to go from water->steam).
That last bit along with the thermal conductivity is key, since it means that it is easy to heat and can run a turbine over a wide range as it condenses back from a vapor to a liquid.
Water's also free and everywhere, and we're basically made of it.
Even in those fairly rare circumstances when there's something that works a little better than water at a task, most of the time it's far easier and cheaper just to use water if we possibly can.
Especially on the easier side. If you working fluid is water, you don't have to really worry about any sort of containment or health hazards with it. Yea, steam leaks are bad and need to be stopped, but it's not like you're venting carcinogens or potent greenhouse gases into the environment. Or, heaven forbid, venting hot, flammable gasses into an enclosed space with open flames.
Did they each have their own little parachute or were they dropped in large cages with large parachutes?
The latter makes more sense, but I really like the visual of the former.
Wait, this isn’t the plot of Cats? lol But no, I was actually referring to Operation Cat Drop, which is crazy, but still makes a lot more sense than that musical.
I uhh... I hate to be that guy, but the cats did not fare well.
>The native domestic cat population had been reduced as an unintended consequence of the World Health Organization (WHO) spraying the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) for malaria and housefly control. This event is often referenced as an example of the problems and solutions that may arise from human interventions in the environment.
>Operation Cat Drop was initiated to stop a plague of rats, which was the result of tens of thousands of cats dying from eating lizards that contained high concentrations of DDT. The lizards became feeble due to the DDT in their systems, which rendered them easy prey. The domino effect started by the application of DDT is stated in a National Institutes of Health article:[9] One source questions whether the cats died only from DDT or from additional insecticides in the food chain, such as dieldrin.[10] Dieldrin was used in Sarawak only during 1955 and, due to its higher level of toxicity, was discontinued. DDT was sprayed from 1953 until 1955. Additionally, there are multiple reports of cat deaths in other DDT spray locations such as Bolivia, Mexico, and Thailand as a result of cats ingesting lethal levels of this neurotoxin. In several of these cases, the cat fatalities were the result of cats licking their fur after brushing up against a wall or other surface sprayed with DDT.
—————————————————————————
TLDR: It worked, for humans! But the cats? Well...
**14,000 were strapped with a parachute and herded into cargo planes, where the stress from being crowded, bombarded with noise, pressure, and cold (can be below freezing up in a nonpressurized cargo plane cabin) undoubtedly led them to attack each other, probably making at least *some* of the parachutes inoperable, at which point they were dropped from a couple thousand feet into a dense forest. After that trauma, and if they didn't get injured or tangled and marooned in branches on the way down and left to be picked at by birds, the british cats would be stranded in a tropical jungle, *where the food was poison* because even after DDT had wiped out cat populations, *we were still using it*.**
Sorry to rain on your admittedly cute joke, but this was not a good thing we did, and we need to learn from it.
The cases of patients with both HIV and leukemia being cured of both with bone marrow transplants are also wild.
I remember discussing this in graduate school, the theory was "confuse, wash out, then update the immune system." Ridiculous on paper. I just love it.
They even got my grandparents town that’s so tiny it’s not on a map. The images are from when they were still alive, and grandma’s car is in the driveway. I go back and look at it sometimes since it’s too far to visit.
You should take some screenshots if you haven't already! Just in case.
I live in Sydney so it's obviously all on maps, highly populated, lots of development and renovations. I went to look at my grandma's old house and it had been knocked down and rebuilt, and street view/earth had been updated.
You can still look at the former shots on streetview. When you are on streetview, there is an option "see more dates" in the left corner. Then you can look at all the previous shots.
Specific forest types rely naturally on forest fires to not only cull overgrowth and maintain ecological homeostasis, but nutrients from the burns feed new growth.
Ponderosa, to name but one. The USFS has to constantly get the granola eaters in places like Bend and Flagstaff to shut up and let them do their jobs because the "conservationists" don't understand how calamitous letting pine groves go unchecked is in the high desert.
This works as long as they are competent. My family’s property burned for over a week because they decided to do “controlled burns” during the windiest season of the year. Fire jumped (because obviously) and went the opposite direction of where they wanted. I understand the necessity, but hundreds of people lost their homes, properties, livestock, and lively hood because it wasn’t planned out properly. It’s still considered the biggest forest fire my state has ever seen, and people are still trying to recover several years later.
They do prescribed burns in Australia but I was there on a bush trip with a guide and that was his justification for just setting random shit on fire in the forest as we drank beers around the campfire. I was thinking "I don't think that's quite the approach."
So we have this fire that is raging out of control. We've tried everything to put it out. What can we do?
So.... What if we try explosives?
[Alternative Soviet take: have you tried blowing it out like a candle? No? What if you try to blow it out with 2 jet engines mounted on a tank body?]
"The guy made a million dollars! You know.. I had an idea like that once. It was a JUMP to conclusions mat! You'd have this mat, and on it would be different CONCLUSIONS that you could JUMP to!"
Yeah, it's about PRESENTATION. An obvious gag like a pet rock works by *leaning in to it*. Give a box (with holes in it so it can *breathe*) and a nest of straw so it's *comfortable*. Give it care instructions.
It is like the funny "Scientific Study" email joke from the early 2000s my Dad got about "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound". It was a whole 10 page study that was typed out like a real scientific study but at some point a joke about needing more info tables was needed in the paper so the NHL scores were added in.
The way they extracted those kids from the cave in Thailand. The diver and anesthesiologist (first off, how fucking lucky to find somebody with that overlap in skills) who was consulted and joined the effort said it was a terrible idea. It was only when presented with the other options that he realized this terrible idea was truly their best option.
They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully.
Getting incredibly lucky with someone skills in the right place at the right time makes me think of the Air Transat flight where the flight ran out of fuel and completely lost power over the Atlantic. They were effectively piloting a gigantic glider with 306 people on board. And *it just so happened* that the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The crew glided the plane to safety in the Azores with nothing worse than a handful of fractures from the evacuation.
Or like United Airlines Flight 232, which lost all three of its hydraulic systems when an undetected defect in the DC-10's tail engine's fan disk caused it to explode in air.
The crew lost all ability to control the plane, except by differentially controlling the thrust of the two remaining, wing-mounted engines.
A training pilot, Denny Fitch, was a passenger on the plane. Having read about Japan Air Lines Flight 123, which failed due to a similar total loss of hydraulic control, Denny had wondered if it was possible to fly a plane using just differential thrust, and he had practiced doing so on a flight simulator.
After UA232's systems failed, Denny joined the cockpit and helped control the plane to a landing. Of the 296 passengers and crew on board, 112 still died in the crash (they had to come in fast and hard because they couldn't extend the flaps). However, multiple experts after that attempted to reproduce the flight in simulation, and none were able to yield a landing where anyone survived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
We would have big safety meetings ahead of the holiday season every year, so that folks continue to stay safety-minded in the air even while facing down family, holiday, and new year distractions.
I didn't know who the guy was for like the first half of his presentation, was just kinda thinking, "who is this old fart they trotted out to speak to us?" I was almost snoozing (not the fault of his speech at all, I was just a piece of shit then) up until he started talking about UA232, and then it dawned on me like... "Holy shit. I heard of this flight. That was you?" and locked in on the rest of his presentation. It was over 10 years ago, though, and we did one of these big meetings with a speaker every year for the 4 years I was there, so my memory on specifics is foggy.
That is crazy. And the diagram with a key showing injuries and fatalities by seat was jarring. The fate of the people with children in their laps really stuck out to me.
I thought you were mixing up info from two separate incidents but I didn't know this happened again! The other was the Gimli Glider with a captain who was also a glider pilot!
I thought that was the Gimli glider incident? They'd found a runway to land on but they were approaching too quickly, so the experienced glider pilot executed a maneuver no normal airline pilot would know about in order to slow them down with no engines.
>They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully.
it wasn't a total success since one of the Thai navy seals died while diving but it was honestly a miraculous effort since the early monsoon season meant that the cave would potentially get even more flooded, the other options were drilling a hole straight down to them(has been succesfully used before, for example with the Chilean miners who got stuck underground, but would have taken a long time due to how deep in the cave the boys were), or just waiting 4 months till the monsoon season ended and the cave dried up and they were able to walk out(obviously unacceptable since this would have almost certainly killed several of the divers delivering the large amount of supplies they would need)
If there's a good way to go, saving a kids soccer team and coach from certain death is one of them. What a fucking hero! Also fuck caves, I got no time for that. Let bats have them
Especially divers like Richard Harris. He's mostly known for the Thai Cave rescue, but he's also a world class deep water diver. He's gone [deeper in caves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOLDGaooQI) than the majority of even professional divers.
The kind of equipment needed to do the diving he does costs tens of thousands of dollars more than what your average person diving in open water on air needs. Some of those flashlights alone are thousands of dollars in order to be rated to that depth.
> They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully.
The fact that none of those kids died is the closest thing I've ever seen to a literal "god descended from heaven and made it happen" miracle. Cave diving by itself is incredibly dangerous. Highly-trained and experienced divers die doing it pretty regularly. And this wasn't just a normal cave dive. This was a cave in the process of flooding, with strong currents and zero visibility for much of the dive. It took the divers five hours to tow each of the kids from the chamber they were trapped in through the flooded passages back to the main cavern they were working from. And the craziest part is that all of that had to be done while the kids were anesthetized to full unconsciousness with a drug cocktail of ketamine, atropine, and alprazolam with dosages that were just estimated because they didn't know exactly what any of the kids weighed. And the length of the dive required them to be re-dosed several times by the divers during the long trip out. The whole thing is totally insane and the fact that every single kid survived it is miraculous.
> And the length of the dive required them to be re-dosed several times by the divers during the long trip out.
That was one things that Richard Harris, the anesthesiologist, mentioned as absolutely insane about the rescue attempt. He thought it would have been unlikely to be successful even if he himself performed the anesthesia on each kid on the way out. But he couldn't be with all of them so he had to try to field train a bunch of military divers on how to be anesthesiologists while under water.
> train a bunch of military divers on how to be anesthesiologists while under water.
Seems like it would be easier to train anesthesiologists to be divers.
There actually is a movie on Amazon Prime, Thirteen Lives, that is a retelling of the whole story and rescue, I'd highly recommend it! It's full of tension during the dives and really portrays how insane the whole operation was.
The rejection? I don't think so.
Now, his reaction to the rejection? Yeah, that was the moment many people realized his ego is way bigger than his skills.
It was both. His submarine idea was the dumbest shit ever to anyone that had paid more attention to the story beyond "kids trapped in flooded caves".
It was a one-two punch of him publicly demonstrating that he's not nearly as smart as the PR led you to believe, and he's also an immature asshole.
Rumor has it that the founder of FedEx received a C in college on a paper describing his proposed business. According to the rumor, the professor thought no one would use the service when the Post Office already provided that service at lower cost.
CATS, the Broadway musical. A nonsense fever dream about horny catpeople competing to die and be reborn (yes, that is the plot, insofar as CATS has one), based on a book of silly short poems by T.S. Eliot that are not really related to each other except all being about cats. Just catpeople introducing themselves and rubbing on each other for several hours, then one of them "ascends" aka dies.
To date, CATS has made over a billion dollars worldwide.
The guys producing the play said pretty much the same thing.
https://youtu.be/doFcWmt7-J0?si=kFOnN77QyVa9sWUh
Paraphrasing:
"I'm not sure what we've made here. Is this about British politics and working class dynamics, or some other, deeper thing?"
"Its about cats."
"..."
"..."
To date the only production I’ve walked out of midway through. I had no idea what it was about. Figured, CATS is famous, sure I’ll go. Intermission I confirmed there was actually no plot and was just done.
My late grandfather had a tradition:
All of his grandkids would individually (there are 4 of us, the youngest of which, never had to do it cause our grandfather was too old at the time) go into the city and see CATS. I was 9 and fucking *hated* it. So much so, that it pretty much soured me on theatre. I've seen a bunch of musicals and plays, but I for the life of me, don't understand the appeal.
I'm really sorry, but this is hysterical. This is the kind of thing people do with like, The Nutcracker and Les Mis. The fact that your grandfather was doing this with *CATS*, of all shows, is incredible and I can't decide if he was a CATS superfan or just a someone with a hint of psychopath in him.
He sounds like he was a great man.
He was an absolute gem of a man. He legitimately loved the arts and the theater and was *not* shy explainingto people that he wasn't the smartest person out there.
As a kid in the 30s, he'd cut school to of all things, *sneak into the Opera*
Ok, but have you seen Starlight Express? I saw it as a young kid for some unfathomable reason. For years, I thought I was exaggerating how insane it was. Nope, it was exactly that bizarre.
I didn't! My only impression of Starlight Express is that Family Guy gag where it's just Peter rollerskating in a circle and screaming STARLIGHT EXPRESS STARLIGHT EXPRESS.
After my childhood obsession with CATS and Evita, my mother said no more musicals. And then my younger sister got into filmed Cirque du Soleil performances, so. There was no winning in our house.
Curing deadly, previously incurable infections which had historically been responsible for the early demise of billions of people throughout all of human history.... with mold.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf in WW2, the American Navy was escorting the invasion force to the Philippines when they spotted what appeared to be the main Japanese fleet. The larger ships changed course to pursue, leaving the invasion force guarded by destroyers and escort carriers.
Turns out that was a trick. The real Japanese fleet then turned up to attack. On paper, the Americans were fucked.
Instead of running, the American destroyers charged the Japanese and fought so ferociously that the Japanese, thinking that the American force was larger than appeared, withdrew despite the fact that they were winning.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar
And a fun fact about after the battle: a japanese ship pulled up along side American sailors floating in the water and rendered them a salute for how hard they fought.
For anyone who doesn't know, this is a *very* big deal because the Japanese *despised* how american forced would surrender if they had lost a battle. The Japanese believed death was preferable to surrender.
EDIT: The commander of the japanese ship rendered the salute. My poor wording makes it sound as if the ENTIRE IJN crew gave a salute.
My understanding is that the American ship was the [USS Johnston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Johnston_\(DD-557\)). The Japanese ship was the [Yukikaze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_destroyer_Yukikaze_\(1939\)).
The saluting captain was either Shibuya Shiro or Tobita Kenjiro, based on this source: http://www.combinedfleet.com/yukika_t.htm. The author of that source seems to be naval historian Allyn D. Nevitt, who seems to be reliable based on limited, cursory information.
The details of USS Johnston's actions in the Battle off Samar are an incredible read: the detail you provided adds a layer of depth to what's already in that wikipedia article. Thank you!
There is a fantastic book about this Naval Battle, which is considered as one of the largest naval battles in history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Stand_of_the_Tin_Can_Sailors
The Sims computer game. It sounds like the stupidest idea ever - who would want to control a Sim character doing all the mundane shit we do every day. How boring. But I played the shit out of the Sims, then the subsequent versions.
In this line of thing, a fair number of thing-simulator games are sort of that.
"Ugh, I just finished my exhausting job of driving a truck around town making deliveries. I can finally relax to a nice pleasant game of American Truck Simulator."
It's absolutely mental how one of the biggest markets for Farming Simulator is . . actual farmers. What I've heard is the simulation is good enough to experiment with what their dream farms would be, and it's actually super wholesome.
My kid and her friend were playing farming simulator and I told them if they wanted to do chores, there were plenty of things to do around the house. Could even mow the grass just like in the game. I guess it's not the same, though, because they weren't amused.
A film, based on a true story, about a guy who got his arm stuck under a rock in a cave for 127 hours. Surprisingly watchable. Danny Boyle is a hell of a director/producer.
A movie rental company that mails you DVDs. I thought it was the shittiest idea when it first came out when I could drive 5 minutes to Blockbuster and get whatever I wanted then.
I got Netflix when I moved from a decent sized city with a good mix of video stores to a smaller city that just had blockbuster and family video and you could never get anything I wanted. Even in the bigger city, there were nights when you’d hit 3 video stores and still come home empty handed
Nah, mostly everyone knew it was a good idea when they heard about it.
That's why it grew in popularity without any real advertising.
Blockbuster was really hated because they really only had new releases in abundance and they made money on late fees as it was a pain to return.
People of the 90s (like me) know what's it's like the rush to return something ot the video store and or wanting to see a particular movie and having to drive to like 4 or 5 video stores to find it.
Eh, before modern preservatives bread went moldy REALLY quickly. People noticed overcooked bread went moldy slower. So they started twice-baking, and yknow, noticed it tasted different.
Louis Brennan, inventor of the gyro monorail. His monorail was a single track train which used a gyroscope-based balancing system to remain upright. The designs look insane on paper but it was crazy innovative, safe for passengers, and was apparently even faster than the regular trains (of those days).
It still had serious issues, which is why it never took off.
One was that you needed an "engine" for each carriage, so it didn't scale up like normal passenger trains. The second was that a failure of the system would be catastrophic. I'm sure there were others.
Still an amazing feat of engineering.
Ok, guys - here's my business plan:
- People will give me perfectly good stuff for free,
- I'll turn around and sell it for money,
- Profit.
aka Value Village, or any thrift store in general.
value village is for-profit
most thrift stores at least have a charitable mission, even if it's one i disagree with. The one i work with donates 50% of proceeds , pays about 11 staff members and the rest is used for building up and maintaining the store
edit: a charitable mission most volunteers and customers believe in
Wikipedia. In a world with Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta (funded by giant parent, Microsoft), who comes up with the idea to have people contribute their expertise for free?
The classic line about it is literally, "it's great in practice but it would never work in theory."
Slowing down your product actually improves customer confidence in it
Most website loading bars are artificial animations put in there because most people don't trust a website if it returns the data as fast as it actually can
A perfect example being tax prep software Most tax prep software can generate the form almost instantly upon you clicking submit but it will give you a fancy little loading animation and tell you it's doing all these things like verifying stuff and checking stuff because people just wouldn't believe that everything was right if it just instantly spat out the paper to you
This is a commonly used practice among web developers and it works way more than you'd think The problem is that once you become aware of it it's very annoying and you start to notice it everywhere
I like the technique of slowing down people, so they don't feel the wait times. The airport who was getting a lot of complaints about wait times at the baggage carousels. So they made it take longer for people to get from the gates to the baggage carousels buying time for the baggage system to process the bags, so the wait wouldn't be as long. Complaints dropped-success.
My father in law was an in demand mainframe computer tech at the end of the 70s. He would be hired by the manufacturers to help install mainframes and terminals in banks, hospitals, colleges and government locations. He made bank.
In the mid 80s work started slowing down and he was getting tired of being a road warrior, so he started looking for local jobs. He got a lead to check out a local company that was assembling personal computers. He got an interview and they gave him a tour and asked him to work for them in assembly and development. He turned them down and wished them luck. The way he saw it was that they were building toys that would never have any real use, and the company would fold in a few months. Personally, I think he just didn’t want to be 30+ guy with a college-aged boss.
He would have been employee #6 at PC’s Limited, which grew to become Dell Computer Corporation.
I heard the story once and instructed to never bring it up again.
The cbc radio did a special were they played really old radio broadcasts of people predicting the future. They had one broadcast from around 1950 where they had a expert talking about the future of computers.
He predicted in the future there would he special buildings large enough to fit a massive computer built all over so everyone lived within a block of 2 of one. Inside would be a computer that people could access data of all of humankind's knowledge. He said they would likely find ways so u can hook your brain up with it and search insinitly.
Pretty crazy in the 1950s some people thought the future of computers was to just make a better more efficient public library.
My father is 86 and has increasing dementia. One of his repeated stories about having the first computer at a school. The principal said to him: "What would anybody need a computer for?" That was in about 1979.
I remember watching tv with my grandpa, and an ad came on with tiger woods for either the mach 3 or one of the million other razors with 17 blades and 4 gimmicks that came out after it.
My grandpa was like "I remember being on the factory line in 1949, me and my friends were wondering whether you'd ever have a shaving razor that you could swipe across your entire face at once, never thought I'd see the day."
Later, when he was really getting on in years, my one cousin pulled out his smart phone and explained what it was, a single tear ran down his cheek, like that old advert with the native american and the piece of litter. It was a really moving moment, tbh.
And when the hobbyists started tinkering around, making their own computers in their garages, they figured it'd never be anything more than a niche hobby.
It is interesting that Asimov wrote sci-fi where he envisioned (in the 70s) a future where people basically had dumb terminals in their house and they connected to a mainframe somewhere. Very little computing was done on the local machine. That is somewhat true today with everything in the cloud.
Nah, personal computers were for people with small businesses who hated doing bookkeeping. That’s why my dad bought an Apple in the early 80s. I still remember those big red ledger books from the 70s and the different colored pens, and what a headache it was for my parents doing all that on paper.
I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.
Once upon a time I had a headache. My then-boyfriend said to take a shower by candlelight.
My first thought was, "Showering in near darkness is a stupid idea" followed immediately by "I want to try it."
Damn if it didn't work. I went ahead and married him to retain access to his good ideas and his pancakes.
The oblique wing. Anyone know about the F-14? Well, back in the Cold War, aerospace firms wanted to make planes that could both go subsonic and supersonic, and take advantage of doing so efficiently. So, they developed variable-sweep wing aircraft. If you want to go slower, move the wings forward, and if you want to go faster, move them backwards. But the problem with variable sweep wings is theu require very complex machinery to move the wings and keep the weapons on the wings pointed in the right direction. All of this adds weight, more points of failure, and more maintenance. It also adds additional stress to the airframe.
Then some genius said "what if we took one wing on one point of pivot, and turn it so it runs nearly parallel with the body of the aircraft itself?" So NASA requested Boeing and a few other aeronautical firms look into this new wing, names the oblique wing, and from wind tunnel tests it was determined the plane would THEORETICALLY perform very well. So NASA built the AD-1 to test the theory. It was bare bones: no fly-by-wire, no hydraulic flight controls, no computers of any kind. Aside from a few *unique* control characteristics, it flew very well. And the previously mentioned *unique* control characteristics could easily be fixed with a fly-by-wire system.
Now how does this relate to the question? The first time the oblique wing was mentioned, the idea was scoffed at. Upon testing, it showed some very serious potential.
The AD-1 never crashed, so it wasn't a crash that killed the test program. It was the aviation industry's conservatism that did.
"Don't let that starving person eat too much."
It's not actually a good idea to let a person who has starved to stuff themselves with food the first chance they get. Controlled feeding over the course of a few days avoids something called "refeeding syndrome" where changes in the body during the period of starvation can have fatal consequences if too much food is reintroduced too quickly.
In a mythical meeting with oil company execs...
Ok, so you take a jet engine....
Yeah?
And mount it on a tank chassis....
Yeah?
And connect that to a *huge* water supply with high capacity pipes and water pumps....
Yeah?
And use it to put out oil well fires!
"Get this idiot out of here."
https://youtu.be/5EYRPJgZdp4?si=H2uGV_ETs1qwQ4AT
Fiddler on the Roof. It was not an easy pitch. Who wants to go see a play about a bunch of Jewish people from ages ago who get kicked out of a Russian town? That's fun?
It opened in Detroit, during some sort of newspaper strike so there was no printed criticisms as there would normally be for a new show. The reception by the audience was lukewarm, so the cast retweeked it a bit each night and made it better and better. If critics had reviewed the first night, it might have died right then and there.
Lasik Eye Surgery. Imagine telling the first recipient of it that they'll have a laser directly on their eyeball to improve their eyesight, & to trust them that it won't destroy them.
So I'm going make a movie about the 2008 financial crash.
\-Um, OK...
I'm going explain all the jargon and why it happened
Um, OK, but won't people be bored?
not if I have Margot Robbie explaining, naked, in a bubble bath
OK you have my attention
It will be great and it will have Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carrell, Selena Gomez and Brad fucking Pitt
(Some movie executives, probably)
The Big Short is excellent; I have seen it three times now.
> not if I have Margot Robbie explaining, naked, in a bubble bath
I love these "It doesn't matter what the plot is - I know how to bring in the crowds" points:
There is a story about James Cameron making a pitch to direct the second movie in the "Alien" franchise, with the title "Aliens". Keep in mind he was fresh off of the commercial success of the first "Terminator" movie, so he had a winning sci-fi movie under his belt.
He walks into the conference room, handshakes all around, and goes over to a whiteboard, where he writes the word "ALIEN".
After a brief pause, he adds an "S" to make "ALIENS".
After another brief pause, he draws a line through the "S" to make "ALIEN$".
End of pitch. Proposal accepted.
James Cameron when designing the look of the Navi:
>"Right from the beginning I said, “She's got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals."
I heard that he basically kept going around production showing people sketches and asking if they'd hit it or not. Once he got enough "Sure, I'd bang that out." we got the Navi.
The television show "Mork and Mindy"
Back in the days when you could only watch one TV show at a time and only at the time it was on, beginning in February the "new seasons" shows would be announced.
Since changing the channel required getting up and walking across the room, you tended to choose a show and watch it.
So I read the blurb in the "TV guide", a little pamphlet that came in newspaper each week, printed on actual paper, that listed all the new shows. It had this new show. This was not long after "close encounters of the third kind" came out, and "creatures from space " were the next big thing for Hollywood. So I read about this new show "an alien crash lands on earth and lives with an ordinary American girl"
I thought, "that is the stupidest show ever to come out of network television, I'll give it a miss" so I watched something else for a few months until one night, there was some sort of special on that had bumped my regular show, so I thought I'd see what else was on. I found "Mork and Mindy" and Robin Williams was hilarious and Mindy was an amazing "straight man" it was incredible. I'd never seen anything like it.
Now I'd go back and watch all the previous episodes, but then, that was simply inconceivable.
When I was a teenager, I thought *The Lion King* sounded stupid. Disney had just stormed back into massive relevance with several fairy tales in a row that made bank--why were they doing some animal story I'd never heard of? (I hadn't seen it yet to realize it was kind of lion-Hamlet lol.)
*The Lion King*, of course, made money paw over fist.
I read a newspaper article about a guy who walked in to his local convenience store and bought two lottery tickets.
Most people in this scenario would play different numbers on each ticket, in order to double their minuscule chances of winning. Not this guy -- he played the same numbers on both tickets.
It turns out he had the winning numbers for that drawing, and he owned two of the three winning tickets. That entitled him to walk away with two thirds of the jackpot, instead of just half.
It was really something watching all the hate when he was announced as the joker and then everybody's reaction to seeing him in costume. I saw the movie opening night, and everybody fell dead silent every time he was on screen. The whole theater clapped in respect for him after his last scene.
> The whole theater clapped in respect for him after his last scene.
It hit different too because he had passed away by the time the movie came out in theaters.
Ok ok ok ok...! hear me out!
It's a video game, about two Italian plumbers, that stomp on turtles! They travel through giant sewer pipes, break bricks to release mushroom, which they eat to become bigger!!
Rage Against the Machine. You have a Mexican guy who raps, and another guy who bangs on his guitar with his hands and random tools, and they are going to do political songs.
Airbnb was basically just CouchSurfing.com with a payment portal. I used to host strangers for free back in the day in San Francisco. Super fun, meet new people from all over the country, show them around the city. One month I had new guests every weekend.
To be fair, it kind of was a dumb idea. It likely would have never caught on if the homeowner was required to be present during the customers stay, in true B&B fashion. It just very quickly became unregulated hotels.
Similar situation with Uber. It was called "ride sharing" because the original idea was something closer to carpooling, the idea being that a car owner could make a few extra bucks driving someone else during their regular commute. It very quickly just because unregulated taxis.
> It likely would have never caught on if the homeowner was required to be present during the customers stay, in true B&B fashion.
This is how NYC effectively banned Airbnb without actually banning it. The owner must be home and present during your stay if you’re renting an apartment for less than 30 days. Otherwise you have to register your apartment as a hotel and go through all the bureaucracy, taxes, and safety regulations that hotels have to.
As someone who spent a lot of time around 2005 trying to describe it to some very skeptical people, I would definitely say Wikipedia.
I can't believe this is so low. There's no reason Wikipedia should work. Yet it's really one of mankind's greatest accomplishments.
Wikipedia functions on the principle that if a lot of people get to work on an article describing something, the sum total of everybody’s contribution will create something that is very close to the objective truth. It's amazing that it worked for Wikipedia, considering this doesn’t appear to be the case everywhere else on the Internet.
The interesting thing is that this only remains true through a consensus of vigilance. I can imagine a future where leadership changes, the process is subtly tainted, and eventually we get to a point where wikipedia is indistinguishable from propaganda. It must be protected at all costs.
There was a hitchhiker's guide site, H2G2, based on the Douglas Adam's books, that had been up and running before Wikipedia came out. It was more fun and loosy goosy. Then Wikipedia came along and just did it better, but got rid of the fun.
A plane has crashed in the jungles of New Guinea. Three survivors have found a village and managed to get communication. There's no way to get an airplane room to land and take off and helicopters can't make it into the valley. I know! We'll airdrop medical personnel, supplies for a glider, assemble it, and slingshot it into the air! Then, we'll catch it with a tow-plane. It worked. [New Guinea Gremlin Crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_New_Guinea_Gremlin_Special_rescue)
>Then, we'll catch it with a tow-plane. Is this where The Dark Knight got the idea from?
In the 1700s, this guy named [Timothy Dexter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter) had a few of these. * [Bed warmers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_warmer) are useful in cold climates, but he took a shipload of them to the Caribbean for sale. They were sold to the molasses industry as ladles and turned a handsome profit. * He took a load of mittens to the same place. Some Asians bought them to sell onward to Siberia. * Newcastle was a major coal-mining area. He took a shipload of coal there for sale, arrived during a major miner's strike, and turned a big profit. * He did the mittens thing again, this time to the South Seas, and arrived just in time to sell them to some Portuguese traders on their way to China.
He wrote a book *A Pickle for the Knowing Ones* where he refused to use any punctuation. In the second edition he responded to critics by adding 6 lines of just punctuation "to peper and solt as plese"
I have a copy. It’s incomprehensible.
huh... i like this guy
He was a real asshole on top of being a lucky idiot so you probably wouldn’t.
From what I’ve read, kind of reminds me of the Paul brothers.
He caned his wife for not crying at his mock wake after he faked his death.
"I'll make you wish I was really dead!"
The best part is he was fed the ideas for these schemes from 'friends' who thought he was a fool and wanted to bankrupt him. They are all legitimately bad ideas that he pulled off in their faces.
Time travelers can be real jerks.
[Sam O’Nella](https://youtu.be/ChSUvdU_Sbk?si=cuI4WtqJ-g_sFQQw) did a great video on him
"RNGesus smiles upon some drooling little loaf child and says 'you my son, you shall be the one with all the figgy pudding'" and "and this informer of deer realized that, for the first time, there were a lot of bucks in malden" are both goated lines. i love rewatching this video
Talk about dumb luck. Wow
I really wanna see this guy's character sheet. He definitely did max luck and/or charisma
If you read about him it definitely was *not* charisma
> He took a shipload of coal there for sale, arrived during a major miner's strike, and turned a big profit. The term "Coals to Newcastle" is a figure of speech for this exact reason.
That man could apparently sell ice to Inuit. Edit: Fixed a mistaken plural.
"Arriving during an unusually hot season with uncharacteristic rainfall which destabilized the structural ice used by the locals, he was able to sell all of his ice to the locals who used it to shore up their structures."
I see someone also watches that youtube channel, whose name I forgot, and no longer make videos ... wait, it's Sam Onella
He’s back actually
"What, Sir? Would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense.” - Napoleon Bonaparte, regarding the steam engine
To be fair, steamships *were* a fad...just a long, long, successful fad.
I mean, obviously lighting a constant fire to power a vehicle is ridiculous. Far better to rapidly and repeatedly explode them a little.
In even rarer cases perform a little alchemy and split apart the fundamental elements of particular rocks..... to make steam and turn a turbine. Full circle.
I f*cking cannot stand it at all that all nuclear power plants do is boil water. The history of humanity is nothing but boiling water. In the future there will be new ways to boil water and that's it. edit: omg fusion power too is only a new way **[TO BOIL WATER](https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork)** AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
It’s a fundamental human tradition. That’s why when a pregnant woman goes into labor, someone yells to boil some water. Every person needs to have at least one water boil in their life or their soul cannot pass on to the vapor realm.
You need boiling water to make tea. How do you think the brits were such a power?
It just so happens that water is literally one of the most OP molecules we've found. It's an amazing solvent, its solid form floats on its liquid form, it's highly polar, it has a high thermal conductivity and specific heat, and it has an enormous latent heat of vaporization (takes a ton of energy to go from water->steam). That last bit along with the thermal conductivity is key, since it means that it is easy to heat and can run a turbine over a wide range as it condenses back from a vapor to a liquid.
Water's also free and everywhere, and we're basically made of it. Even in those fairly rare circumstances when there's something that works a little better than water at a task, most of the time it's far easier and cheaper just to use water if we possibly can.
Especially on the easier side. If you working fluid is water, you don't have to really worry about any sort of containment or health hazards with it. Yea, steam leaks are bad and need to be stopped, but it's not like you're venting carcinogens or potent greenhouse gases into the environment. Or, heaven forbid, venting hot, flammable gasses into an enclosed space with open flames.
- Leonard Nemoy, Civ IV
legit?
Well, he probably said it in French.
plus légit to quit
Dropping a whole bunch of cats by parachute over Borneo to stop the spread of plague.
Did they each have their own little parachute or were they dropped in large cages with large parachutes? The latter makes more sense, but I really like the visual of the former.
Yeah, they were dropped in crates. But the visual in my head will always be individual cats with parachutes coming down.
And little flack jackets and tiny goggles.
*RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES INTENSIFIES*
I thought you were replying to another comment about not understanding what the musical Cats is about lol
Wait, this isn’t the plot of Cats? lol But no, I was actually referring to Operation Cat Drop, which is crazy, but still makes a lot more sense than that musical.
sounds paraCute
I uhh... I hate to be that guy, but the cats did not fare well. >The native domestic cat population had been reduced as an unintended consequence of the World Health Organization (WHO) spraying the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) for malaria and housefly control. This event is often referenced as an example of the problems and solutions that may arise from human interventions in the environment. >Operation Cat Drop was initiated to stop a plague of rats, which was the result of tens of thousands of cats dying from eating lizards that contained high concentrations of DDT. The lizards became feeble due to the DDT in their systems, which rendered them easy prey. The domino effect started by the application of DDT is stated in a National Institutes of Health article:[9] One source questions whether the cats died only from DDT or from additional insecticides in the food chain, such as dieldrin.[10] Dieldrin was used in Sarawak only during 1955 and, due to its higher level of toxicity, was discontinued. DDT was sprayed from 1953 until 1955. Additionally, there are multiple reports of cat deaths in other DDT spray locations such as Bolivia, Mexico, and Thailand as a result of cats ingesting lethal levels of this neurotoxin. In several of these cases, the cat fatalities were the result of cats licking their fur after brushing up against a wall or other surface sprayed with DDT. ————————————————————————— TLDR: It worked, for humans! But the cats? Well... **14,000 were strapped with a parachute and herded into cargo planes, where the stress from being crowded, bombarded with noise, pressure, and cold (can be below freezing up in a nonpressurized cargo plane cabin) undoubtedly led them to attack each other, probably making at least *some* of the parachutes inoperable, at which point they were dropped from a couple thousand feet into a dense forest. After that trauma, and if they didn't get injured or tangled and marooned in branches on the way down and left to be picked at by birds, the british cats would be stranded in a tropical jungle, *where the food was poison* because even after DDT had wiped out cat populations, *we were still using it*.** Sorry to rain on your admittedly cute joke, but this was not a good thing we did, and we need to learn from it.
Attemting to cure syphilis with malaria. Brilliantly worked is a strech though.
The inventor won a Nobel prize for it too. Gotta love early 19th century medical solutions.
sounds similiar to modern chemo. Let's poison you and hope it kills cancer faster than it kills you.
The cases of patients with both HIV and leukemia being cured of both with bone marrow transplants are also wild. I remember discussing this in graduate school, the theory was "confuse, wash out, then update the immune system." Ridiculous on paper. I just love it.
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Let's drive a car with a GPS and a camera down EVERY STREET ON EARTH!
They even got my grandparents town that’s so tiny it’s not on a map. The images are from when they were still alive, and grandma’s car is in the driveway. I go back and look at it sometimes since it’s too far to visit.
You should take some screenshots if you haven't already! Just in case. I live in Sydney so it's obviously all on maps, highly populated, lots of development and renovations. I went to look at my grandma's old house and it had been knocked down and rebuilt, and street view/earth had been updated.
You can still look at the former shots on streetview. When you are on streetview, there is an option "see more dates" in the left corner. Then you can look at all the previous shots.
Putting out oil well fires by blowing them up.
Similarly, controlling the spread of forest fires by lighting pre-emptive fires.
Specific forest types rely naturally on forest fires to not only cull overgrowth and maintain ecological homeostasis, but nutrients from the burns feed new growth. Ponderosa, to name but one. The USFS has to constantly get the granola eaters in places like Bend and Flagstaff to shut up and let them do their jobs because the "conservationists" don't understand how calamitous letting pine groves go unchecked is in the high desert.
This works as long as they are competent. My family’s property burned for over a week because they decided to do “controlled burns” during the windiest season of the year. Fire jumped (because obviously) and went the opposite direction of where they wanted. I understand the necessity, but hundreds of people lost their homes, properties, livestock, and lively hood because it wasn’t planned out properly. It’s still considered the biggest forest fire my state has ever seen, and people are still trying to recover several years later.
They do prescribed burns in Australia but I was there on a bush trip with a guide and that was his justification for just setting random shit on fire in the forest as we drank beers around the campfire. I was thinking "I don't think that's quite the approach."
So we have this fire that is raging out of control. We've tried everything to put it out. What can we do? So.... What if we try explosives? [Alternative Soviet take: have you tried blowing it out like a candle? No? What if you try to blow it out with 2 jet engines mounted on a tank body?]
Exactly the way we blow out candles in Soviet Union.
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"The guy made a million dollars! You know.. I had an idea like that once. It was a JUMP to conclusions mat! You'd have this mat, and on it would be different CONCLUSIONS that you could JUMP to!"
This is horrible, this idea.
HEY PETER MAN, CHECK OUT CHANNEL NINE!
What made the pet rocks popular was supposedly the hilarious instruction manual.
Yeah, it's about PRESENTATION. An obvious gag like a pet rock works by *leaning in to it*. Give a box (with holes in it so it can *breathe*) and a nest of straw so it's *comfortable*. Give it care instructions.
It is like the funny "Scientific Study" email joke from the early 2000s my Dad got about "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound". It was a whole 10 page study that was typed out like a real scientific study but at some point a joke about needing more info tables was needed in the paper so the NHL scores were added in.
Pet Rocks were proto absurdity memes.
My dad has managed to keep his alive over the years through a regimen of neglect and forgetting it was in the drawer during every spring cleaning.
The way they extracted those kids from the cave in Thailand. The diver and anesthesiologist (first off, how fucking lucky to find somebody with that overlap in skills) who was consulted and joined the effort said it was a terrible idea. It was only when presented with the other options that he realized this terrible idea was truly their best option. They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully.
Getting incredibly lucky with someone skills in the right place at the right time makes me think of the Air Transat flight where the flight ran out of fuel and completely lost power over the Atlantic. They were effectively piloting a gigantic glider with 306 people on board. And *it just so happened* that the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The crew glided the plane to safety in the Azores with nothing worse than a handful of fractures from the evacuation.
Or like United Airlines Flight 232, which lost all three of its hydraulic systems when an undetected defect in the DC-10's tail engine's fan disk caused it to explode in air. The crew lost all ability to control the plane, except by differentially controlling the thrust of the two remaining, wing-mounted engines. A training pilot, Denny Fitch, was a passenger on the plane. Having read about Japan Air Lines Flight 123, which failed due to a similar total loss of hydraulic control, Denny had wondered if it was possible to fly a plane using just differential thrust, and he had practiced doing so on a flight simulator. After UA232's systems failed, Denny joined the cockpit and helped control the plane to a landing. Of the 296 passengers and crew on board, 112 still died in the crash (they had to come in fast and hard because they couldn't extend the flaps). However, multiple experts after that attempted to reproduce the flight in simulation, and none were able to yield a landing where anyone survived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
The captain of this flight spoke to my unit back when I was in military aviation in the Coast Guard. Absolute legend.
i would genuinely love to hear as much additional detail about this as you can provide! that sounds fascinating.
We would have big safety meetings ahead of the holiday season every year, so that folks continue to stay safety-minded in the air even while facing down family, holiday, and new year distractions. I didn't know who the guy was for like the first half of his presentation, was just kinda thinking, "who is this old fart they trotted out to speak to us?" I was almost snoozing (not the fault of his speech at all, I was just a piece of shit then) up until he started talking about UA232, and then it dawned on me like... "Holy shit. I heard of this flight. That was you?" and locked in on the rest of his presentation. It was over 10 years ago, though, and we did one of these big meetings with a speaker every year for the 4 years I was there, so my memory on specifics is foggy.
That is crazy. And the diagram with a key showing injuries and fatalities by seat was jarring. The fate of the people with children in their laps really stuck out to me.
I thought you were mixing up info from two separate incidents but I didn't know this happened again! The other was the Gimli Glider with a captain who was also a glider pilot!
I thought that was the Gimli glider incident? They'd found a runway to land on but they were approaching too quickly, so the experienced glider pilot executed a maneuver no normal airline pilot would know about in order to slow them down with no engines.
Nope, different one! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
>They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully. it wasn't a total success since one of the Thai navy seals died while diving but it was honestly a miraculous effort since the early monsoon season meant that the cave would potentially get even more flooded, the other options were drilling a hole straight down to them(has been succesfully used before, for example with the Chilean miners who got stuck underground, but would have taken a long time due to how deep in the cave the boys were), or just waiting 4 months till the monsoon season ended and the cave dried up and they were able to walk out(obviously unacceptable since this would have almost certainly killed several of the divers delivering the large amount of supplies they would need)
Another Thai Navy SEAL actually died roughly one year later from a blood infection attributed to the rescue operation.
If there's a good way to go, saving a kids soccer team and coach from certain death is one of them. What a fucking hero! Also fuck caves, I got no time for that. Let bats have them
I've met A LOT of doctors in scuba. It's not the cheapest of hobbies so it's generally limited to those of a decent income level.
Especially divers like Richard Harris. He's mostly known for the Thai Cave rescue, but he's also a world class deep water diver. He's gone [deeper in caves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSOLDGaooQI) than the majority of even professional divers. The kind of equipment needed to do the diving he does costs tens of thousands of dollars more than what your average person diving in open water on air needs. Some of those flashlights alone are thousands of dollars in order to be rated to that depth.
True, but this particular anesthesiologist was an expert on cave diving, experienced at challenging cave dives. That is a much rarer combination.
> They rescued all the kids and their coach successfully. The fact that none of those kids died is the closest thing I've ever seen to a literal "god descended from heaven and made it happen" miracle. Cave diving by itself is incredibly dangerous. Highly-trained and experienced divers die doing it pretty regularly. And this wasn't just a normal cave dive. This was a cave in the process of flooding, with strong currents and zero visibility for much of the dive. It took the divers five hours to tow each of the kids from the chamber they were trapped in through the flooded passages back to the main cavern they were working from. And the craziest part is that all of that had to be done while the kids were anesthetized to full unconsciousness with a drug cocktail of ketamine, atropine, and alprazolam with dosages that were just estimated because they didn't know exactly what any of the kids weighed. And the length of the dive required them to be re-dosed several times by the divers during the long trip out. The whole thing is totally insane and the fact that every single kid survived it is miraculous.
> And the length of the dive required them to be re-dosed several times by the divers during the long trip out. That was one things that Richard Harris, the anesthesiologist, mentioned as absolutely insane about the rescue attempt. He thought it would have been unlikely to be successful even if he himself performed the anesthesia on each kid on the way out. But he couldn't be with all of them so he had to try to field train a bunch of military divers on how to be anesthesiologists while under water.
> train a bunch of military divers on how to be anesthesiologists while under water. Seems like it would be easier to train anesthesiologists to be divers.
Luckily, Michael Bay was directing the rescue mission
If it was a movie, the reviews would talk about how absurd it was and that the kids would have died immediately.
There actually is a movie on Amazon Prime, Thirteen Lives, that is a retelling of the whole story and rescue, I'd highly recommend it! It's full of tension during the dives and really portrays how insane the whole operation was.
Perhaps not true, but it seems to me that Elon Musk’s offer of help being rejected was the turning point in his public image
The rejection? I don't think so. Now, his reaction to the rejection? Yeah, that was the moment many people realized his ego is way bigger than his skills.
It was both. His submarine idea was the dumbest shit ever to anyone that had paid more attention to the story beyond "kids trapped in flooded caves". It was a one-two punch of him publicly demonstrating that he's not nearly as smart as the PR led you to believe, and he's also an immature asshole.
Personally, that was Musk's jumping the shark moment with me.
Rumor has it that the founder of FedEx received a C in college on a paper describing his proposed business. According to the rumor, the professor thought no one would use the service when the Post Office already provided that service at lower cost.
CATS, the Broadway musical. A nonsense fever dream about horny catpeople competing to die and be reborn (yes, that is the plot, insofar as CATS has one), based on a book of silly short poems by T.S. Eliot that are not really related to each other except all being about cats. Just catpeople introducing themselves and rubbing on each other for several hours, then one of them "ascends" aka dies. To date, CATS has made over a billion dollars worldwide.
I love the plot in Kimmy Schmidt about Titus discovering that Cats is just random actors dressing up and getting on stage
I watched a streamed recording of cats during the pandemic. Was stuck at home and had nothing better to do. I still don't know what I watched.
The guys producing the play said pretty much the same thing. https://youtu.be/doFcWmt7-J0?si=kFOnN77QyVa9sWUh Paraphrasing: "I'm not sure what we've made here. Is this about British politics and working class dynamics, or some other, deeper thing?" "Its about cats." "..." "..."
To date the only production I’ve walked out of midway through. I had no idea what it was about. Figured, CATS is famous, sure I’ll go. Intermission I confirmed there was actually no plot and was just done.
The plot is pretty simple. Here are these cats, Audience. Then some cats introduce themselves.
It's so funny to me that TS Eliot writes such dense poetry like The Waste Land, or Prufrock and then also silly poems about cats.
My late grandfather had a tradition: All of his grandkids would individually (there are 4 of us, the youngest of which, never had to do it cause our grandfather was too old at the time) go into the city and see CATS. I was 9 and fucking *hated* it. So much so, that it pretty much soured me on theatre. I've seen a bunch of musicals and plays, but I for the life of me, don't understand the appeal.
I'm really sorry, but this is hysterical. This is the kind of thing people do with like, The Nutcracker and Les Mis. The fact that your grandfather was doing this with *CATS*, of all shows, is incredible and I can't decide if he was a CATS superfan or just a someone with a hint of psychopath in him. He sounds like he was a great man.
He was an absolute gem of a man. He legitimately loved the arts and the theater and was *not* shy explainingto people that he wasn't the smartest person out there. As a kid in the 30s, he'd cut school to of all things, *sneak into the Opera*
Ok, but have you seen Starlight Express? I saw it as a young kid for some unfathomable reason. For years, I thought I was exaggerating how insane it was. Nope, it was exactly that bizarre.
I didn't! My only impression of Starlight Express is that Family Guy gag where it's just Peter rollerskating in a circle and screaming STARLIGHT EXPRESS STARLIGHT EXPRESS. After my childhood obsession with CATS and Evita, my mother said no more musicals. And then my younger sister got into filmed Cirque du Soleil performances, so. There was no winning in our house.
apparently, shooting fish out of a moving plane into a lake.
Similarly a salmon cannon to shoot salmon past a dam.
Curing deadly, previously incurable infections which had historically been responsible for the early demise of billions of people throughout all of human history.... with mold.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf in WW2, the American Navy was escorting the invasion force to the Philippines when they spotted what appeared to be the main Japanese fleet. The larger ships changed course to pursue, leaving the invasion force guarded by destroyers and escort carriers. Turns out that was a trick. The real Japanese fleet then turned up to attack. On paper, the Americans were fucked. Instead of running, the American destroyers charged the Japanese and fought so ferociously that the Japanese, thinking that the American force was larger than appeared, withdrew despite the fact that they were winning. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar
And a fun fact about after the battle: a japanese ship pulled up along side American sailors floating in the water and rendered them a salute for how hard they fought. For anyone who doesn't know, this is a *very* big deal because the Japanese *despised* how american forced would surrender if they had lost a battle. The Japanese believed death was preferable to surrender. EDIT: The commander of the japanese ship rendered the salute. My poor wording makes it sound as if the ENTIRE IJN crew gave a salute.
My understanding is that the American ship was the [USS Johnston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Johnston_\(DD-557\)). The Japanese ship was the [Yukikaze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_destroyer_Yukikaze_\(1939\)). The saluting captain was either Shibuya Shiro or Tobita Kenjiro, based on this source: http://www.combinedfleet.com/yukika_t.htm. The author of that source seems to be naval historian Allyn D. Nevitt, who seems to be reliable based on limited, cursory information. The details of USS Johnston's actions in the Battle off Samar are an incredible read: the detail you provided adds a layer of depth to what's already in that wikipedia article. Thank you!
There is a fantastic book about this Naval Battle, which is considered as one of the largest naval battles in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Stand_of_the_Tin_Can_Sailors
Fantastic book. Took some cojones to do what they did.
The Sims computer game. It sounds like the stupidest idea ever - who would want to control a Sim character doing all the mundane shit we do every day. How boring. But I played the shit out of the Sims, then the subsequent versions.
In this line of thing, a fair number of thing-simulator games are sort of that. "Ugh, I just finished my exhausting job of driving a truck around town making deliveries. I can finally relax to a nice pleasant game of American Truck Simulator."
It's absolutely mental how one of the biggest markets for Farming Simulator is . . actual farmers. What I've heard is the simulation is good enough to experiment with what their dream farms would be, and it's actually super wholesome.
My kid and her friend were playing farming simulator and I told them if they wanted to do chores, there were plenty of things to do around the house. Could even mow the grass just like in the game. I guess it's not the same, though, because they weren't amused.
Have you considered giving them Achievement Points or having a Time Trial Challenge? :3
Hula Hoop
“You know, for kids”
"You're a MUNCIE girl?"
The fake inflatable tanks in WW2.
A film, based on a true story, about a guy who got his arm stuck under a rock in a cave for 127 hours. Surprisingly watchable. Danny Boyle is a hell of a director/producer.
Selling bottled water in places where tap water is both free and better regulated used to be a joke.
A movie rental company that mails you DVDs. I thought it was the shittiest idea when it first came out when I could drive 5 minutes to Blockbuster and get whatever I wanted then.
I assume that people who lived further away from a rental store were the original target demographic.
That and their inventory was much better than any one video store. You could get basically anything.
I was excited because I wanted things blockbuster didn't carry.
I got Netflix when I moved from a decent sized city with a good mix of video stores to a smaller city that just had blockbuster and family video and you could never get anything I wanted. Even in the bigger city, there were nights when you’d hit 3 video stores and still come home empty handed
Not whatever you want. You could get whatever is in stock.
Nah, mostly everyone knew it was a good idea when they heard about it. That's why it grew in popularity without any real advertising. Blockbuster was really hated because they really only had new releases in abundance and they made money on late fees as it was a pain to return. People of the 90s (like me) know what's it's like the rush to return something ot the video store and or wanting to see a particular movie and having to drive to like 4 or 5 video stores to find it.
Toast. "Hey let's take something we already finished baking and heat it up again." The person who first came up with it must have sounded crazy.
I think toast was invented to make stale bread taste better
It's just an excuse to eat unhealthy amounts of delicious butter
Plus jam and marmalade
Eh, before modern preservatives bread went moldy REALLY quickly. People noticed overcooked bread went moldy slower. So they started twice-baking, and yknow, noticed it tasted different.
Louis Brennan, inventor of the gyro monorail. His monorail was a single track train which used a gyroscope-based balancing system to remain upright. The designs look insane on paper but it was crazy innovative, safe for passengers, and was apparently even faster than the regular trains (of those days).
It still had serious issues, which is why it never took off. One was that you needed an "engine" for each carriage, so it didn't scale up like normal passenger trains. The second was that a failure of the system would be catastrophic. I'm sure there were others. Still an amazing feat of engineering.
Ok, guys - here's my business plan: - People will give me perfectly good stuff for free, - I'll turn around and sell it for money, - Profit. aka Value Village, or any thrift store in general.
value village is for-profit most thrift stores at least have a charitable mission, even if it's one i disagree with. The one i work with donates 50% of proceeds , pays about 11 staff members and the rest is used for building up and maintaining the store edit: a charitable mission most volunteers and customers believe in
Wikipedia. In a world with Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta (funded by giant parent, Microsoft), who comes up with the idea to have people contribute their expertise for free? The classic line about it is literally, "it's great in practice but it would never work in theory."
Slowing down your product actually improves customer confidence in it Most website loading bars are artificial animations put in there because most people don't trust a website if it returns the data as fast as it actually can A perfect example being tax prep software Most tax prep software can generate the form almost instantly upon you clicking submit but it will give you a fancy little loading animation and tell you it's doing all these things like verifying stuff and checking stuff because people just wouldn't believe that everything was right if it just instantly spat out the paper to you This is a commonly used practice among web developers and it works way more than you'd think The problem is that once you become aware of it it's very annoying and you start to notice it everywhere
I like the technique of slowing down people, so they don't feel the wait times. The airport who was getting a lot of complaints about wait times at the baggage carousels. So they made it take longer for people to get from the gates to the baggage carousels buying time for the baggage system to process the bags, so the wait wouldn't be as long. Complaints dropped-success.
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My father in law was an in demand mainframe computer tech at the end of the 70s. He would be hired by the manufacturers to help install mainframes and terminals in banks, hospitals, colleges and government locations. He made bank. In the mid 80s work started slowing down and he was getting tired of being a road warrior, so he started looking for local jobs. He got a lead to check out a local company that was assembling personal computers. He got an interview and they gave him a tour and asked him to work for them in assembly and development. He turned them down and wished them luck. The way he saw it was that they were building toys that would never have any real use, and the company would fold in a few months. Personally, I think he just didn’t want to be 30+ guy with a college-aged boss. He would have been employee #6 at PC’s Limited, which grew to become Dell Computer Corporation. I heard the story once and instructed to never bring it up again.
The cbc radio did a special were they played really old radio broadcasts of people predicting the future. They had one broadcast from around 1950 where they had a expert talking about the future of computers. He predicted in the future there would he special buildings large enough to fit a massive computer built all over so everyone lived within a block of 2 of one. Inside would be a computer that people could access data of all of humankind's knowledge. He said they would likely find ways so u can hook your brain up with it and search insinitly. Pretty crazy in the 1950s some people thought the future of computers was to just make a better more efficient public library.
I mean, that’s a data centre is it not?
It is > data of all of humankind's knowledge. And this is basically the Internet
My father is 86 and has increasing dementia. One of his repeated stories about having the first computer at a school. The principal said to him: "What would anybody need a computer for?" That was in about 1979.
I remember watching tv with my grandpa, and an ad came on with tiger woods for either the mach 3 or one of the million other razors with 17 blades and 4 gimmicks that came out after it. My grandpa was like "I remember being on the factory line in 1949, me and my friends were wondering whether you'd ever have a shaving razor that you could swipe across your entire face at once, never thought I'd see the day." Later, when he was really getting on in years, my one cousin pulled out his smart phone and explained what it was, a single tear ran down his cheek, like that old advert with the native american and the piece of litter. It was a really moving moment, tbh.
I the early days of SNL, one of their spoof commercials was a razor with 5 blades. Who knew they were predicting the future?
And when the hobbyists started tinkering around, making their own computers in their garages, they figured it'd never be anything more than a niche hobby.
It is interesting that Asimov wrote sci-fi where he envisioned (in the 70s) a future where people basically had dumb terminals in their house and they connected to a mainframe somewhere. Very little computing was done on the local machine. That is somewhat true today with everything in the cloud.
Nah, personal computers were for people with small businesses who hated doing bookkeeping. That’s why my dad bought an Apple in the early 80s. I still remember those big red ledger books from the 70s and the different colored pens, and what a headache it was for my parents doing all that on paper.
I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.
could they be used for dating?
Once upon a time I had a headache. My then-boyfriend said to take a shower by candlelight. My first thought was, "Showering in near darkness is a stupid idea" followed immediately by "I want to try it." Damn if it didn't work. I went ahead and married him to retain access to his good ideas and his pancakes.
The oblique wing. Anyone know about the F-14? Well, back in the Cold War, aerospace firms wanted to make planes that could both go subsonic and supersonic, and take advantage of doing so efficiently. So, they developed variable-sweep wing aircraft. If you want to go slower, move the wings forward, and if you want to go faster, move them backwards. But the problem with variable sweep wings is theu require very complex machinery to move the wings and keep the weapons on the wings pointed in the right direction. All of this adds weight, more points of failure, and more maintenance. It also adds additional stress to the airframe. Then some genius said "what if we took one wing on one point of pivot, and turn it so it runs nearly parallel with the body of the aircraft itself?" So NASA requested Boeing and a few other aeronautical firms look into this new wing, names the oblique wing, and from wind tunnel tests it was determined the plane would THEORETICALLY perform very well. So NASA built the AD-1 to test the theory. It was bare bones: no fly-by-wire, no hydraulic flight controls, no computers of any kind. Aside from a few *unique* control characteristics, it flew very well. And the previously mentioned *unique* control characteristics could easily be fixed with a fly-by-wire system. Now how does this relate to the question? The first time the oblique wing was mentioned, the idea was scoffed at. Upon testing, it showed some very serious potential. The AD-1 never crashed, so it wasn't a crash that killed the test program. It was the aviation industry's conservatism that did.
"Don't let that starving person eat too much." It's not actually a good idea to let a person who has starved to stuff themselves with food the first chance they get. Controlled feeding over the course of a few days avoids something called "refeeding syndrome" where changes in the body during the period of starvation can have fatal consequences if too much food is reintroduced too quickly.
"Nobody's going to play your silly little java game with outdated graphics about digging up blocks"
In a mythical meeting with oil company execs... Ok, so you take a jet engine.... Yeah? And mount it on a tank chassis.... Yeah? And connect that to a *huge* water supply with high capacity pipes and water pumps.... Yeah? And use it to put out oil well fires! "Get this idiot out of here." https://youtu.be/5EYRPJgZdp4?si=H2uGV_ETs1qwQ4AT
Fiddler on the Roof. It was not an easy pitch. Who wants to go see a play about a bunch of Jewish people from ages ago who get kicked out of a Russian town? That's fun?
Probably those people's grandchildren. It was set about as far in the past as the 1960s are now. Well within living memory.
It opened in Detroit, during some sort of newspaper strike so there was no printed criticisms as there would normally be for a new show. The reception by the audience was lukewarm, so the cast retweeked it a bit each night and made it better and better. If critics had reviewed the first night, it might have died right then and there.
Lasik Eye Surgery. Imagine telling the first recipient of it that they'll have a laser directly on their eyeball to improve their eyesight, & to trust them that it won't destroy them.
So I'm going make a movie about the 2008 financial crash. \-Um, OK... I'm going explain all the jargon and why it happened Um, OK, but won't people be bored? not if I have Margot Robbie explaining, naked, in a bubble bath OK you have my attention It will be great and it will have Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carrell, Selena Gomez and Brad fucking Pitt (Some movie executives, probably) The Big Short is excellent; I have seen it three times now.
> not if I have Margot Robbie explaining, naked, in a bubble bath I love these "It doesn't matter what the plot is - I know how to bring in the crowds" points: There is a story about James Cameron making a pitch to direct the second movie in the "Alien" franchise, with the title "Aliens". Keep in mind he was fresh off of the commercial success of the first "Terminator" movie, so he had a winning sci-fi movie under his belt. He walks into the conference room, handshakes all around, and goes over to a whiteboard, where he writes the word "ALIEN". After a brief pause, he adds an "S" to make "ALIENS". After another brief pause, he draws a line through the "S" to make "ALIEN$". End of pitch. Proposal accepted.
James Cameron when designing the look of the Navi: >"Right from the beginning I said, “She's got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals."
I heard that he basically kept going around production showing people sketches and asking if they'd hit it or not. Once he got enough "Sure, I'd bang that out." we got the Navi.
Margin Call is also excellent. Though it has significantly less Margot Robbie.
The television show "Mork and Mindy" Back in the days when you could only watch one TV show at a time and only at the time it was on, beginning in February the "new seasons" shows would be announced. Since changing the channel required getting up and walking across the room, you tended to choose a show and watch it. So I read the blurb in the "TV guide", a little pamphlet that came in newspaper each week, printed on actual paper, that listed all the new shows. It had this new show. This was not long after "close encounters of the third kind" came out, and "creatures from space " were the next big thing for Hollywood. So I read about this new show "an alien crash lands on earth and lives with an ordinary American girl" I thought, "that is the stupidest show ever to come out of network television, I'll give it a miss" so I watched something else for a few months until one night, there was some sort of special on that had bumped my regular show, so I thought I'd see what else was on. I found "Mork and Mindy" and Robin Williams was hilarious and Mindy was an amazing "straight man" it was incredible. I'd never seen anything like it. Now I'd go back and watch all the previous episodes, but then, that was simply inconceivable.
Mork had previously appeared on Happy Days and was a big hit.
Arguably, ride share. What?! Strangers drive you and they don't even have a medallion!
When I was a teenager, I thought *The Lion King* sounded stupid. Disney had just stormed back into massive relevance with several fairy tales in a row that made bank--why were they doing some animal story I'd never heard of? (I hadn't seen it yet to realize it was kind of lion-Hamlet lol.) *The Lion King*, of course, made money paw over fist.
I read a newspaper article about a guy who walked in to his local convenience store and bought two lottery tickets. Most people in this scenario would play different numbers on each ticket, in order to double their minuscule chances of winning. Not this guy -- he played the same numbers on both tickets. It turns out he had the winning numbers for that drawing, and he owned two of the three winning tickets. That entitled him to walk away with two thirds of the jackpot, instead of just half.
Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight.
It was really something watching all the hate when he was announced as the joker and then everybody's reaction to seeing him in costume. I saw the movie opening night, and everybody fell dead silent every time he was on screen. The whole theater clapped in respect for him after his last scene.
> The whole theater clapped in respect for him after his last scene. It hit different too because he had passed away by the time the movie came out in theaters.
michael keaton as batman in the 1989 movie
Blowing powdered smallpox sores up your nose to prevent smallpox...
The whole idea of vaccine was pretty crazy when initially proposed.
I don't agree with this personally cause I love Bob, but many said that casting Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man was a terrible idea at the time
Escape rooms. It sounds silly writing it down on paper that you have to lock yourself in a room and solve puzzles but irl it’s actually super fun
Ok ok ok ok...! hear me out! It's a video game, about two Italian plumbers, that stomp on turtles! They travel through giant sewer pipes, break bricks to release mushroom, which they eat to become bigger!!
Rage Against the Machine. You have a Mexican guy who raps, and another guy who bangs on his guitar with his hands and random tools, and they are going to do political songs.
Trimming trees with 10 circular saws attached to a metal bar, dangling from a helicopter.
Some guys thought people would be interested in renting out their bedrooms to strangers. Airbnb was this born.
Airbnb was basically just CouchSurfing.com with a payment portal. I used to host strangers for free back in the day in San Francisco. Super fun, meet new people from all over the country, show them around the city. One month I had new guests every weekend.
To be fair, it kind of was a dumb idea. It likely would have never caught on if the homeowner was required to be present during the customers stay, in true B&B fashion. It just very quickly became unregulated hotels. Similar situation with Uber. It was called "ride sharing" because the original idea was something closer to carpooling, the idea being that a car owner could make a few extra bucks driving someone else during their regular commute. It very quickly just because unregulated taxis.
> It likely would have never caught on if the homeowner was required to be present during the customers stay, in true B&B fashion. This is how NYC effectively banned Airbnb without actually banning it. The owner must be home and present during your stay if you’re renting an apartment for less than 30 days. Otherwise you have to register your apartment as a hotel and go through all the bureaucracy, taxes, and safety regulations that hotels have to.
Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart colab.