Tag: video

Boring Prospects

Boring Company has started work on an 29km tunnel in Chicago from downtown to the airport. Successfully completing the airport tunnel will make the tunneling company worth as much as $16B. This valuation will be before any full speed hyperloop implementation. If Boring Company succeeds in lowering the cost of tunneling by 10-100x then they will enable high-speed transportation to be used inside and between cities. This would not only mean capturing most of the existing tunnel and infrastructure projects but increasing the tunneling projects by 100x.

2021-12-17: New tunneling methods are being tried. They’re currently about as fast as Prufrock, the Boring machine (which does 10 m / hour)

Petra, a 3-year-old startup is developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. A mix of gas and heat above 1000 degrees Celsius breaks rock into small pieces. Sensors attached to small rods touch the rock, but the excavation is carried out by the heat and gas. Petra is testing its tunnel-drilling method in a Minnesota quarry on Sioux Quartzite, 8x tougher than most forms of concrete. In the test, Petra says its method is moving through rock at 12 m / hour. Once the rock is broken into tiny pieces, a vacuum is used to suck rock fragments out of the hole.

Wobble Palace

A comedy that centers on the trials of try-hard millennials, Eugene and Jane are a couple in the death throes of their relationship. They see other people, but they haven’t broken up because neither wants to move out of the apartment they share in downtown Los Angeles — an art-freak crash pad with AstroTurf carpets and curtains printed to look like a crowded Windows desktop, complete with the ubiquitous grassy knoll. To satisfy their desire for time to themselves, they decide to split the apartment over a weekend. Eugene’s day comes first, and he begins it by swiping through Tinder on the toilet. It would be impossible to miss that Eugene is balding. Around the shiny dome of his forehead, his remaining hair passes his shoulders. By the time Eugene’s date appears for brunch, he has fashioned a hair piece that is as fantastic as it is foolhardy: He wraps his stringy fringe into a bun and fastens it above his bald spot. It’s a style he calls the “floating toupee.”

Good disguise

This video is loaded with lots of fascinating techniques of high stakes disguise. There’s light disguise, which uses glasses, caps, and facial hair, to hide in a crowd, says Jonna Mendez, the CIA’s former Chief of Disguise. And there’s advanced disguise, which is used to hide your identity in face-to-face encounters. And good disguise is more than just makeup and prostheses. It’s about behavior, too. For instance, an American posing as a European can give themselves away by holding a cigarette the wrong way, resting while standing on one leg, or holding a fork in their right hand.

Skibidi

Skibidi is the latest release by the Russian dance/rave/art/electro/satire Little Big. The band/collective have a reputation for their videos, which include the Disney-lawyer-baiting AK-47, Kim Jong Un tribute LollyBomb, the gangster culture Give me your money, to the retirement home Faradenza, the street life With Russia from love, the nightmare-inducing Hateful Love, and the unforgettable {definitely NSFW} piano-playing Big Dick.

Wow

Owen Wilson likes saying “wow” in movies, people like pointing out that Owen Wilson likes saying “wow” in movies, and this is a collection of those moments.

The First

What “The First” does share with “House of Cards” is a sense of outlining an institution. Its energy is procedural. But the show scarcely cares whether the talking points of the political lobbying, or the engineers’ urgent conversations about the return vehicle, or the astronauts’ gasping debates during training drills, amount to mumbo jumbo. The workplace dramatics exist partly as mere trials for inspirational figures to survive, partly as a spur to the sober soap-operatics that play out around kitchen islands and among taupe interiors. An ode to exploration undercut with a vague sense of elegy, “The First” offers escapism in its dream of gaining distant colonies, and introspection in its study of human limits.

88 OOM Dark Matter Search

physicist Davide D’Angelo and geomicrobiologist Jennifer Macalady travel to Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso to see one of the latest efforts to detect dark matter, the SABRE detector. As with the search for neutrinos, looking for dark matter needs to happen under conditions of “cosmic silence” — in this case, beneath a mountain in Italy. D’Angelo, who is a collaborator on the project, likens the search to “hunting ghosts”.

2020-11-24:

the search spans 10e-21 eV to 10e67 eV, 88 orders of magnitude. perhaps the broadest search ever? The lightest that dark matter could possibly be is about one-thousandth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the electron’s mass — which would result in a particle that’s like an extremely low-energy wave, with a wavelength the size of a small galaxy. Lighter (and therefore longer) entities would be too diffuse to explain why galaxies stick together. The heaviest is a black hole of 30 solar masses.

Final Offer

In Mark Slutsky’s short scifi film “Final Offer”, a traffic ticket lawyer awakens in a doorless room and discovers he’s there to make a deal with an interstellar attorney that could affect all life on Earth.