From an old edition of the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge:

An airplane’s tire will hydroplane at a speed in knots equal to 9 times the square root of the tire pressure in PSI. So if your tires are inflated to 36 PSI, sq.rt 36 = 6 * 9 = 54 knots. If there is standing water on the runway, you will have no braking authority or steering control from the wheels, you will have to maintain control of the aircraft with the flight controls, and you cannot rely on short field stopping figures from the POH if it requires applying brakes above 54 knots.

I got that out of the 2003 edition; I don’t know if it’s in the current issue.

Ask Randall Monroe.

This post is the first I’ve heard of this, and I’m confident in declaring it pseudoscientific bullshit.

I present to you: The Carrington Event. In 1859, the Earth was directly hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun. This caused the strongest geomagnetic storm in recorded history. Miners in the American rocky mountains woke up in the middle of the night because the Aurora Borealis was so bright they thought it was morning. Currents induced in telegraph wires caused sparks and fires. A telegraph line from Boston Massachusetts to Portland, Maine was able to operate for hours with no power connected at all; the geomagnetic storm induced enough current in the telegraph lines that the operators were able to pass traffic for hours without any batteries connected to the circuit at all.

There is no mention of people dying from unexplained heart attacks at the time. If solar or geomagnetic storms could magnetically disrupt blood flow, you’d think the largest geomagnetic storm we know of would have been associated with an uptick in recorded cases. But it isn’t.

THAT SAID. I do believe that solar flares, CMEs or other such events can and do have an effect on the health of organisms on Earth including humans. I spent most of my time in aviation meteorology class studying the troposphere so my understanding of the high atmosphere isn’t as strong, but…bombard the high atmosphere with particles from the sun, some chemistry can happen which disrupts the ozone layer, more UV light makes it to the surface, and we get more sun burns and skin cancers. However, as far as I can tell, Thomas Midgley Jr. had more of an effect on the ozone layer than any recorded solar flare has.

I had a nightmare once made mostly or entirely out of assets from Ocarina of Time.

I found myself in an underground room of some kind, just a large space made out of that brown dirt wall texture. There was no entrance or exit, the room was maybe the size of a large classroom or two, maybe 30x40 feet? Along one wall was a low rise, with the light grey stone wall texture behind it, two braziers providing the only light in the space, and a kind of gallows/gantry thing made out of those large wooden beams you see Beneath The Well. One upright member supporting a horizontal swingarm, and from the end of the swing arm dangled a noose.

Standing beneath the noose was a tall, thin figure. Thinking about it now I picture it as a ReDead enemy but I don’t think that’s what it actually looked like. It made no sounds at all. It walked like a ReDead does though; that slow labored trudge. It started trudging toward me, and as it did, the gantry moved to keep the noose hangling about a foot directly over its head, making the noise from the Castle Town draw bridge as it moved.

It followed me around this room for a bit, I couldn’t move very fast, like my body wouldn’t respond right. I tried to say something but I couldn’t summon up any power.

I woke up in a cold sweat with my girlfriend asking me what was wrong. Did I mention I was 27 years old at the time?

The novelty of my brain using N64 graphics for this, along with the weirdness of the noose hanging over the figure and not actually around his neck, burned it into my memory.

I’ll also never forget the first lucid dream I had. I was on my grandparents’ back deck, talking to several members of my family. My grandmother’s dog Ginger started barking over us, as she constantly. I started to say some smartass line to the dog, starting with “Ginger, you shouldn’t bark because…” and then a thought occurred to me. “…Because you’re dead…we put you down last year, and dead dogs don’t…bark I must be dreaming.”

The dog and the people disappeared. Just…despawned. Everything got less vivid and my peripheral vision disappeared. I could see what I was directly looking at, or a blank beige color. I walked around the yard for a minute in a perfectly familiar and yet empty world, everything simultaneously had a kind of dark “before an afternoon thunderstorm” kind of look and that blank beige color, and after a minute or two I woke up.

I hadn’t heard of lucid dreaming before this, and in fact not until a couple years after the fact. I spent a couple years really interested in the subject when I did, and managed it a couple more times. Some people talk about having “control” of the dream, for me, I usually realize I’m dreaming, it immediately starts to fade, and I’m able to just walk around and look at stuff for a little bit before I wake up.

I’m guessing everything that was on that corner is now on the floor.

“I don’t get out much, so I read.”

• Pilot, Farscape

They do publish pretty good information about home canning, though in batch sizes more and more of us aren’t going to do because we’re not putting up 10 acres worth of vegetables.

You rarely encounter pure water out in the world; even rainwater will have things dissolved in it.

Even then, there may be chemicals like solder flux or electrolyte from a leaky capacitor that water might dissolve and become conductive enough to cause problems.

Compact Disc Digital Audio is difficult to improve upon in terms of quality. For day to day listening I’ll either use mp3 or FLAC but especially as the streaming services enshittify I’ll take my media on CD, thanks.

Both of my cars have CD players, I probably ought to burn some discs to listen to. I often drive in silence these days.

What is it with people on Lemmy and “I’m [height] with unusually [shoe size] feet”?

It’s like how Firefox’s homepage almost always recommends an “article” about hearing aids.

I was just thinking the exact same fucking thing. Somebody call Eddie Murphy.

Yeah that same cat I was talking about needed thyroid medication that was given to him by ear cream. Compounding pharmacy liked to underdose him by a factor of 10 though; we got at least two batches of that medicine that was something like .01mg when it was supposed to be .1mg. Which was…great.

I had a cat that could not be pilled. You could push that pill down that cat’s throat elbow deep and he’d still spit it out. I had this conversation with more than one vet:

“Do you have that medicine in liquid form? You can’t pill this cat.”

“Oh sure you can, you just have to do it right.”

“Okay, demonstrate if you please. Give him a dose and show me how it’s done.”

“ugh, okay.” fails to pill the cat “…Huh. Well…”

“Do you have that medicine in liquid form?”

Shiny coat.

This is NOT what I meant and that damn genie KNEW it…

The dangle tail is yes.

I think there are several different motivations.

First, I’ve seen cats chew up cardboard boxes in order to shape them. This side is in my way, I’m gonna saw it off, and the only saw I have is my face. ergo: cronch.

Second, humans like chewing on things like crunchy potato chips. Imagine if you had long pointy fangs, wouldn’t it be satisfying to sink your teeth into something like cardboard?

The little nose wrinkle as the teeth get punched in always slays me.

I we ar my PPE. Most commonly eye and ear protection but I’ll wear a dust mask when routing or sanding, etc. Allowing onesself to be injured in the shop is unethical.

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