My interests: Journalism, Politics, International Relations, Urbanism
1 - The New Yorker is the best magazine in the English-speaking world. They employ incredibly good writers.
2 - Without The Guardian, British democracy is utterly fucked. The Brits just don’t know it. Most UK papers are owned by shady characters such as Jonathan Harmsworth. The Brits even have a paper (The Independent) owned by a politically-connected Russian mobster (Evgueni Lebedev).
The Guardian’s non-profit structure gives it more freedom that most UK papers. They often investigate stories the rest of the UK press just won’t touch: Paradise Papers, Panama Papers, Cameron’s tax evasion, etc…
3 - The two best newspapers in France are Le Monde and Mediapart, hands down. Mediapart is a non-profit. Le Monde journalists have special rights and can’t be removed by shareholders. These 2 newspapers are more independent than the rest of the french press.
4 - The Financial Times is the favorite newspaper of elites worldwide. CEOs. Billionaires. Millionaires. Presidents. Prime Ministers. Everyone reads it. And honestly, it’s very solid. The information is always extremely reliable. The FT is also the most expensive newspaper on the planet. But they sometimes publish free stories.
5 - The editorial section of the Wall Street Journal is directly controlled by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The WSJ is the jewel of his global media empire. Fox News and the New York Post are for influencing the masses. WSJ editorials actually allow him to have influence over US high income readers.
6 - If you read WSJ editorials, Rupert Murdoch’s ideas are very simple. Labor unions must be crushed. Corporate concentration is good. Netanyahu is a brave man. US military spending is good. Unions should be restricted by tough laws. Environmental rules are bad. Slash taxes on large corporations. Of course, he doesn’t write it openly. But this what virtually most of the WSJ editorial content boils down to.
7 - Many talented reporters work for the Wall Street Journal and end up deeply ashamed of it. It feels like prostitution. Many would much rather work for The Financial Times, New York Times or ProPublica.
Rupert Murdoch employs great reporters at the Wall Street Journal simply because he needs them to acquire credibility in order to influence readers through his WSJ editorials. If the WSJ was 100% full of trash, american high income readers wouldn’t purchase it.
8 - The best coverage of Silicon Valley is an online newspaper called The Information. If you truly want to know what Meta/Adobe/Microsoft executives are up to, read The Information. Most of their readers are very wealthy investors and rival tech executives.
9 - 90% of leftists who attack the New York Times are wrong.
"The New York Times doesn’t go after powerful people"
They literally took down Harvey Weinstein.
They literally went after Rupert Murdoch
“The New York Times is very pro-israel”
They exposed Israeli war crimes.
The Israeli Prime Minister says he hates them.
“The New York Times didn’t warn americans against Trump”
They did. They really did.
“The New York Times doesn’t cover labor rights”
They exposed how the biggest US Corporations illegally use child labor
They exposed Starbucks vicious war against unions
I’m not saying it’s a perfect news organization. A perfect news organization does not exist. But it’s a very solid one. 90% of leftists who attack it are using bad faith arguments.
10 - When it comes to television and radio, public media (PBS, BBC, NPR, CBC) is often more professional, more serious, than corporate media. PBS or CBC make outstanding documentaries. Stuff US/Canadian private networks just wouldn’t make.
11 - Generally speaking, journalism that you pay for is far better than journalism you don’t pay for. This is a general rule, not a law of physics. There are exceptions. The Daily Mail has subscribers. It’s largely non-sense. ProPublica is free. They do stunning investigations.
12 - AIPAC is a powerful lobbying organization. But there is limit to their power. There was an intense AIPAC campaign to stop the President Obama from signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. And he defeated them .
13 - Most Trump tweets aren’t written by Donald Trump. They are written by a dude named Dan Scavino. Most americans have no clue who Dan Scavino is. They wouldn’t know him if they met him in the supermarket.
14 - Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.
15 - If you want to transform an authoritarian regime into a democracy from within, the number 1 tool you need are powerful labor unions. Powerful unions can basically go on a general solidarity strike and shut down an entire economy.
16 - Everything Barack Obama predicted would happen if the US didn’t sign the nuclear agreement with Iran actually happened. Trump left the agreement. Iran started enriching nuclear fuel. Then a major war happened.
17 - Many Middle Easterners are very tribal. Most Israelis see themselves as Jewish first, Israeli second. Syrian druzes think of themselves as Druze first, Syrian second. Many lebanese Shias see themselves as Shia first, Lebanese a distant second. And so on. Their loyalty often lies more to their tribe than to the State they actually live in.
18 - Imperialism was bad. But imperialism didn’t actually cause instability in the Middle East. The most stable period was actually Ottoman Imperialism. For 5 centuries there was commerce and peace. Then, there was the British/French empire. Apart from some episodes of violence, it was stable. But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
19 - Saying “we don’t speak with terrorists” is completely dumb. Many terrorist organizations later became peaceful. Many terrorist leaders later became statesmen. It’s wrong to say “We can’t make any peace with those who hands are stained with blood”. Get out of here with that non-sense. If you truly want peace, seeking only decent leaders means you aren’t going to find anyone at all. Criminals make peace. This isn’t Scandinavia.
20 - The most ugly, polluted and noisy cities in the world have one thing in common. They have cars everywhere. The best cities in the world (Singapore, Geneva, Copenhaguen) all have one thing in common. They try to aggressively reduce car ownership. If you want to improve the cities, you need to increase parking costs. Pedestrianize streets. Build bike lanes. The hard part is the politics. Car owners see the short term pain. They never see the long term gains.
What are things you know because of your personal interests that most people have no idea about ?
Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like “BOFU2017” or “BOF:NT” in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history
So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as “illegal charts”)
In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS… the flagship event is called “BMS of Fighters” (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (… and there are some shitposts too, we don’t talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)
Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash’s entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact… a song from BOFU2017
It’s hard to tell but I wouldn’t be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games… or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks
As for the BMS themselves… distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining… but anyways it is rather fascinating
Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/
I sat here for a couple of minutes, trying to think of something I was willing to reveal.
Alright then, keep your secrets!
Username checks out.
Fuck it. Believe me or don’t.
I made a documentary that got C&Dd by Netflix. It was about Orson Welles and the final movie he made in '71 that didn’t get finished until 2021 (by Netflix).
In researching Welles, I discovered a rediculous amount of information about him that is not at all publically known.
His children?
One daughter lives in New York. Another in Sedona.
But there’s also the two he had out of wedlock in secret. (Both of which have documentaries about them)
And then I discovered his fifth child.
Sasha Welles. Who he had with his mistress Oja Kodar during the making of his last film. The kid is almost 100% his, but might not be Kodar’s as he basically had sex with her whole family.
But that’s not what this comment is about.
It’s about the movie he filmed but never finished editing, “The Otherside of the Wind” and starred Oja Kodar.
It’s now on Netflix, and while it did receive some nice critical reviews. Very few people came to look at it as close as I have. (And the others that have kinda sorta agree with what I’m about to say).
The closest (for the most part) was Peter Bogdonavich, who said the movie was a perfect book end for Welles career - a movie that matched his creativity with Citizen Kane.
But, the movie was actually much more than that. Much much more. (At least imo.)
Orson wanted this film to be finished more than anything. He even begged Peter Bognonovich to finish it in case he died. Something Bogdonavich actually tried to do well into the 2000’s!
The reason he wanted it finished? No one knows. But I have a theory, and that’s what my doc was about.
The theory:
Orson Welles created The Otherside of the Wind as a sequel / spiritual successor to Citizen Kane. Except instead of a story about a media magnate based off William Randolph Hearst, The Otherside of the Wind is about a filmmaker based off of Orson Welles.
Basically, Orson Welles made an autobiography of himself and his struggles to be the first Independant filmmaker in the style of his masterpiece Citizen Kane, and then died before telling anyone.
You can watch it on Netflix right now too. The Otherside of the Wind.
So. Every interview he gives about the movie. Literally every single one (I’ve seen 13 or so) he lies about the meaning of what the “Wind” in the title of the film means. In one interview, it’s about the duality of Men and Women. In another, it’s about art and commerce. In another, it just sounds good.
He was an artistic guy. And was known to tell lies and grandiose stories for attention. But at the end of his career, Orson was literally operating on another level. Want to know who coined the term “visual essay?” It was Orson Welles in his documentary F is for Fake. Where he basically makes the first YouTube video (in 1974) about art forgery and art. Which is what F is for Fake is about: faking art.
He has a monologue in that movie. One about a beautiful Church in England built in the old eclesiastic style. And one built by an anonymous architect over 20 years. He wonders at the thought of making something so grand, and never putting your name on it. Something those who appreciate architecture would love, even if they’re biased against the architect.
At this point in his career, Orson was making commercials and getting drunk while doing it. All to raise funds to finish his films. But despite being THE GUY who made Citizen Kane, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, etc, he just got an endless raft of shit from Hollywood for being in these commercials. In one of his many lunches with Bogdanovich, he muses about removing his name from his next movie, so Hollywood might appreciate it as a film instead of crapping on it because of his name.
So he makes Wind. People point out the story of the filmmaker in it kinda resembles him. He denies it. Eventually saying it’s inspired by him. And being a Welles movie, it also has a unique meta narrative. A movie within a movie. As it’s literally about a filmmaker trying to finish his last film, but he tragically passes before it’s completed. Which is what ended up literally happening to Welles and this movie. He died before he could make it. So his unfinished film due to his passing was about a filmmaker having an unfinished film due to his passing.
Great coincidence. And one that attracted me to this story. But it COULD just be a coincidence right? Maybe Otherside just HAPPENS to parralel Welles life through Kanes narrative structure.
Except what I discovered about the title of the film. He never gave a straight answer about it. And that bothered me. Anytime he played coy, it was for a reason.
And it got me looking at the name “The Otherside of the Wind” in a new way. What if the name wasn’t a metaphor at all? He was certainly known for them. (Cough Chimes at Midnight) But, what if this name that really sounded like a metaphor was just a literal, practical name?
The Otherside of the Wind has a movie within a movie. As you watch the film, the filmmaker in it screens his new movie to friends and execs to different results. Eventually you see parts of that movie. The ending to The Otherside of the Wind is also the ending of that movie.
It ends with a woman walking onto a dusty Hollywood set built in the desert. Props of flimsy buildings sway in the wind, as she wanders through them. Eventually the wind picks up and knocks over all the props.
“The Otherside of the Wind” ENDS with a strong WIND blowing down props in a dusty storm.
So if that’s the WIND part of the title, what would the OTHERSIDE of that BE?
Well, the very FIRST shot of Citizen Kane has a cold wind in a snow storm opening up the gates to Kanes mansion.
The otherside of that wind, is the wind in the final shot of “The Otherside of the Wind.”
The movie is named after the first shot in Citizen Kane. And is about literally being the final shot of Welles career.
One that will likely never be noticed, as he made sure to tell no one. Just to make sure they would watch that movie without a bias towards him. Instead the whole point of the movie basically got lost. Because by the time it was finished 50 years later, not many were left who could fit the pieces together.
In the interviews I did, I talked with many people who worked with him as part of VISTOW. A group that thanklessly helped Orson make his movies. Many who went on to have large careers in Hollywood or Academia.
VISTOW stands for “Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles.”
And I’ll be damned if I didn’t say I’m envious of those in that group. Despite the horror stories.
Consider this very condensed rant about this topic that probably only 5 other people on the planet know my service to Orson Welles.
The Otherside of the Wind needs to be looked at as follow up to Citizen Kane, not as the final movie in Welles career.
If you watch the movie on Netflix, I encourage you to do so through this lense. (But be warned, the first 10 minutes are rough, as intended).
in the open source multiplayer game Space Station 14, you can swab pollen from cannabis plants to egg-plants (as in, plants that grow eggs, distinct from eggplant) and have a chance to grow eggs full of pure THC
Love you, botanist being. Please grow wheat and bananas, as the only recipe I’ve memorized is banana bread.
Have you seen my chef knife? Someone stole it!
Isn’t there another one in the vending machine??
The power went out when I was in the freezer, and it wasn’t there when I finally got out!
Everything I’ve heard about that game sounds insane
It’s outstanding. Easily the most fun I’ve had in any sort of multiplayer game in recent memory.
Definitely has learning curves stacked on learning curves, but starting out as a janitor is perfect for learning the ropes
Would I enjoy it if I like Rimworld? Or am I way off base as to what the game even is?
You directly control and roleplay as your own individual character. There’s a ton of different jobs, I like botanist a lot. Superficially its just growing plans for food and medicine, but it can go so very very deep. I can dump mutation chems in plants to give them random genes, I can cross pollinate different plants to spread certain genes, I can increase plant potency with chems too.
A few weeks ago I worked a botany round with another botanist who spent an hour frantically growing and mutating and grinding up plants, all for setting up a gag. She ended up having me drag one of two metal lockers to medbay, where she opened each one and sprayed some water on a large quantity of “kobold cubes”, which all sprang to life at once. Then she set off a grenade which filled medbay with the chemical " corgium". This transformed all the kobolds (and me, briefly) into intelligent corgis. There were a ton of corgis all over the station for the rest of the round.
Bro. What even is this game lol
Almost every song you’ve heard has included at least one sample from the Roland TR808 drum machine.
You really do just need to turn it off and back on again 99% of the time.
Almost all of the internet utilizes akamai, Amazon, or cloudflare for some piece of vital infrastructure.
If properly made, furniture made of solid hardwoods will last multiple lifetimes.
Depending on the era and genre, the most ubiquitous drum machine would be a Linn Drum (late 70s & early 80s pop, e.g. ABBA), Roland TR-808 (80s soft pop, e.g. Phil Collins), or Roland TR-909 (90s House/Dance/Trance, e.g. Scooter).
There are many others, of course, and even if the actual machine wasn’t used, these sounds have been sampled and reused countless times, e.g. using a Fairlight CMI.
Interestingly, the 808 is the only one of the three that does NOT use samples itself but synthesizes all of its percussion sounds, which gives it a rather distinct character. Perhaps that is what led you to believe that it is the most ubiquitous drum machine - it’s easier to recognize than the others, even in a crowded mix.
Totally fair point, I suppose I just listen to more genres that incorporate 808s than the others. I’ve always loved the simplicity of the sine based synthesis of the 808, so much can be done with it.
I look up everything interesting that occurs to me on Wikipedia so I know a lot of shit about random topics.
Not sure the Guardian has enough readers to be so influential in British politics tbh, though it does try
I look up everything interesting that occurs to me on Wikipedia so I know a lot of shit about random topics.
This is a very valuable habit.
Here’s another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.
David Vizard’s books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing…
That’s a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.
I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently…
sigh
the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.
Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than … pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.
IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:
- “The Principles of Yacht Design”, get the most-recent edition of it.
- ALL of Dave Gerr’s books.
- Fossatti’s Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
- probably Nigel Calder’s books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
- Tom Cunliffe’s books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs “good enough”, & the implications of that, on the design
- a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
- “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, by Brion Toss
- “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice” or something like that, can’t remember, right now…
- the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
- look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
- Harry Riblett’s book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil’s problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
- Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren’t touching any part of the code that you aren’t working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can’t find what it is that is skewing everything unless you’re seeing the whole sheet’s equations: it’s the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )
Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing “wild geese”.
For aircraft-design, I’d say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson’s book, NOT Raymer’s.
( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri’s is on its 2nd edition, so I’m presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can’t afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I’d got Gudmundsson’s book, instead of Raymers, now )
You’ll need Harry Riblett’s book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.
You’ll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn
( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold’s birds. )
Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation … become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.
Harry Riblett was using Eppler’s simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you’d HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.
You NEED to understand both Bernoulli’s principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.
There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics’s complicated, & I’d recommend that.
It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one…
Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.
There is a video, which I now can’t find, on changing Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.
That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you … don’t waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.
You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that’s beginning to become significant in modern designs.
All the stuff I’ve realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I’ll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection’s required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.
Sorry I’m not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means…
but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more … exploring-evolution’s-potential.
Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you’re really knowing-what-you’re-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.
Don’t expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.
It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc…
But I’d rather the world have other-people doing it, … than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.
LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space…
Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.
If not, then just ignore this.
_ /\ _
I feel like there’s some amount of this in every hobby, which sounds like I’m downplaying this take and racing but that’s not that case I promise you.
I can imagine how this would be amplified big time in a pretty expensive hobby/semi-pro/pro? I assume there must exist some amount of pros
But yeah as a collector of a couple to many more likely expensive hobbies, it’s crazy how much shit you see designed to just separate people from their money efficiently
Forgot this stuff, sorry:
Aviation:
- you need ALL of Mike Busch’s books!
- Barnaby Wainfan, at Kitplanes: read ALL of his stuff. I disagree with some points of his ( & consider his faceted lifting-body aircraft to have been needlessly unsmooth: I like Mike Arnold’s ultra-low-drag paradigm! ), but he gives you sooo much understanding, that you simply aren’t competent in this domain if you aren’t understanding the stuff he’s giving.
- S-Glass is nearly as stiff as carbon, but MUCH tougher: consider it for your wings.
- E-Glass is radar-transparent, the other composites generally aren’t: make any radome of it.
- Turbine-engines cost about 10x as much as piston-engines, to buy, but maintenance-intervals can be MUCH greater, which is why commercial operations like them.
- All aircraft NEED redundant angle-of-attack indicators: fly that indicator, & you’re safe: nearly-all the final-approach-crashes due to stall would have been prevented with AoA-indicators on the flightdeck. ( the McDonnell Douglas 737Max fiasco is because McDonnell Douglas, now falsely-labeled as “Boeing”, they did a reverse-takeover from the inside, after the merger, allowed only 1 AoA-sensor on the airframe, & if that reading went wrong, the avionics highjack the aircraft from the pilots. People died. IN AVIATION, REDUNDANCY SAVES LIVES, for critical-avionics! )
Boats:
- there is the Kelvin Wake Angle that you need to understand: it is the angle from the longitudinal-centerline of your boat, out at an angle, along-which your wake’s peak lies. It is 19.5-ish degrees ( 19.47, iirc ). For multihulls, you NEED to make-certain that that angle doesn’t go from the bow of 1 hull to touch or get too-close to any other hull: it NEEDS to have space, xor you’re creating needless drag. Also, for slenderness, you need to be able to create that angle from your bow, & NOT have your bow’s bluntness violate that angle.
- the LWL:BWL ratios ( Length or Beam, WL means WaterLine ) of interest for multihulls are between 8:1 & 12:1. Going longer than that, as Gerr pointed-out, gives you too-much skin-drag. People who’ve studied aircraft-design know that you want the skin-drag to equal the other kinds of drag, because that’s your minimum-drag. Making a hull 18:1 means you’ve got less bluff-drag, but you’ve got waaay-more skin-drag, so you’re losing, in the displacement regime. Hydroplaning boats are different. Wave-piercing speedboats are different. The multihull designers generally target 9:1 because it really is an optimum LWL:BWL.
- Silicone-Silane is the ONLY anti-fouling that people ought be considering, nowadays ( “Silic One” is 1 brand of that kind of stuff ). NOTHING else works as well, or is as slippery for reducing drag.
- After you’ve earned you real-competence, & now you want to instantiate a business, you’re going to need ABYC membership, & if you’re wanting to sell into the EU, you’re going to need the ISO/DIN standards, which will cost you … about $30k, so you can make your designs compliant with their regulations. They intentionally constructed their standards to enforce as much buying-of-other-components-of-their-standards as possible. To me that is anti-economic-flourishing: putting needless barrier-to-entry, but they’re the ruling institution, so they get to make their economy obey their authority.
- The 1st implimentation of a boat, that vessel’s name, becomes the model’s name, so if you want to control your boat-names, then you can’t have your customers deciding on the name of the 1st implimentation of a design, can you?
- NOLO press makes books on intellectual-property, including Patent It Yourself, which includes a section on getting EU patent protection. Give yourself perhaps a year to get through that book: it’s technical stuff, and there is one hell of alot of stuff to know, in patent-applications, in order to not need to hire ( for $10k+ ) a patent-lawyer for your single application. EU patents are covered in a section of that book, but EU patents cost WAAAY more than North American patents, per point-of-application, or search, etc.
- look at the designs of Cape Falcon Kayaks: they’re elegant in ways that nearly-no boat-designers would do.
- look at the designs of Dave Gerr, if his site is still up, & see how solidly good his work is, compared with normal
- BoatDesign.net is the primary place for boat-design discussion, though … I think it was called “sailing anarchy” was a competitor to it, don’t know if they still exist ( don’t know if either still exists, actually )
- you need to study & understand composites, if you’re doing that, & I’d recommend studying some of the stuff from the aircraft-domain, too ( I got Niu’s composite-airframes textbook ), so you get much-better-than-DIY-“information” about what’s proper. 2" radius minimum for composite-carbon, & that may be pushing it, & you CAN’T mix reinforcement-fibers & get the benefits-of-both: you get the disadvantages of both, not the benefits… this one’s important & non-obvious, so I’m breaking it out into a discussion, not just this little list-point…
Say one has reinforcement-fabric with graphite fiber going east-west & kevlar going north-south.
Then the next layer is with the graphite going north-south & the kevlar going east-west.
Now vacuum-infuse it, so resin spreads forces between all the fibers…
What happens when the temperature rises, in hot sun?
The kevlar SHRINKS. Kevlar has a NEGATIVE Coefficient-of-Thermal-Expansion ( CTE ), but graphite’s is close to zero, & epoxy’s is positive…
So, now your layup is stressing, because some fibers are shrinking, & others are not, & the matrix is expanding.
Worse, when you try flexing it, kevlar isn’t stiff, so NO flexing-force is going onto those fibers, ALL of the flexing-force is going onto the graphite.
But did you calculate your layup so the graphite fibers would be able to take all the flexing that your piece needs to bear?
If not, now it’ll break.
In composites, the stiffest fibers resisting flexing, are taking ALL of the stress of that flexing, until they break, then the next-stiffest are taking all the load.
Mixed reinforcement-fibers is IDIOCY, but you can buy many brands of differently colored aramid+carbon reinforcement-fabric, from many vendors.
It is Niu’s composite-airframes textbook that caused me to know that, & the industry is pushing snake-oil bling, instead.
The only 2 cases where mixed-reinforcement-fibers makes sense, are
- entirely-cosmetic pieces, which bear no structural load, &
- pieces where you’re orienting all the stiffest fibers in 1 particular direction for stiffness in that direction, & you want flex in the other direction, so you use e-glass or something in the bendy-required direction.
Oh, & graphite-fiber’s just thinner, stiffer carbon, generally. Processed at a higher temperature.
There: hopefully I’ve given you enough so that you can compete against me better, in the future.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?
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I know more than I ever planned on knowing about audio equipment.
The first thing you need to know is that you cannot defeat physics with marketing hype. I don’t give a flying fuck how many wave guides Bose talks about or all the technology under the sun, you need a big speaker to make deep bass. There is nothing anyone can say or do to change this.
And when you look up audio equipment, ignore the “music power” because they will state what is the momentary maximum power the speaker can handle… but we don’t play micro seconds of MAX power music, we play steady audio… what you need to know is the RMS power the device can handle or output.
Furthermore, audio cables are a complete sham. You can take any power cable from a discarded vacuum, boom, you’ve got speaker cable. But but gold connectors… Yeah no.
John Carver torpedoed the “golden ear” self-deluded class, one time, purrfectly…
He had them appear to review/compare a pair of prototype amplifiers…
They did, eventually coming to the consensus that 1 was categorically better than the other.
Then John Carver removed the covers, & the ONLY difference between the amps, was the packaging they were in: the circuit-boards were identical.
He had ZERO respect for all the snake-oil bullshit stuff going on.
I’ve dug-into speaker-builder books enough to know that yes, waveguides do make difference in acoustics, & yes, you can hear that difference ( compared with plain-box speakers that are closed, all 'round ).
I have not paid-for any of the speaker-builder software ( & Linux has some FLOSS stuff, in that domain, anyways, now ),
but yes, it is actual-fact, that to make lower-frequencies of sound, you need bigger speaker-drivers.
For high-fidelity concert, I’d want 15" drivers, or pairs-of-12"-ones, on the sound-reinforcement speakers, if it were needing good quality bass. ( for a Liquid-Jungle genre concert, or something )
( I can’t hear low-enough to hear the lowest human-hearable frequencies, but others can: it’d matter for them, right? )
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Nobody said wave guides don’t help, but they don’t produce bass the way the marketing hype lies. They just don’t.
Be careful with that makeshift speaker cabling though. If you’re using small gauge power cables, you could easily melt those cables with a powerful enough audio signal.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an amplifier that could output so much power it would melt a vacuum power cable or lamp cord lol
Light-duty power cables can handle like 1,400-1,800W you’re never going to find anything that can output even close to that… unless you are the audio/hardware guy for outdoor concerts.
Of course, don’t use angel-hair wires
Would you use this as speaker wire?
https://www.amazon.com/Conductor-Electrical-Oxygen-free-Automotive-2AWG-32-8FT/dp/B093LCQQFY/
I wouldn’t.
I’m just saying be careful. Power cables aren’t all equal. Anyone doing this should understand what kind of wire they need, and make sure they’re not using one that’s too thin.
Stuff like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Cordless-Charger-XBCHGX140-Replacement-Charging/dp/B0BFDFXYR4/
Is unsafe, even though it’s for a (rechargeable) vacuum.
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Use ANY shielded-cable which can handle the current, & has the right kind of connectors on the ends.
Period.
That’s the ONLY 3 criteria I care about, now.
That’s why I recommend Cat6A cable for the foil-shielding in it, to block alien-crosstalk, in ethernet setups: you don’t get speed-degradation-due-to-alien-crosstalk.
All the screaming that computer-speakers did, when a GSM phone was near them, that was due to lack-of-shielding.
Find any trustworthy site which lists AWG vs Amperage, & you’ll see what current you can put on that gauge of wire.
Match your current-carrying-capability, & don’t go overboard ( 2AWG for speakers for anything less than a DisasterArea concert, is stupid ).
Signal travels through copper at around 0.7 * speed-of-light ( impedance monkeys it, at higher-frequencies, audio’s functionally DC, for cables )
& the OP wasn’t talking about cordless-rechargeable vacuum-cleaners, but for normal vacuuming-the-whole-floor vacuum-cleaners, which have … 14AWG wire, roughly, in 'em.
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Yes, so, basically what I said. Be careful and understand what you need.
If you’re thinking from the mind of someone who understands current, of course you wouldn’t use 26 awg wire for speakers. When you’re giving advice online though, you have to think from the mind of someone who doesn’t have your same knowledge. OP telling someone “just use a vacuum cleaner power cable” isn’t specific enough, because they don’t have the knowledge OP has to understand what that means.
I completely agree with OP that speaker wire is generally a rip off, and using any suitable wire is fine. I just want OP to also say that you need to know what you’re doing, or you could start a fire.
I’ll give you an anecdote to hopefully illustrate my point. A while ago I was hanging out in a friend’s backyard on a chilly night. She wanted to provide some warmth for the guests, so she brought out two space heaters and a power strip. She plugged them in and turned them on and they ran for about 30 seconds, and the circuit breaker tripped. She went over to it and flipped it back on, and then about 30 seconds later it tripped again.
I’m not saying this to disparage her, but to illustrate that many people don’t understand current, and don’t realize what is and isn’t dangerous when it comes to electricity. It wasn’t unreasonable for her to assume that would work, and it wasn’t unreasonable for her not to understand why it wasn’t. The breaker is there for exactly that reason. When you’re talking about making your own wire, it’s too easy to get it wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing, and that could cause a fire.
Understanding that you need more conductor-cross-section to carry more current’s sooo fundamental to me, that that itself is a problem, obviously…
I’d presumed that telling people to go search for AWG that can carry whatever-current, would be enough…
The 14AWG point, though, should do for apartment-dwellers & normal home-owners.
( seriously, if you’re doing some kind of mega-installation, & you’re putting 20A circuits in, specifically for your amps, then you’d better be able to calculate Ohm’s law, for your speakers, & work-out what currents are required for them )
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Cable hype is in every industry. You can buy hundred-dollar gold plated “Gaming” HDMI cables that are no better than any other HDMI cord
the one that kills me is some genius is selling TOSLINK cables with gold plated connectors.
TOSLINK is a fiber optic standard. The whole point of it is that the cable is non-conductive.
The gold is for good luck dummie /s
When I was a cable guy a customer’s Monster Cable RG-6 fell off in my hand.
“Ah! My Monster Cable!”
“I’ll make you a better one.”
I knew they weren’t up to the hype, but fuck me, the shielding was single-wrap, made of Chinese whispers and toilet paper. The copper core could be bent with harsh words. The dialectric (white part) was some form of marshmallow. In my 3 years in the industry, Monster was the shittiest cable I ever encountered, a cut below the cheapest Walmart cable.
Made him a new one, cut to size, out of our standard quad-shielded, real coax. Quite a lesson for both of us.
Nice one! I’ll have to borrow that idea, and next time I scrap some coax I’ll coil up some for later. Good tip.
Yeah Monster is so bad they’re a dollar store item where I live. Not even kidding!
Yeah, there’s a lot of snake oil in the audio world.
You’re spending five thousand dollars on solid gold cables that were soldered by blind monks then braided by trained gerbils, in an attempt to get the highest fidelity possible. Meanwhile, the album was recorded using the cheapest 10¢ per ft star-quad cable the studio could find, and $4.50 Neutrik connectors that were soldered by the studio’s unpaid intern.
There have been multiple instances where I have seen someone asking for advice on trying to track down an intermittent buzz in their system. They had people saying they needed to totally rethink their entire system, they had to buy thousands of dollars of new gear, completely change how they had everything routed… When all they needed was a 5¢ ferrite bead.
Chef’s kiss on this comment. I have been selling high-end audio gear for 2 years since I accidentally got good at it
I have never met a single person through this entire adventure who even knows what these are, and I’m continually laughed at and questioned why I would save them lol
Well, add one to the tally, what are those?
Ferrite beads for filtering out high frequency noise, particularly when cabling acts as a radio receiver.
They are inductors.
IF you put enough inductor 'round a cable, you can choke the change-in-current-flow in the cable, thereby removing frequencies from its transmission.
You will notice that inductors are used in power-supply-filtering circuits, along with capacitors, to reduce the changes in the supplied power…
Putting them on signal cables, means they have to be calibrated to what frequency they are trying to oppose, around that conductor…
People who just add them, for “magic” reasons, may have the right underlying idea, of trying to filter-out noise, but … you have to understand how noise is interacting with a specific signal, among specific conductors, to know how to stop it, right?
Same as when I was a boy & offered a tiny 9V battery to help start a car: I didn’t understand that the current required was thousands of times greater than what I was offering.
( this is for anyone who wants to know what those things are: they’re ferrites: iron-oxide inductors, that people put around cables, to choke harsh noise from them, for specific frequencies, for specific material-variations ( there are several kinds of ferrites ), for specific cables )
_ /\ _
Oh, for the people who say that waveguide-boxes for speakers are identical to closed-boxes for speakers, … the textbooks I’d read, years ago, had different equations for solving those 2 categories of speaker-box, so, no, I don’t buy that they are identical.
It’s entirely-possible that I’m wrong, but that is what the evidence I encountered in the domain gave me.
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It’s amazing how much metalurgy you learn from Dwarf Fortress
Okay, so, there’s this Canadian children’s book author, Paulette Bourgeois, right? She wrote the Franklin books ( the one about the turtle ) that later got adapted into 2 different cartoons.
But little fun fact that I doubt many people know is the fact that in an interview, she admitted that the first book, the one where Franklin deals with fear of the dark in his shell at night, was inspired by an episode of MASH ( cannot format the title properly ). Specifically the episode where the 4077th have to move operations into a nearby cave. If I remember correctly, she was a fresh first time parent when watching that episode one night with her baby, but it’s been a while since I read this, so take it with a grain of salt.
The electric siren was not invented to warn of air raids, but instead to warn volunteer firefighters that a fire call is in progress and to report to the station ASAP. Before the development of the electric siren between 1905-1910, fire departments relied on air horns, steam whistles, tires, or bells. These all had their own major drawbacks: Horns and whistles rely on an external source of air/steam that must be recharged periodically, and a leak can lower the volume or outright silence it if it goes unnoticed. Fire bells, on the other hand, could easily be confused with church bells. Clearly a better solution was needed.
The electric siren was first developed by a man named William A. Box, and his “Denver” electric sirens quickly became popular and replaced the aforementioned warning devices. The siren’s ability to start reliably and rapidly at the push of a button proved valuable and saved precious time, and it costed only a few cents to run in terms of electricity costs. The sound of the siren was distinct, could not be mistaken for anything else, and could be heard even in neighbouring towns. By the mid-1910s and early 1920s, there was already a huge booming market for fire sirens. Companies like the Federal Electric Company (still around as Federal Signal Corp), Sterling Siren Fire Alarm Co (now Sentry Siren Inc.) and Decot Machine Works all competed fiercely to outdo one another.
While far less common nowadays thanks to pagers taking over this role, fire sirens are still fairly common in the U.S., especially on the East Coast. In fact, several 100 year old sirens are still in service today because they’re just that well-built and reliable!
Here’s a video of a roughly 100 year old Denver siren, still operational.
My first wife lived literally directly beside one of these at a volunteer fire department (AND A TRAIN TRACK). It took quite awhile to adjust to visiting/sleeping there. I really should have listened to that literal siren and stayed away.
You can clean dirty/corroded electronic edge contacts with a pencil eraser. Also helps equally as cleaning preparation before soldering.
Go ahead and try it yourself on an old penny, it’ll clean up and look shiny as new. Same principle for electronics.
A good rubber eraser also takes sticker adhesive right off of most surfaces, safely.
So does fresh duct tape.
Wait wait wait, for real? I’m 42, how did I not know this?
The real LPT is always in the comments.
Ha, yeah. Snap-On sells a 400$ tool that takes 30$ consumable rubber wheels. Or you could use a 99 cent pink pencil eraser.
Snap-On’s Snap-On: they are a BRAND-Identity, not an engineering-actual-solutions-to-acutal-problems company.
There’s a Project Farm, or something, yt-channel, where they guy just does comparative-tests of different products, to see what the truth is, & … it’s a resource all ought be knowing-about.
Ha I DID remember its name right! https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectFarm/videos
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When I detailed cars at a used car dealership for a living, I had a wheel made of the same rubber you find in erasers on the end of an air powered die grinder. It was soft enough to not affect the clear coat, but it was fantastic at removing commercial vehicle decals / stickers / numbers along with the adhesive!
My dad taught me this!
Awesome!
Yeah, there’s one drawback though, if the edge contacts or whatever trace was originally gold plated, the pencil eraser trick will pretty quickly wear away the gold plating.
But… If you got corroded gold plated contacts, the gold plating itself is the least of your worries, you want clean metal…
Gold doesn’t corrode, Hoomin…
If it’s corroded where the gold wasn’t … that’s different.
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I’m well aware of that actually. But if the gold plating is already worn and/or pitted, then the copper underneath will corrode through and even on top of the gold.
Plus, if it counts for anything, I happen to have an open faced USB-A flash drive on my pocket keychain, that actually does still have its gold contact plating, but just looking at it right now, I’ll have to clean the contacts once again from pocket crud before I use it again.
In that case though, I usually just lick my thumb, wipe the contacts clean, and dry it off with my shirt. Gold itself might not inherently corrode, but it can and will still get dirty, plus that plating is super thin and just regular use will eventually wear it away down to the bare copper underneath.
Please stick a cap on it, if you want it to last.
Tech that works is worth protecting.
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Nah, it’s an early model Lacie USB key shell from 2011. The way they designed it, it was actually never meant to go on an actual keychain nor in my pocket, it was meant to go on a lanyard. Also, the way they designed it, a cap could never stay on there, even if I tried.
I had to very carefully arrange my keys to lay perfectly parallel to and not rub against the USB traces or bend or otherwise damage the key. But yeah for real, it would never hold a cap, especially in my pocket, even if I tried.
It’s almost held up pretty well since 2011 though, and has even been dismantled and rebuilt twice for flash storage upgrades. Currently I keep Linux Mint MATE 22.1 installer/live boot on it, nothing else right now so no personal data, so honestly it’s no big deal for me.
For reference, here’s a new one on eBay, with way more than the 8GB module I currently have in mine…
I learned this when I was a kid, and the only problem is that nowadays, I haven’t seen a pencil nor its eraser and probably 15 years.
Still, a pretty great tip!
Normal people use alcohol or flux
I do a ton of electronics repair, would never in a million years think that an eraser is going to do anything but make my life harder
OK… But have you tried it?
Why would I do that? So I can fuck up my precision solders on expensive boards??? I need my electrical connections to be free of dirt and debris, and the way to accomplish that is by cleaning it with a solvent or flux. Using an eraser is the equivalent of rubbing it with your fingers… you’re not going to remove the small particulate or oils. Haven’t tried it; won’t. Its piss-poor advice.
Edit downvoters don’t seem to be aware that the last thing you need on a solder site is eraser particulate. Do yourself a favor, go rub a pencil eraser on two things and then try to solder them together without cleaning with flux or alcohol. Send pics lol
We who’ve done it blow the particles away to get them out of the area.
It’s a practice used when cleaning ( by sanding, grinding, etc ) throughout industry.
The removing-film & surface-dirt with an eraser is valid, but not cleanroom, obviously.
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You left-out the critical resource of https://www.semiaccurate.com/ btw…
What a generally … outright-awesome post.
The Guardian changed-ownership recently, & cut their journalism-staff, savagely, ttbomk, AND they are now purged from DuckDuckGo??
searching for
kremlin papers trump site:theguardian.com
produces NOTHING at DuckDuckGo, now, & for the last few weeks, at-least?
& I’ve seen that FT definitely has anti-viability strategy in its pushing of distortion, in its stuff…
fscking-idiot webmastering at TheGuardian… WHERE’S THE SEARCH-FUNCTION??
https://www.theguardian.com/index/subjects/a
THAT page has a search-function.
??
WHEN I search on the keywords
kremlin papers
only-in-title, only-in-English, then click the button, then I get
So, TheGuardian IS BLOCKING DuckDuckGo for sake of kickbacks for Google-exclusivity??
Looks like it…
“Those who are ignorant of history, are damned to re-enact its disasters.” is true for our entire world, & especially true in the domain of journalism!
IF you keep disappearing historical key-information ( as for-profit, & for-institutional-status/importance, “journalisms” both do ), THEN you’re garrotting OUR WORLD’s viability!!
Scum…
The highest quality science-news is https://www.science.org/news
whereas the highest quantity of science-news is probably https://phys.org/latest-news/
( you have to fight with phys.org, as it keeps trying to prove one is just a bot, if one keeps digging into archives )
Salut, Namaste, Kaizen, & Gratitude for making this post!
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For someone interested in journalism it’s odd you don’t know about the Bylines network.
In “The Andy Griffith” show intro with the whistling tune, little Opie throws a rock into the fishing pond. In reality, little Opie was not strong enough to throw that rock that far so there was a guy off-camera and behind a bush that watched Opie throw and timed his throw to match it. The rock hit the water and made a splash and it looked like little Opie threw it.
