I mean, imagine if friction worked like this. You’d push a heavy object … and it would move to the left (or maybe the right?) like it was on ice.

FWIW I do have a Physics undergraduate degree. It doesn’t help in this case.

For me, the weirdest thing is that when a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, it experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of motion; this results in the particle tracing out a curved path through the field. Like … what the actual fuck? Why in hell would the universe be this way?

Random tea story: I travelled in India a few … shit, decades ago. On one of my train trips there was this one guy selling tea from a big urn. Usually these guys jump on at a station, sell cups of tea or coffee to whoever wants it, then they jump off at the next station; they can’t sell tea or coffee in more than one car because the passageways between cars are usually kept locked.

This one guy walked up and down the aisle selling a few cups, then he went to the door (the car doors that people use to get on or off the train are usually kept open or they’re not even there) and while holding his urn in one hand grabbed the vertical handrail on the outside of the door with his other hand, swung himself out into space (this while the train was moving at full speed), grabbed the handrail of the next car and swung himself in. He did this just so he could sell a few more cups of tea before we reached the next station.

People tend not to believe me when I tell this story, but there are a bunch of Youtube videos from India showing people doing even crazier shit than this on trains. For me, it just tends to make me not sweat the tea rings underneath my cup.

Edit: found the one I was thinking of.

Perhaps he’s lazily hiding some of his assets in plain and obvious ways to throw the courts off the scent of stuff he’s shielding more effectively and discretely.

FWIW classic rock often wasn’t just about sex - it was about sex with 14-year-old girls. And often the same 14-year-old girl.

Nothing, however, can possibly top Steven Tyler of Aerosmith becoming the legal guardian of the underage girl he was fucking so he could bring her on tour with him.

One word: mortars.

They already like to have fun by attacking sailboats. Orcas are comrades!

We got hired by a company that was developing a remote-controlled baseball launching machine. The machine itself was just the standard two spinning wheels (although the max rotational speed of 125 mph was a lot for this sort of thing), but it could also pivot 360 degrees and also angle itself between straight up and 45 degrees down towards the ground, so it was capable of simulating any hit ball in baseball. The idea was that you would put this machine at home plate and then the coach could walk out among the players and use the remote (which was a Windows Mobile PDA) to generate any kind of hit, like a grounder to short or a pop fly to right field etc. Because the wheels could be independently controlled, you could put any kind of spin you wanted on a ball by having one wheel spinning faster than the other.

Really a cool device and a cool project, but my coworker who got the gig was a remarkably terrible programmer who spent more than a year fucking things up in various ways. At one point, for example, he spent three months trying to develop a Physics engine to control where the ball went, despite the fact that a) he knew nothing about Physics, and b) the Physics of a spinning baseball is actually incredibly complicated and well beyond the processing power of a PDA circa 2005. Not to mention that the balls used varied tremendously in how old and scuffed up they were, which would have defeated any attempt to calculate where they were going with any kind of real precision.

Despite being well over budget and past the original schedule, he had things sort of working (sometimes) and the client asked him to produce a variant of the software that would let the machine be used by Little League coaches. My coworker in addition to writing the version to scale back the speeds appropriately, also decided to completely change the API that was used to communicate with the machine. Previously, the speeds had been specified by short integer values between 0 and 32768, but he decided it would be better to use floating-point values between 0 and 1. All well and good, except his way of dealing with the huge amount of compiler errors this generated was to cast all the hard-coded short int values as floats and clamp the result between 0.0 and 1.0.

As bad as this was, he also decided to test this version - for the first time - on a field with actual Little Leaguers (in his defense - but only slightly - we rarely had access to the actual machine itself, so proper testing was always difficult). The coach sent the command for a slow grounder to the shortstop. This should have produced a horizontal ball with about a 30 mph speed on the bottom wheel and 35 mph on the top wheel to give it some topspin. Instead, his hard-code int values were about 10000 and 12000, which got cast and clamped to 1.0 by the API call - in other words, maximum speed (125 mph) on both wheels. This ejected a ball with no spin going 125 mph, the most deadly knuckleball in human history (human pitchers throw knucklers at maybe 50 mph and they’re nearly impossible to hit or even catch). At least he had the angle and azimuth “right” so this was fired straight at the shortstop! Had it hit him, the kid for sure would have badly concussed and very possibly killed, but fortunately it sailed just over his head.

This was my entire 25-year career. No way in hell would I want to watch a show like that.

Although if there were a show based on my career, I’m sure the highest ratings would be the show where my coworker fires a 125 mph knuckle ball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. It was the only time in my career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between my boss and the client.

All my life Spring has always been a happy time for me. This one has just sucked, though, even though the weather has been near-perfect.

And it’s not like withholding some tax revenues would have any effect on Republican spending. Despite their bullshit “fiscal conservatism” rhetoric, they’ve had no qualms whatsoever about running enormous deficits for more than half a century now. A tax strike would just produce more debt and give Republicans ammo to blame it all on Democrats.

Most people have their federal tax withheld by their employers and do their taxes in order to get back their overpayment. Are we all going to not do our taxes and leave that overpayment in the government’s coffers? Are employers going to stop doing the withholding? Neither scenario is very likely.

A person in my neighborhood still has a TRUMP LOW PRICES KAMALA HIGH PRICES sign in their front yard, albeit partially hidden behind a bush. Unremarkable except they’re black and living in a subsidized housing development. You just can’t make shit like this up.

And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.

Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn’t returned yet: “yeah, I’ll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!”

Even if they hear and enter the order correctly, the probably of exactly that ending up in the bag is still pretty low. At least the food service robots might get that part right.

Or they can’t fucking write. I’m a programmer and many of my colleagues over the years have been entirely unable to form a coherent idea into a sentence or paragraph. For a lot of them, that’s why they became programmers in the first place.

I don’t think they’re Sackett Board as they’re much thicker and heavier than 1/4" and they’re not layered in any way. They are preformed plaster and they have sort of tongue-and-groove edges like modern ceiling tiles so that two edges are supported by neighboring panels so as they’re installed they only have to be nailed off on two edges. Installation must have been a two-man job, at least on the ceiling. The houses in my neighborhood were built as temporary housing for shipyard workers and were certainly never meant to last 80+ years, and yet here they all still are - only two of the original 320 are gone and they were torn down intentionally to make room for a baseball diamond. I watch these house inspector videos on Youtube and just laugh my ass off at what pieces of utter shit modern houses are.

The hat wasn’t a slouch hat unless that term is broader than I think. It was green waxed canvas with a small front brim and little ear flaps with ties. It even had a tag with the contract number and year on it, which confirmed when the house was built. I was going to wear it but it had a bunch of little moth- or other-critter- holes in it and I stupidly threw it away.

I recently bought a house that was built in 1942 and I’ve been renovating it. I tore down one of the interior walls and reused the studs (which incidentally were completely straight and free of knots, unlike any modern 2x4 I’ve ever seen) to build a new wall. When I put the wall in place it didn’t quite fit and when I measured I realized it was 1/2" too tall. I don’t normally make measurement errors of that magnitude and it took me a while to figure out that the studs I was reusing were not 3.5"x1.5" like modern 2x4s but were actually 3.75"x1.75" (so the base plate and head plate being thicker than I thought was producing the problem). Apparently the transition from real 2x4 to BS 2x4 dimensions was gradual, who knew.

One other weird thing was how the interior walls and ceilings were covered. I’ve worked on a lot of 19th century houses with lathe and plaster and of course I’ve worked with modern sheet rock. This 1942 house was in a transitional phase that used 16"x16" blocks of 1" thick rough plaster that were nailed to the studs, and then finish plasterers came in and put a smooth plaster coat over these rough blocks. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and removing these rough plaster blocks was a monstrous bitch - each one weighs as much as a solid rock of those dimensions and I have no idea how a few nails were holding them up on the ceiling joists.

Also found a hat in the attic from 1942. I like to imagine some young worker wondering for the rest of his life where he put his favorite hat.

I think that comes from pro wrestling.