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June 9th, 1973

Secretariat wins Triple Crown.

"Secretariat becomes the first horse since Citation in 1948 to win America’s coveted Triple Crown: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. In one of the finest performances in racing history, Secretariat, ridden by Ron Turcotte, completed the 1.5-mile race in 2 minutes and 24 seconds, a dirt-track record for that distance.

Secretariat was born at Meadow Stables in Doswell, Virginia, on March 30, 1970. He was sired by Bold Ruler, the 1957 Preakness winner, and foaled by Somethingroyal, which came from a Thoroughbred line known for its stamina. An attractive chestnut colt, he grew to over 16 hands high and was at two years the size of a three-year-old."

Via history.com

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So this flash drive was made in the form of a single monolithic element (why the spider board says "for monolith"). This means that, unlike other forms of memory storage devices, it cannot be unsoldered and read on a particular hardware reader. [Tangent: USB flash drives and SD memory cards may or may not be monolithic, but all MicroSD flash drives are.]

To connect to a memory chip on monolithic flash drives, data recovery specialists need to strip the printed circuit board of the flash drive and connect to the necessary contacts using a special PC-3000 Spider Board device.

The PC-3000 Spider Board is designed to perform switching with technological outputs of drives in monolithic memory cards. Data can be recovered with the Spider Board from a variety of damaged memory cards, including Monolithic USB Flash Drive, MicroSD, SD, and others. The PC-3000 Flash Spider Board Adapter is an all-purpose way to safely restore monolithic data without tedious soldering.

The PC-3000-Flash software reads the ROM (read-only memory) of the device that is having its data recovered by directly accessing NAND chips. [Tangent: Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. It is a semiconductor that stores data and is used in smartphones and many other electronic devices around us. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. KIOXIA invented the world’s first NAND flash memory in 1987 and remains one of the leading companies conducting flash memory development and manufacturing.] The connection is carried out through the PC3000 Spider Board adapter, which allows connection to the process pins of the NAND Flash chip without soldering due to 25 movable needle contacts.

My sources (which I quoted verbatim as well as paraphrased):

Have you ever wondered how tech technicians recover data from faulty flash and memory whose data cannot be recovered by normal methods.

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Concert Stage Effects

Today, I was curious about the different kinds of stage effects that have been used. There's fog and pyrotechnics, but that's all I knew of. So here's a neat list of different concert stage effects.

Pyrotechnics are often used to punctuate climactic moments in a performance. Pyrotechnics can include high-shooting fireballs, raining sparks, and intricate music-synchronised firework displays.

Entertainment Effects, my information sources for this post, lists these pyrotechnics as available for purchase through their business:

Comets: Shooting bursts of light, designed to look like shooting stars.

Gerb Fountains: A jet of sparks to create a dazzling plume. These can be used both indoors and outdoors to create spectacular concert special effects.

Mines: Similar to comets, mines release small bursts of light. They spread out, creating fan-shaped pyrotechnics effects.

Sparkulars can be operated in close proximity to performers – and unlike traditional pyrotechnics – the sparks themselves are not flammable. With a cold fallout that creates a dazzling visual element, there are a number of sparkular special effects that are popular in concerts:

Sparkular Machines create non-hazardous effects that look exactly like traditional fireworks or pyrotechnics.

Sparkular Cyclones displays the amazing spark jet but up to an impressive 10m! It is an ideal choice for large productions, concerts, music festivals and outdoor events.

Sparkular Falls create a stunning silver waterfall effect.

G Flames, or propane flames, light the stage with controlled bursts of fire. These flames can dance and flicker in synchronisation with the music.

CO2 jets release plumes of white, billowing fog that cover the stage and crowd.

Confetti can be used in a variety of ways at a concert.

Entertainment Effects, lists these confetti systems as available for purchase through their business:

A powerful confetti blaster can blast a wave of confetti up to 25 meters high. Blasters can have an automatic feed, be used wirelessly anywhere on the stage.

When loaded full, a confetti swirl fan can be launched for around 2 minutes on full power and up to 8 minutes when it’s controlled with a dimmer.

Information Source:

Entertainment Effects's article, "Top 5 Most Dazzling Concert Special Effects"

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why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

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The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (commonly abbreviated as the CRC or UNCRC) is an international human rights treaty which sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children.

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From the above "Edit 3" Wikipedia link.

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

Edit: Now that we're talking about it, look. There is all the countries ratification dates, along with considerations for their laws.

And you can check the convention here.

Edit 2: For those in the US who want to check their state's laws compliance to the convention, there is this site.

Edit 3: The map source btw. Its from wikipedia.

Thank you people in the notes for the info and image desc.

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Another good source:

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

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“Did you know the Italians have 200 different words for pasta?”

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American ophthalmologist Adelbert Ames Jr. also created what is known as "the Ames Room". The Ames Room is a distorted room that creates an optical illusion that makes people appear smaller or larger than they really are.

The Ames Room illusion works by manipulating the viewer’s depth perception. The room is shaped like a trapezoid with the back wall shorter than the front wall, and the ceiling and floor are angled. From the front view, the room appears to be a normal rectangular shape, but in reality, it is not."

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Text and photo from a 2023 blog post of Entertrainment Junction.

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Studies show, however, that some married persons perceive less size distortion of their spouses than a stranger. This instance of selective perceptual distortion, known as the Honi phenomenon, could perhaps reflect differential familiarity and/or emotional involvement toward these stimulus persons.

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From an article on APA PsycNet.

Dion, K. L., & Dion, K. K. (1976). The Honi phenomenon revisited: Factors underlying the resistance to perceptual distortion of one's partner. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33(2), 170–177.

An interesting demonstration of how the human brain works.

But also something of a lesson regarding perception, and the unreliability of subjective perspective versus objective reality.

You can be extremely certain about how you perceive the world, your "lived experience," that which you "feel it in my heart." But that doesn't mean it's actually true. And it doesn't mean we have to endorse it, or ignore or outright deny objective reality.

That's a "you" thing, not a "we" thing.

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“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver

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Poster released by the Alberta Department of Public Health circa 1948 (A17202b/ Provincial Archives of Alberta)

Image from the "Alberta's Rat Control Program" link above.

is it fucking weird to anyone else to think that deer are like, everywhere

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Biologists have long known that birds, which descend from one branch of extinct dinosaurs, have an unusual, sophisticated respiratory system that enables powered flight. But paleontologists have long debated whether those superlungs arose only in birds or earlier in dinosaurs.

Unlike humans and other mammals, whose lungs expand and deflate, bird lungs are rigid. Special air sacs alongside the lungs do the heavy lifting instead, pumping air through the lungs, where the oxygen diffuses into the bloodstream. The lungs are attached to the vertebrae and ribs, which form the "ceiling" of the rib cage—all of which helps keep the lungs stationary. A connector called the costovertebral joint, where the ribs and vertebrae meet, provides further support. That setup allows for a continuous stream of oxygen and requires less energy than inflating and deflating the lungs. It also allows paleontologists studying fossils to learn a lot about the lungs by examining the bones around them.

Many dinosaurs, including therapods like Velociraptor and Spinosaurus, a large carnivorous dinosaur, had similar lung architecture to birds, as reported in Royal Society Open Science.

All of this suggests dinos had the same kind of efficient respiratory organs as birds. These superlungs may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate and spread despite the rarified air of the Mesozoic, paleobiologist Robert Brocklehurst of The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom says. Back then, the air was only 10% to 15% oxygen, compared with 20% today.

But Jingmai O'Connor, a paleontologist with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, adds that just because a fossil has the bone structure for birdlike lungs doesn't necessarily mean it actually had such lungs.

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Paraphrased from this 2018 article from science.org.

y'all ever think about how insane the sauropods were