ridgeguy

A modern instance of that old saw "you are what you eat".

SpaceX, Tesla, and X have entered the chat....

YMMV a lot with Aliexpress. I bought a $700 chiller that arrived without a small attachment fitting for the return inlet line. I complained, received another chiller (with the fitting) free. Go figure.

eBay is very good for science-related goods, in my experience. Last week, I bought ~$12K of used gear for a project. All items work, would have cost ~2.5x that from the usual used instrument vendors, about 6x new.

YMMV. When we sold in 2021, our realtor connected us with an interest-free lender who put up $76K for repairs and staging. This, and other services, made the difference between our selling for $1.8M and the $2.4M we got. Maybe we could someday get similar service from a realty AI, but in our recent experience, the humans made all the difference.

The lighter centers could have been diffraction around the object and reconvergence. Or some kind of signal processing effect at the retinal level.

The retinal vessel network is a fun thing to inspect as you say. It works best for me when the sun is high in the sky. The bright, featureless blue brings out the branching network very well.

Reconsider the blood cell visualization thing. I've had bilateral PVD. Each was accompanied by an initial few minutes of seeing a few dozen small dark spots that had lighter grey centers. Most visible when I looked at the sky. They all disappeared after a few minutes. I think these were RBCs from minimal retinal blood vessel tearing at the PVD events.

Human RBCs are ~6µm - 8µm diameter. Human retinal light sensing cells range from ~0.5µm - 10µm diameter, depending on type and position. They're close packed.

Given the geometry, RBCs leaking onto retinal cells should cast shadows that could be resolved as images. And that's right where leakage is most likely to occur during a PVD event.

Maybe the taxpayers who pay for those expensive sports arenas + the tax breaks that frequently shelter their owners/operators?

"Rocket Manual for Amateurs" was my favorite book after I found it in 8th grade. In high school I had a chem teacher who would give me chemicals so I could experiment with what I'd read. A great book for budding Raketenkinder.

Teflon.

I wonder if the results would have differed if LLM training data were biased to include a stronger correlation between use of nukes and subsequent collapse of technology that all LLMs require to run ("survive")?

I suspect there are substantial numbers of us in our 70's+ who would volunteer. Why not go out having made an amazing contribution?

This is an issue for me and my company.

I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines over Bambu because of the potential for losing critical proprietary IP with Bambu. Can't take the chance.

Unknown at present (nobody sells diamond sandpaper yet that I know of), but not likely. Diamond is as bioinert as gold, fluorocarbons, and similar materials in not provoking inflammatory responses when implanted in tissue. Your point about unexpected behavior of dust is a good one. AFAIK, the worst dust hazards (aside from outright chemical or radiological toxicity) are from spiky, acicular particles like asbestos. Diamond dust is either well-formed small crystals or blocky fragments, depending on how it's made. It doesn't exist in needle-like forms that trigger pathological responses from otherwise nontoxic materials.

One has to be trained to do it, the untrained tendency is to wait too long. There's a USAF film on Youtube titled "Ejection Decision" that discusses this and shows how little time there is to make that choice.

De Beers built and has abandoned a very large CVD gem diamond synthesis in Oregon. This was their LightBox operation. They've transferred it to Element Six to rid the parent (De Beers) of the money sink, probably as a touch-up before a sale.

There was a fire sale of LightBox diamonds a few months back. I picked up 3 diamonds, all brilliant cut: 3ct. white, 2ct. pink, 2ct. blue. Total for the three was $600.

De Beers sells devices that can distinguish between naturals and CVD synthetics. They're not cheap, but less than ~$80K, IIRC. They do a pretty good job, I've heard >90% success in identifying CVD stones.

Diamond grit for polishing and grinding is now a cheap commodity. In 10,000 ct. lots, I pay from 5¢/ct. to 30¢/ct. depending on specific grit properties. I haven't searched for it, but diamond sandpaper should be a thing at these prices.

Perhaps this is an early indicator.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...

The helmet cam video gave me a sense of just how difficult such operations are. I'm grateful we have people who will accept such assignments.

We turn off the AI note taker for the legal liabilities discussed in the NYT article. But we've also found its accuracy bad enough to warrant kicking it out, independent of legal issues. We have simultaneous participants from USA, India, France, Israel, and Estonia. Some have heavy accents (English is the meeting language). No problem for the humans, but the AI just can't cope (yet).

Arthur C. Clarke beat them to it - the thought, at least.

Watch This Space - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_to_the_Moon

Also, fine motor coordination often declines with age. Can make it hard to do a swipe or hit a key reliably in the first try.

Analyze staffing, not budget. That gets more directly at workload.

No expert here, low-time GA decades ago. I regard these incidents as aspects of the universal race to the economic bottom.

The workloads are too high. Nobody running life-critical operations should be working 60+ hour weeks and overnight shifts. We've known for decades how these practices increase errors. One effective answer is to dilute the workload by hiring more people. But this slows the race to lower costs, so it isn't done. We need to spend more on people.

Perhaps to some degree, kids recapitulate in their childhoods the weapons evolution of their homo sapiens forebears.

Around age 4, I learned how to flake spear points from a local flint deposit. That, string and Elmer's glue from mom & dad's repair goodies got me into the spear biz. Band-Aids were in demand.

A couple years later, I'd made arrows and single curve bows from pine branches and bowstring from braided water rushes. Flint knapping scaled down well to arrowheads and string+glue still worked.

Then I read about atlatls, and found new interest in my spears. Finally, I discovered slings, and there was no going back. I got good enough that in later life, I had no trouble crediting scientific studies that proposed early humans brought down a great range of game species with slings.

Alaska was a great place to be a kid.

Caught my eye due to family events. One of my uncles was killed in the Pine Creek mine in California. He was repairing an ore crusher when somebody switched it on. Pre-OSHA and tagout days.

I doubt we'll be pinched by tungsten shortages. The fusion application isn't going to come on for at least two decades. Smaller apps will be met by known reserves.

That said, it is a cool material. Looking for aluminum bars at Alan Steel (CA) years back, I was stunned when I tried (and failed) to pick up a 12" long by 6"diameter piece of what turned out to be tungsten misfiled in the aluminum section. Density, thy name is tungsten.

A distinction without a difference...

Scroll down a bit. Interactive elements were below "Definitions" on the page I tried.

Interesting. This is exactly the problem I've begun to have on my 14" M2 MB Air. I'm on 15.7.3. The issue started with 15.7.1.

Here I've been thinking it's a hardware problem, like some sort of mechanical intermittent. Maybe not.