I had a bird in my basement last summer. Scared the hell out of everybody until we realized it wasn't a bat. Then it was just a matter of herding the panicky little idiot back outside.
Had a bat at a T-shirt stand I used to work at once, ended up being a joint effort between myself, the only staff member willing to deal with the problem, and a collection of volunteers amongst the tourists that finally got the little bastard contained in a cardboard box which I was instructed to leave out back by the trees.
If you ever run into this in the future, you can often stand outside an open door with the lights on if it’s dark and make loud fast clicking noises (to give them a sense of outside through echolocation, plus a light outside the door to draw their attention since they have perfectly good eyesight) and they will just fly out on their own. They are smart, and don’t want to be inside buildings.
I get 0-5 bats a year in my house, not really sure how they get in, other than through some crack somewhere (cheap, poorly historically maintained, 140 yo house is bound to have some, and my neighbors house is basically made for bats to live in the siding so not surprising they try mine too) but I’ve figured out that’s typically a highly effective strategy to get them back out. Very easy, minimal stress for anyone involved. I don’t have anyone to help me, so it’s something one can do solo without wasting all the bat’s energy.
This was close to closing but still daylight. We just got him in the box with brooms. Honestly I was used to dealing with a crisis by that point in that town. I tell people I’ve only ever had one job and that’s whatever ends up needing done that day. I’ve worked on a demolition crew and I’ve been a cashier in a jewelry/luxury housewares store, not on the same day of course.
“A pickle for the knowing one” was a book written completely without punctuation. When people bitched about it. He printed a second edition that that last few ages were nothing but punctuation with the instructions to put them where you want them.
The only rule on punctuation that I ever learned in English was:
If in doubt - leave it out
Anyway, I fully acknowledge that my cellphone autocorrected my first comment wrongly and that “its” should have had an apostrophe. I’m just not going to edit it, because it makes no sense in any other way, so no one should be able to misunderstand the sentence and the grammar nazi added nothing of value.
Heh Nah, man you’re good. You’ll never see me be a grammar Nazi. I mentioned that book because Sam O Nella did a YouTube video about the guy that wrote that book.
These are shit. Aging wheels on YouTube did a review on them.
They have lead acid batteries, so it’ll trim a full yard once or twice on a charge for about 6 months. After a year or so you have to replace the batteries. That’s like 400 bucks worth of batteries every year.
I believe this is the same model the Aging Wheels guy on youtube bought, and then the inevitable happened. You could desulfate the batteries, but he stuffed it full of custom lithium cell battery packs instead.
You are correct that using lead-acid in this application is a really bad choice. Even deep cycle batteries will have a crap energy-to-weight ratio. This was the result of the manufacturer (or more likely Home Depot themselves, who specified the product) to rush something, anything out the door to jump on the bandwagon as fast as possible. You see this shit coming out of China all the time, like the little “neighborhood electric vehicles” that in their stock trim leave the factory with like two lead-acid golf cart batteries in the back that give it a range of approximately eleven feet.
I was at Home Depot trying to get a gas powered hedge trimmer. I have almost an acre of property, and there are tons and tons of bushes around the house.
Salesman says I should buy electric. I tell him yes, but I’d have to buy another battery or two just so I can do all the work in one day. Which makes it significantly more expensive than gas.
“Ah that’s the thing. You just replace everything with electric, and you get a battery with each device!”
Okay, so, what if I want to cut the grass, do the edging, and trim the hedges in one day? I understand the need to switch to electric and reduce emissions. But the number of towns banning gas powered lawn care equipment is just ignoring the obvious. Electric is simply not practical for anyone with a remotely large property.
The secret is not to buy your battery packs from Home Depot. The markup on those “genuine” Ryobi packs is insane, especially given they’re just stuffed full of the same low quality 18650 cells as all the other Chinese garbage anyway.
I have a small fleet of Ryobi cordless stuff by now: A mower, a string trimmer, a blower, and one of those inflator thingies. I just buy the knockoff battery packs online for 1/3-1/4 of the cost and so far I’ve found the knockoffs to have just as much or more capacity and to be more reliable than the Ryobi branded ones. Home Depot wants $189 for a 40v, 4.0Ah pack. Or you can buy a “6.0Ah” knockoff which is probably actually still 4.0 online for $57. The price gulf on the 18v packs is even greater.
It’s an optical illusion. The planes aren’t really that close together. The person who shot the video is using a telephoto lens and is zoomed way in. This compresses the space and flattens it out so it’s hard to judge distance. Also the plane in front is smaller than the one in the back which heightens the illusion. It’s a really cool shot!
Definitely the windows, but recent planes have gone with huge turbines so it’s not the most reliable tell. I don’t know Airbus well but the turbines on a 737-800 or Mac are pretty big compared to a - 300 or A320
It’s not as rare as you may think. I used to work at a weather service office located right near the end of one of the runways at IAD and it would happen a few times a day if the airport was busy and the winds were such that they were coming in from our side.
I got this off Bluesky. No, squirrels in North America are mostly grey or black, and the red ones we do have in woodsy areas definitely don’t have these ears.
My thoughts too. I figured that the FAA would prevent this from happening for any reason except emergencies
Edit: c’mon folks, I’m not asserting that this is an emergency or that this is against regulations. I thought it was, but if this is a normal landing then it’s simply a surprise to me that it happens.
Looks like San Francisco. There are two main runways there, this is common. I think it’s just time and chance to land at the same exact moment like this.
So the Alaska is a e175 which is about 70 people vs the United which is about 170 people. It looks close because of the angle and some camera tricks. Landing on parallel runways happens all the time.
They are called Precission radar monitoring approaches and they start doing them when things get super congested. Requires us to listen to another radio so atc can tell us to break-out if someone crosses the no go zone in between the runways.
The runways are likely pretty far apart. Telephoto lenses compress depth and make objects appear closer to each other. It’s why telephoto lenses are used for portraits to make facial features look more attractive and with slightly less depth.
I’ve done this (sitting in a passenger seat), it’s normal. This video is a bit of an optical illusion, the planes are nowhere near as close as they look.
There are certain airports where it’s standard procedure.
SOP (like 99% sure). Many airports have parallel runways with more than enough clearance for two simultaneous landings. I have been a passenger in this scenario at least four times that I can think of, and I don’t fly that much. I think those were in Denver, SFO and LAX. I don’t recall there being any situation that would be considered an emergency on any of those.
Yeah, this is SFO and these runways are 750 ft / 230 m apart. Definitely not a lot of room for error, but the telephoto zoom makes this look a lot closer than it really is
Having looked at sand under a microscope for many, many hours: kinda? These images are not just heavily curated but arranged. Yes I’ve had a bunch with random shell fragments and forams SOMETIMES but notice in those images the pieces are carefully spread out?
Most clean sand looks like the bottom right two images but even those are already filtered for interest. I have a bunch of stuff that looks like the bottom middle photo, which is a contentinal glacial sand deposit that is sorted by wave action to have more heavy minerals (pink garnet, black probably magnetite, a splash of green epidote and white qtz splashed in there). It’s usually a thin THIN layer found on some beaches. It’s like a “pretty” sand people know about and not indicative of the vast majority of sand.
Most sand even in a variety of environments is quartz and random lithic (rock) fragments.
I get a little annoyed when these images (usually the top 3) are shared and layman say, “look at how beautiful ALL sand looks! Appreciate the micro world blah blah some inspirational quote.” It’s straight up misinformation but because it’s “just sand” most people don’t care.
I care. Regular sand IS pretty and it’s neat to look at for a little bit. Stop making sand feel bad with unrealistic beauty standards :p.
This made me laugh but I can see why if you have interest you’d be somewhat annoyed by arranged and selected items. It’s not a natural sample. Sand’s not the only thing I’ve seen this done with. There are worse things in the world to be fussed up about tho’. And I do like the heart shaped piece 💜
But I did find this image of the garnet sand that would be a good example of the bottom middle picture in the post. You can make out the pink, black, and green zones and I think it looks rad.
I always think sand is worth looking at at least once, lol. Get a hand lens (like $10?) and check it out!
Also it’s probably pink not because of garnet but because of the oxidized bedrock. I’ve seen a ton of stuff that looked like that on the shores around the Lake Superior and it was usually some form of basalt, rhyolite, or rare sedimentary interbed. You’d probably see a bunch of smaller reddish pinkish sand grains along with darker gray ones and maybe some milky quartz. But IIRC Canadian Shield stuff is pretty diverse and I recall there being some gnarly meta stuff out there so you might find some glittery mica and garnets.
Do you know what the sand from elafonissi beach (Crete) looks like under a microscope? It really does look pinky when you’re there, and I was told it was because of a certain type of seashell that made up the majority of the top sand. I was a kid though, definitely could have been lies.
Never heard of it but sounds nice! Pink sands can happen for a variety of reasons and I’m not sure exactly what is going on in Crete. I collected some pink sand in the Bahamas that I found interesting and long story short, it was manganese stained fossil coral. It sounds like a similar process is happening in Crete with red stained foraminifera tests (tiny shells). Not sure what the red is in the tests in Crete without digging into it as I only did a cursory search but iron oxide and/or manganese aren’t horrible guesses.
Whoa you were not kidding about that being pink. Holy cow. I mean…the pink grains could potentially be garnet but I’m a little doubtful and unsteady at saying that for sure. They have conchoidal fracture and a vitreous sheen which could easily be quartz, perhaps stained by something else going on in the area (Mn? > Fe).
Those blue green grains are fricken neato, I don’t have a good explanation for them and can’t really get a good look from the photos.
I see a couple of green grains that could be epidote or some other green mineral, and one that looks a little olivine-esque but it’s hard to tell.
It’s one of those things that you poke and prod and rotate and stare at for a while before giving a broad, hand wavy guess.
It would probably be helpful to look up the location and the formation to get a better sense of what to expect.
I work with telecom cables. This happens when the cable isn’t rotated when hung. If it’s hung without any rotations the wind catches it and it’ll dance like this
I was pleasantly surprised by the race this year. Like, cheesiness of the showmanship aside, the racing itself was highly entertaining. Especially if you ignore Verstappen and focus on the rest of the grid.
mildlyinteresting
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