That's One Way to Do It!

Your tractor-trailer truck is involved in a traffic accident and catches fire.  How do you put it out?  You get some help:

Prince Rupert's Drop...

I have read about Prince Rupert's Drops, but I had never before seen one demonstrated – especially not at 130,000 frames per second!  If you're interested in science, you'll enjoy this 7 minute mini-documentary...

Imagine...

Imagine a thick steel sphere whose interior is just 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter.  Imagine shoehorning yourself, a companion, and a whole bunch of equipment into this tiny space.  Then imagine that steel sphere is attached to a submarine.  You're floating just a few feet under the surface when something goes horribly wrong, and your now-broken submarine breaks free of the cable holding it near the surface and it plunges toward the bottom, about 1/3 of a mile (1,580 feet, or 480 meters) below.  As your steel sphere – the only thing keeping you alive – rushes down at speeds reaching 40 mph (60 k/h).  You have almost a minute to prepare yourself before it his the bottom, but when it does hit all hell breaks loose.  Your submarine embeds itself in a shallow gully on the bottom.  Equipment and supplies are all over the place, but you and your companion survive.  You have oxygen sufficient for just 72 hours of life, but basically everything else about your submarine is broken.  There's no way you can do anything at all that could get you back to the ocean surface.  What do you do now?

This really happened forty years ago, in August 1973.  I remember it well, especially the timing (just a couple of weeks after the last U.S. combat activity in the Vietnam War).  The plight of the two men trapped deep underwater made news headlines all around the world.  After an international effort got the right equipment and men to the scene, the helpless submariners were rescued.  When they were finally back on the surface and cracked their hatch, they had just 12 minutes of oxygen left.  It was that close.  I know that Hollywood would have made it 12 seconds, but in real life...that is really, really close to the edge.  The photo at right was taken just after a raft picked them up from their sphere...

Palate Cleanser of the Day...

Just watch:

How To Demolish a Hotel, Las Vegas Style...

This happened 6 years ago, but I just saw it:

Flash Floods...

What they actually look like:


I've only seen two flash floods in my entire life, both entirely by accident – I wasn't chasing them like these guys.  Both the flash floods I saw looked much like this, though the character of the brush was a bit different (being Southern Californian chaparral).  They aren't at all like the flash floods of Hollywood or many western novels – there's no 50 foot high wall of water that appears without warning.

On the other hand, if you do something stupid like, say, parking your RV in the wash and going to sleep – you're likely to get quite a rude surprise!  In one of the flash floods I witnessed, exactly this happened.  I saw the RV being washed along the by the torrent, flipping over and over.  About 15 minutes after the RV went by, the owners (a young couple) came huffing up, trying to catch up with it.  They managed to get out of the RV before the flood tipped it over, but getting to shore was touch-and-go.  They were both quite scared.  I gave them a ride, first down to where their RV was still tumbling along, now beaten almost beyond recognition.  It was a total loss.  Then I gave them a ride into the town of Ocotillo, where they parked themselves in an air-conditioned business and awaited help from relatives.

Open Content...

I hope this is the start of something big...

The Getty Museum announced its “open content” program, and released hundreds of high resolution images into the public domain.  You can browse the released images on a rather nicely done web page.  The preceding link will show you all the open content digital images of paintings by Rubens of the natural world.  It's easy to change those filter settings to whatever you'd like to see.  If you click on the title of any image shown here, you'll get a page that lets you download it, in awesomely high resolution.

Bravo, Getty Museum!

Bombardier 415...

Nice video of Bombardier 415s in action – the only airplane designed from the ground up for fire-fighting.  Via reader and blog friend Simi L.:

It's 2013, but 2016 Election Materials are Already Available...

Triple Play...

A book review in the Wall Street Journal (my favorite newspaper), written by Bruce Schneier (my favorite security commentator), about a book by Radley Balko (my favorite libertarian writer).  Sweet!

Getting Through the Day...

He's Like a Superhero!

Burglar gets a little surprise in Tulsa, Oklahoma:

TULSA, Oklahoma - A burglary suspect got quite the surprise Wednesday morning. Police say Robert Cole tried to break into a home, but ended up hogtied in the front yard.

The picture is making its way around the Internet. Police say Cole was bum-rushed and hogtied by the homeowner, after he tried to break in to the house in the 2600 block of East 54th Street North.

"He's like a superhero," said Denay Houston.

Read the whole thing, and watch the videos:

Crazy People...

...are fun to watch:

Home Depot Has This Stuff Right Now...

If There Were More Ads Like This...

...I might watch a little more television!

Dear NSA...

Zombie sends the NSA an email:

To: doesn’t_matter@you’ll_read_this_regardless_of_the_address.com

From: zombie@z0mbietime.com


Dear NSA,

Constitution Allah Ackbar Tea Party bomb abortion patriot gun IRS Islam dog whistle Obama prayer tax surveillance.

There. Now that I’ve gotten your attention, can we have a chat?

If you have any pull with the American Psychiatric Association, could you please recommend to them that the psychological state formerly known as “paranoia” should be no longer defined as a mental illness? Asylums all across the country are filled with people whose only neurosis is the vague feeling that they are being spied on or followed by unseen powerful enemies. But now we know that everyone is being spied on every time they pick up the phone, buy something, use the Internet, or walk around in public — so it turns out that these “paranoid” patients aren’t delusional after all. It seems rather unfair to lock us them up and classify us them as crazy if our vague feelings of being stalked by the government turned out to be true.

To make sure you get this message, may I also say 9/11 Eric Holder birth certificate Bill Ayers drone Orwell Anonymous leak.

And in conclusion, just in case your algorithm has gotten overloaded, I’d like to not mention my private, personal opinions about the Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and Ninth Amendment (and you really don’t want to know what I think about the Sixteenth Amendment). For more information, please read the Fifth Amendment.

Thank you.

— zombie

PS — Tell the IRS that the best times for for my upcoming audit are Tuesdays and Thursdays, but unannounced visits from the EPA, FBI, OSHA or ATF would be more convenient on Monday afternoons or Wednesday mornings. And, needless to say, you can eavesdrop any ol’ time.

I hope the Zombie doesn't mind the copy - no excerpt made any sense.

One Awesome Young Lady...

Can you even imagine doing this as an adult, let alone at age 11?  I can't...

Escherian Stairwell...

Via reader and friend Simon M.  Watch this video first:


Then for an explanation, watch this:

Metallic Snow...

Really!

Shifting Sands...

Watch this:


If this is new to you, there's a brief explanation here.  There's no photographic trickery involved; if you were standing there, you'd see this.

I stumbled across this phenomenon completely by accident when I was in the U.S. Navy.  The ship I served on was made of steel – decks, walls, ceilings, everything.  In one small compartment, about 10 feet on a side, we had a pair of “motor-generators” (MG sets) that converted 60Hz AC to 400 Hz AC to power our computer systems.  The MG sets ran at a constant speed, and served as a source of vibration.  The floor acted like a nice metal plate, with the MG sets right in the middle.  The dirt and junk on the floor acted just like the sand in this video, being bounced around by the standing vibration waves until they wandered into the stationary node lines.  The result, just like this video, was a beautiful “picture” of the standing waves...