dual_sport_dork
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
- Comment on WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CURSOR? 4 hours ago:
Meanwhile, I’m fascinated by the type of dweebus that would waste construction time and budget, not to mention taking up precious squares in their base, sandbagging the edges of a cliff.
(I’m assuming this is a prefab computer opponent base in some damn fool mission or another, but I’ll be damned if I can remember which one after 30 years.)
- Comment on Would submitting a criminal complaint against Trump and his administration too the ICC for war crimes be a waste of time? 1 week ago:
*Asterisk.
^I’vebeenwaitingmyentirelifetomakethissnidecomment.^
- Comment on What should we actually turn our aggression towards? 1 week ago:
Teflon. Goddamned Teflon. Did your podcast mention Dr. Kenneth Berry? (No, not the nutrition quack. The other one.)
Dr. Roy J. Plunkett gets all the credit for the discovery of Teflon and it’s true that his name appears on the patent for the process for creating the actual material. As it was the dry powered precipitate wasn’t terribly useful as a consumer product and mostly only saw use being pressed into solid forms for making highly corrosion resistant gaskets and seals for e.g. nuclear equipment.
Dr. Kenneth Berry’s picture is not hanging in the hallways in DuPont’s offices. His name appears on no plaque. He’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Teflon. When it comes to DuPont’s puff pieces and their official history, you’ll notice that in the gap between the accidental discovery of that weird slippery white powder and its advent as a consumer product there is inevitably some dismissive handwaving and use of the passive voice. Oh, “it was discovered that…” and “DuPont engineers determined that…”
They don’t mention that Dr. Kenneth Berry was the inventor of the solution form of Teflon. He figured out how to dissolve and suspend it in liquid, and by extension how to actually apply it to surfaces in a useful manner. He did not invent the pan, but he was instrumental in figuring out how it could be done. And it was Dr. Berry who ate the first fried egg cooked on a Teflon surface — not Marc Grégoire. Dr. Berry’s patent, applied and granted in 1951. Grégoire’s, 1954.
DuPont doesn’t mention this because Dr. Berry also knew damn well what nasty chemicals DuPont was using to produce Teflon, and to some degree he knew where and how they were dumping them. He documented all of this he could, stored it in a bank deposit box, and wrote it into his will that these documents were to be released to the public when he died in 2008. In retaliation for this, DuPont memory holed him. He is persona non grata there, even in death.
I know this because he told me so. Dr. Berry lived in the town I grew up in. It’s not in whole thanks to him that we know the full story of the deeply evil things DuPont has done, but it is certainly in part. I was knee high to a grasshopper at the time so the significance of this was surely lost on me. I know, however, why my mother was so insistent that we never owned any Teflon pans.
Dr. Kenneth Berry: Lived, invented, developed a conscience, once shot my stuck kite out of a tree with his shotgun, tattled on DuPont, died.
- Comment on i guess lunar eclipse got an update too.. 1 week ago:
Yes, the Omnians. They’re a scathing critique of dogmatic hierarchical religions in general and Christianity in particular. The zenith of their folly is depicted in Small Gods, where it’s revealed that not a single one among them except for one lowly initiate actually believes in their god anymore, having replaced him instead with blind obedience to their rituals and the bureaucracy of the church itself. The Discworld being what it is, their god is very much real but has been diminished to inhabiting the body of an ordinary tortise and is unable to communicate with anyone except his sole remaining believer.
One of their ironclad declarations is that the Disc is spherical, a notion that they are quite willing to torture people to death over questioning. Of course as we all know, the truth is the opposite.
And yet, the turtle moves.
- Comment on Can't get better than this 2 weeks ago:
Approved. I will see you, and raise:
- Comment on Even as an adult I always loved these cartoons 2 weeks ago:
Them as would like to be socked directly in the nostalgia may also wish to click on:
- Comment on public service 2 weeks ago:
In case you’d like to know just how fucked the entire Linkedin edifice is, now is once again the time to trot out this piece of trivia.
Windows users only: Hold down all four modifier keys on your keyboard, Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Win, and press L.
You can never unlearn this piece of knowledge. You’re welcome.
- Comment on Requesting to Mod /c/Photography 2 weeks ago:
Rockin’.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to support@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on Administrative task management 3 weeks ago:
There’s a friggin’ drop shadow on her arm and the gun as if somebody made this in Microsoft Word. The shadow falling across the corner of the computer tower wouldn’t line up with the part on the wall and bookshelf like that, not to mention the edge of the door frame.
- Comment on Administrative task management 3 weeks ago:
With the jank-ass safety lever and the top grip screw in the wrong place?
Don’t worry, I have a worse one you can look at. Here you go.
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 3 weeks ago:
When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 3 weeks ago:
Only if you want to have the black and green version of Toy instead of the white and blue version, at this rate. Barring a handfull of exclusives everything gets released on PS5 and Xbox now and maybr also a watered down port on the Switch/2. The current Xbox and Playstation are so architecturally similar to each other that they may as well be the same machine with the only difference being which asshole is at the helm, and for either of them you may as well have a PC.
- Comment on Shit would be pretty sick 4 weeks ago:
Way ahead of you, chief.
- Comment on Games you fell out of love with. 5 weeks ago:
How many other games from 2011 just got re-re-re-released on the Switch 2 for a full $60, though?
- Comment on My only response to Discord 1 month ago:
As any night club bouncer or liquor store clerk knows, ZIP code 12345 actually resolves to Schenectady, New York.
- Comment on PROTIP 1 month ago:
I carried my Schrade Switch-It every day in the little seam pocket of my carpenter’s jeans (as was the style at the time) and the only flak I ever caught for it was one day the principal spotting it and telling me he didn’t want to see me with my “pager” at school anymore.
I told him he had my scout’s honor that he would never see me with a pager so long as a lived. Yes, this sailed right over his head. I still didn’t get into trouble, though, which is surprising given the sheer variety of other stupid and highly spurious things that somehow got me in trouble in school.
- Comment on PROTIP 1 month ago:
- Comment on All fight no flight 1 month ago:
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a meme before.
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 month ago:
I have seen guys do it, though. I suppose in certain specific scenarios it might make sense. I’m in agreement there, though, I think I’ll give it a pass unless I absolutely have to.
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 month ago:
For anyone wondering what the heck this thing is, it’s called a roll chart. Usually these are loaded with turn-by-turn instructions for rally racing or similar, but as you can see you can also stick a map in one.
If you’re going to do the map thing it kind of helps for your overall route to be oriented vertically, or else otherwise you have to stick the map in it sideways.
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 month ago:
It’s a map in a roll chart holder. These days they’re used in rally and off road racing, and sometimes motorcycle touring.
- Comment on What's with companies naming things "MyNoun"? 1 month ago:
I can confirm this to at least some degree. Part of my job involves marketing and this unfortunately requires at least some minimum peripheral contact with professional marketing people.
They’re idiots, at least on the creative side. They live in a bubble of their own making and are among the worst people on Earth for predicting how regular people think, interact with products or websites, or make decisions.
However, they also get piles and piles of cash shoveled in their direction by executive types who are also idiots, in the vain hope of an ROI that is legendarily fuzzy and also extremely easy to fudge. Thus, the machine churns on.
- Comment on London stabbing rates vs X posts about London crime 1 month ago:
Agreed.
Also, if everybody has a knife, the cartel that slaps those impossible-to-tear plastic collars over the necks of bottles of salad dressing and soy sauce will no longer hold any power over us.
- Comment on London stabbing rates vs X posts about London crime 1 month ago:
And while we’re at it, un-ban all the silly things that they used your baseless hysteria as a purported justification for banning.
Knives for everybody! All shapes and sizes.
- Comment on How would you spell the sound Transformers make when they transform? 1 month ago:
As usual, this is thoroughly documented to a perhaps ridiculous degree on the Transformers Wiki:
tfwiki.net/wiki/Transformation#Onomatopoeia
There is an official answer to this question. It’s Transformers; of course there is an official answer to this particular question. Actually, there are several. Jury’s out on which of these interpretations in particular have caused the franchise to be Ruined Forever, but surely at least one of them has.
- Comment on smh 1 month ago:
I’m convinced that the majority of whinging about metric in the US is actually coming from old machine operators tucked away somewhere in the industrial sector who don’t want to give up their old decimal inch Bridgeports and Shipleys, or have bosses who wouldn’t buy them new machines anyway. Everything else stems from there, bubbling on up through the pipes as it does.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 month ago:
More or less, yes. That’s also why it appears more red/orange as it gets closer to the horizon from your perspective, since at that oblique angle the light has to pass through more of the atmosphere to get to you and more of it gets scattered or absorbed by particulates in the air.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 month ago:
The question is how gradually. Over the span of 10,000 years, probably not. Over the span of a month, absolutely. Remember that the hue of sunlight already changes significantly throughout the day based mostly on the sun’s proximity to the horizon (and thus how much thickness of crap in the atmosphere it has to plow through to get to your location) and we can definitely detect that easily.
- Comment on If the color of the Sun was orange, wouldn't the clouds and everything white also be orange? My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the "real" Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED. 1 month ago:
We perceive the sun as white. That’s a fairly important distinction.
The reason we perceive the sun as white is surely because the sun has output basically the same spectrum as long as humanity (and a great deal of humanity’s precursors) has existed. We evolved with our eyes considering the spectrum the sun kicks out as fully white light, comprised of the sum total of electromagnetic frequencies we’re able to receive with our eyeballs.
There is no such thing as objective color of any light. Our understanding of color is completely based on our perception of it. If the sun’s peak output were in the 590–625nm range (what we currently perceive as orange) for all that time rather than in the green part of the spectrum it is in reality (500–565nm), we undoubtedly would have evolved to see that particular spectrum combination as white light instead.
All of the above notwithstanding, if the spectrum output of the sun changed overnight like OP’s idiot friend is suggesting, it would be immediately apparent to everyone who isn’t literally blind.
