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(Zoom into these photos to see Mars!)
Taken using my Hadley 3D printed telescope, with a crowd of friends invited to watch the occultation of mars by the moon! The phone I was taking photos on ran out of battery, so I hastily threw a friend’s iphone into the holder just in time to capture these.
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I rediscovered the xkcd up goer five text editor, which lets you type using only the 1000 most common english words. So here’s my attempt at writing a description of something:
Not Real Numbers We know how to do many number problems. Number problems with adding are easy. Adding the same number over and over is also easy. If you take a number and add it many times, the same number of times as that number, you get a box number.
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@sylvie hi get fanarted for a fun game with neat movement mechanics
There’s something inherently funny about someone who only knows how to descend ladders by backflipping
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I saw the aurora! It looked like light pollution at first, and I only realized what it was when I noticed the underwhelming “clouds” were in a different place after ten seconds. An hour later they had slight tints of red and green and distinct ray-like shapes! Very cool. Phone camera picked up way more color and detail than I could see by eye, and long 8s exposures picked up even more.
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So I was talking to new local friends and telling them about telescopes and someone says “I have a mirror sitting on my table, is that something that could be useful?” and so after picking it up I now have a ginormous 12.25" mirror that’s 2.25" thick!!
…now what do I do with it? Honestly I’m tempted to make a scope out of it… but that would take money and I’d need to learn new skills like woodworking.
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I have a 1/2" diameter hole. I want to put a pipe inside the hole. What size PVC pipe fits into a 1/2" hole?
Did you guess 1/2" pipe? WRONG. “1/2 inch pipe” isn’t half an inch big on the outside. It’s closer to 7/8". You might think “ah so the 1/2” refers to the inner diameter". Wrong. The inner diameter of 1/2" PVC pipe is legally required to be 0.
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Today I learned liquids don’t exist in space. It’s either gas or solid because apparently liquids only exist when you have a ton of force squishing atoms together and forcing them to intersct and normally that’s air smashing into things at high speed. Crazy. Space whales won’t know what liquids are
Later that day… I found https://www.nasa.gov/ames/flute ! They want to use reflective liquids to make perfect parabola shapes for mirrors!
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This is the 1985 “electronotes builder’s guide and preferred circuits collection” and Bernie Hutchins is advising first time synth makers go buy chemicals at radioshack to etch copper and use a paintbrush to trace out wires manually. It’s so weirdly analog and hands-on compared to the way circuit boards are made today I’m used to, “pay someone else online to do it”
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As a tiny part of the New Deal, Hallie Flanagan helped create the Federal Theatre Project in 1935, where the US government funded unemployed actors to make free plays available to all. A big part of those were Living Newspapers: researchers became playwrights and wrote about current events lifted from the headlines to inform people.
The very first Living Newspaper was a hilarious tragedy. “Ethiopia” by Arthur Arent was all about how being invaded during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War was ravaging the country.
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i bought a t-shirt and the store offered a “$3 mystery t-shirt” so i figured cheap t-shirt why not. presumably that was so they could get rid of t-shirts that didn’t sell well
it finally arrived… and it’s extremely impressively the exact opposite of my style