You can clean dirty/corroded electronic edge contacts with a pencil eraser. Also helps equally as cleaning preparation before soldering.

Go ahead and try it yourself on an old penny, it’ll clean up and look shiny as new. Same principle for electronics.

Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.

This isn’t actually true. You can look at the Nordic countries which are very oil rich and owe a lot of their prosperity to that. The United States is pretty resource rich as well. What is a curse is imperialism, and having lots of resources attracts lots of imperialists. The “oil curse” or “resource curse” is a myth made up to whitewash imperialists and absolve them of guilt.

Strap in and let me tell you about my special interest, Iranian history. In the 1800s, before the discovery of oil, Iran was ruled by an extremely corrupt line of shahs who sold out every part of the impoverished country to fund their lavish lifestyles and massive harems - to the point that other countries had to step in and say that they weren’t allowed to sell out that much of the country. But the Iranian people were upset by this state of affairs, and staged a massive boycott, which set the stage for a mass movement in 1905 that established a democratic parliament and a constitution, with the support of an overwhelming majority, including the clergy (a fatwa was actually issued declaring violating the boycott to be haram). Iran was well on it’s way to becoming a peaceful, prosperous, democratic society - but then the Fire Nation attacked, in the form of the British and Russian Empires moving in, shelling the parliament building and dividing the nation between themselves, like a pack of wolves.

The Iranian people suffered tremendously in the following years, with major plagues, famines, and genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Of course, the Russian Empire collapsed, the British took the opportunity to unify the country, propping up a shah of a new dynasty as their puppet. That shah proved uncooperative during WWII, and the Allies invaded to set up supply lines between the Eastern and Western fronts and to secure the Iranian oil (which had now been discovered), and the shah was forced to abdicate to his son, who the British found more amenable.

The British technically owned the rights to Iran’s oil, but the deal they had made was with the previous dynasty (Qajar). The one that had been selling out their country to an absurd degree, the one that had been overthrown by the people precisely because they were selling out the country, and so naturally the deal they had struck with the British regarding oil (which had been made before oil had even been discovered in Iran) gave them extremely lucrative terms. But it actually didn’t matter how lucrative the terms were because the British were just straight up stealing it. They falsified their records and forbid any kind of inspection of their facilities.

This led the Iranian people to once again mobilize in support of democracy and self-rule. As outrage over the exploitation grew, the shah, who had previously rubber-stamped anyone the British picked, began to fear his own people more than the British and appointed democratic reformer Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. After the Iranians had watched the British stonewall them for decades, Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry with overwhelming public support. Iran was once again on track to becoming a peaceful, democratic, independent country.

But the British set up a naval blockade that crippled their economy. Iranians, at this point, had a neutral to positive view of the US, and hoped that it would live up to its stated ideals and support them against the British. The British, meanwhile, expected the Americans to back up their “property rights.” President Truman threw up his hands in frustration, seeing both sides as intransigent. But Churchill simply waited him out, and offered his successor Eisenhower British support in Korea and NATO in exchange for the CIA launching a coup, and so Iran was passed around like a bargaining chip. Mossadegh’s commitment to democratic ideals allowed the CIA free reign, he didn’t crack down on the press despite the CIA controlling virtually all the newspapers, he didn’t crack down on protests while the CIA was hiring protesters on both sides, etc. Naturally, he was ousted (although the CIA denied it/covered it up for decades), and the shah was given much more power (which he used to hunt down and exterminate the Iranian left) and the oil kept flowing.

But after a few decades, once again, outrage over the exploitation came to a head, and the shah, seeking to appease his people, participated in a multinational oil boycott. But as a result, his foreign support was withdrawn, which set the stage for the Islamic Revolution. President Carter, against the advice of his state department, allowed the shah to take refuge in the US. Naturally, this outraged the Iranians, because the US had previously staged a coup to install the very same man as a dictator. In retaliation, some of the revolutionaries seized the US embassy and took hostages. This of course led to a breakdown in relations between the US and Iran.

And so, Iran is often held up as an example of this supposed “resource curse” that leads to political instability (not to mention the old line about “Islam is incompatible with democracy”), but the reality is that the country had multiple times in its history where it could’ve become stable, peaceful, democratic, and independent, but those chances were destroyed, not by Iranians, but by foreign imperialists, the vile colonial empires of the British and Americans. Had they simply been left alone, they would not have suffered from this supposed “resource curse.” If you look into the history of any similar country, you will find a similar story. But the history of these countries are simply not taught and not known in the imperial core, and so other explanations are invented.

I know more than I ever planned on knowing about audio equipment.

The first thing you need to know is that you cannot defeat physics with marketing hype. I don’t give a flying fuck how many wave guides Bose talks about or all the technology under the sun, you need a big speaker to make deep bass. There is nothing anyone can say or do to change this.

And when you look up audio equipment, ignore the “music power” because they will state what is the momentary maximum power the speaker can handle… but we don’t play micro seconds of MAX power music, we play steady audio… what you need to know is the RMS power the device can handle or output.

Furthermore, audio cables are a complete sham. You can take any power cable from a discarded vacuum, boom, you’ve got speaker cable. But but gold connectors… Yeah no.

This might not be uncommon around here, but…

Between D&D and video games, I can identify most medieval weapons and armor.

Mythological beasts as well.

People really misunderstand a lot about diving.

1

• SCUBA is an acronym that stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Aparatus
• SCUBA specifically refers to the gear with a tank, and not gear that uses an air hose connected to a boat
• Tanks are usually filled with just regular air, nothing special about it
• Oxygen becomes toxic at depth, so if you were to dive with 100% oxygen, you’d die at a fairly shallow depth

2

• Your flesh and blood absorb nitrogen from the air
• The amount it absorbs is based on the pressure of your environment/the air you’re breathing
• When you come back up to one atmosphere (1 bar) of pressure, your body slowly releases the nitrogen it has absorbed at depth
• This is a physical process, not one your body has any control over
• If you stay down for too long or come up too quickly, the nitrogen will become bubbles in your flesh and blood (the bends)
• That’s painful and can kill you
• A hyperbaric chamber (hyper-more than normal, baric-atmospheric pressure) can help by forcing the nitrogen bubbles to dissolve back into your flesh and release slowly
• You can use a special mix of air with more oxygen and less nitrogen than normal to increase safe dive times, but this also decreases maximum depth, because of oxygen toxicity

3

• Another danger is if you ascend without breathing out, your lungs can pop
• Humans don’t have any sense to tell us our lungs are too full
• This is called lung over-expansion and can also kill you
• It is also treated with a stay in a hyperbaric chamber

4

• Another danger is nitrogen at depth can induce an intoxicating effect like alcohol
• This is called nitrogen narcosis and can cause you to act carelessly and get yourself killed
• If you experience this, the correct course of action is to ascend a bit (like 15 feet) and wait until it subsides before you attempt to descend again
• You can use a special mix of air with helium or a special mix of just helium and oxygen to reduce the risk of narcosis on deep dives

5

• Regular diving gear has two second stage regulators, your main and your octo
• The name octo comes from how it makes your gear look like an octopus
• It’s a backup for you and for anyone who might need it
• The hose is yellow to make it easy to see

6

• The vest you wear (not everyone uses one, but most divers do) is called a Buoyancy Control Device, or BCD, or just BC
• It fills with air from your tank when you want to ascend to increase your buoyancy
• In an emergency, you can drop your weights, which should make you positively buoyant and cause you to ascend

And last, but not least:

• Diving is incredibly fun and an experience I’d recommend to everyone who is even remotely interested

Amethyst, citrine and tigers eye are all Quartz they just have various impurities and structural differences that create the differences in color/appearance. Some can even be irritated or heated to change their color.

The Orion nebula can be seen with binoculars depending on the lighting and the famous horse head nebula is actually located very close to it in the sky (visually from our perspective, not physically)

This feels well known but…

Adding split screen to games is actually a very funky process.

It changes how the UI works, input setup, how sounds are handled, how some effects are done, how optimizing is worked on, it significantly increases testing and QA time because split screen may have its own unique bugs, and other quirky problems due to either the game’s or engine’s design (most of the time split screen is not a high priority focus compared to other features)

All that for something a very small percentage of players will even look at.

I often see people lament the lack of split screen games, and I do wish there were more, but its a hard sell and I can see why many games abandon it completely.

(Save for a few that made it entirely their focus, like split fiction)

I sat here for a couple of minutes, trying to think of something I was willing to reveal.

in the open source multiplayer game Space Station 14, you can swab pollen from cannabis plants to egg-plants (as in, plants that grow eggs, distinct from eggplant) and have a chance to grow eggs full of pure THC

I look up everything interesting that occurs to me on Wikipedia so I know a lot of shit about random topics.

Not sure the Guardian has enough readers to be so influential in British politics tbh, though it does try

The chemical used to stiffen cloth for archival book covers is also used to help snack bars retain their shape.

Here’s another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.

David Vizard’s books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing…

That’s a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.

I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently…

sigh

the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.

Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than … pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.

IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:

• “The Principles of Yacht Design”, get the most-recent edition of it.
• ALL of Dave Gerr’s books.
• Fossatti’s Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
• probably Nigel Calder’s books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
• Tom Cunliffe’s books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs “good enough”, & the implications of that, on the design
• a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
• “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, by Brion Toss
• “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice” or something like that, can’t remember, right now…
• the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
• look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
• Harry Riblett’s book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil’s problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
• Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren’t touching any part of the code that you aren’t working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can’t find what it is that is skewing everything unless you’re seeing the whole sheet’s equations: it’s the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )

Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing “wild geese”.

For aircraft-design, I’d say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson’s book, NOT Raymer’s.

( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri’s is on its 2nd edition, so I’m presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can’t afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I’d got Gudmundsson’s book, instead of Raymers, now )

You’ll need Harry Riblett’s book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.

You’ll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn

( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold’s birds. )

Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation … become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.

Harry Riblett was using Eppler’s simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you’d HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.

You NEED to understand both Bernoulli’s principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.

There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics’s complicated, & I’d recommend that.

It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one…

Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.

There is a video, which I now can’t find, on changing Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.

That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you … don’t waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.

You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that’s beginning to become significant in modern designs.

All the stuff I’ve realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I’ll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection’s required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.

Sorry I’m not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means…

but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more … exploring-evolution’s-potential.

Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you’re really knowing-what-you’re-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.

Don’t expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.

It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc…

But I’d rather the world have other-people doing it, … than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.

LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space…

Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.

If not, then just ignore this.

_ /\ _

Apart from some episodes of violence, it was stable. But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess.

Not directly relevant to your question, but for starters you should read about Sykes-Picot. The destabilizing impact of imperialism simply comes after the imperialist force and its vastly superior military leaves. Also you’re thinking of colonialism; imperialism never ended.

Now to directly answer your question, I’m a politics and history guy and the Ottoman Empire doesn’t get nearly enough hate for its role in shaping the modern Middle East. The stagnation they caused that allowed the region to be so easily swallowed by Western imperial interests is a direct result of centuries of Ottoman stagnation and authoritarian incompetence. The janissaries in particular deserve a special place in hell for their role in obstructing any and all progress in the Empire until it was too late. Those fucks are the reason there’s no Ottoman Catherine the Great or Frederick the Great.

There is a “Wilhelm Scream” for TV police radio chatter. It’s a sound effect that you’ve probably heard hundreds of times without realising it. I first encountered it while playing SimCity 3000 and it has bugged me for 20 years because I couldn’t work out what was said.

Here is the soundbite and an extensive list of TV show episodes and movies where it’s been spotted:

https://youtu.be/dklA4-ACN4k

Now, I think I cracked it last year:

Please go listen to it for a few times and write down what is being said before you read my analysis

Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like “BOFU2017” or “BOF:NT” in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history

So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as “illegal charts”)

In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS… the flagship event is called “BMS of Fighters” (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (… and there are some shitposts too, we don’t talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)

Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash’s entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact… a song from BOFU2017

It’s hard to tell but I wouldn’t be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games… or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks

As for the BMS themselves… distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining… but anyways it is rather fascinating

Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/