I had the ISO locked to about as high as I wanted to go given that I was also shooting plenty of things in the shade that day. And I was lazy. Noticeable graininess does not set in on my camera until above about 1250, in my opinion.

This movie is like the king of freeze frame references. If it’s mentioned anywhere in Japanese mythology, even if in a form borrowed from other cultures, it’s virtually guaranteed that it appears somewhere, especially in the yōkai parade the raccoons put on. I think the Ghibli animators had a lot of fun cramming in absolutely everything they could think of.

or the equivalent for woman and be done with it.

You’ll probably find that one to be more difficult than you think, especially in these regressive times.

This is Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.

It’s all pipes, Jerry!

We’re sorry, we can’t accept a check for the amount of “NaN.”

All our American homies are going:

“Wat?”

Erithacus rubecula is the European robin, and doesn’t look much like our ubiquitous American robin and in fact isn’t even in the same family, although they are both passerines. The only other things they have in common are reddish bellies and the fact that early European colonists (and the British in particular) were devastatingly uncreative and habitually went around naming apparently every single thing in the new world after things they already had back in the old world.

In other news, the American robin’s scientific name is Turdus migratorius. “Turdus” being Latin for “thrush” and having absolutely nothing to do with their propensity to crap on your car. Honest.

This episode of Bird Facts brought to you for no reason in particular.

A metric ton, anyway, and provided whatever you want is water.

The obvious answer: Use your replicator to replicate more replicators.

The correct answer: The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

The clever dick corollary: 1m³ is actually quite a large volume, and ain’t no rule says you can only replicate one object at a time. If whatever luxury item or commodity you want is small in volume, which it probably is, don’t forget you can replicate a whole bunch of it within a meter cube.

I have absolutely no idea what I’d do with this but I want one.

There you go.

And the Greeks were reportedly setting ships on fire with sunlight and mirrors millennia ago.

I addressed that in another comment here. The long and short of it (very long, as it happens) is that the volume you’d need is still the same. So your elongated balloon would have to be well beyond what most people would consider to be ridiculously tall. 325.5 meters tall, in fact, given the 0.75 meter diameter I assumed to start with. I figure most people could probably stand in a 0.75m circle provided they didn’t wave their arms around a bunch.

I’m positive competent nerds make up none of their earnings, because we’ve all been pirating Microsoft software ever since we were tall enough to reach the keyboard.

Brake fluid?

Regular DOT3 brake fluid is quite harmful to paint especially if it’s unnoticed and won’t be cleaned off for several hours. You can pump the stuff through rubber brake lines no problem, so I imagine a balloon would be able to survive it.

This I am fairly certain we do not have the technology to achieve. Anything vacuum filled that large would need to have walls so thick so as to completely negate any buoyancy effect. I don’t know of any modern material that would simultaneously be rigid, strong, and light enough.

Sure. You could do a cylinder of three quarters of a meter across which seems like a reasonable footprint for someone to stand in. That’d only have to be, uh, 325.5 meters tall to have the same volume.

Absolutely, but the scale of the balloons is a bit off. Nobody would be walking shoulder to shoulder like this. For a normal-ish 170lb/77kg individual your personal balloon would have to be a little under 6.5 meters across assuming it were filled with helium.

Yes, I did the math.

He did what?

Nature really is out of balance lately.

You can absolutely configure Windows to open folders – and all other shortcuts – with a single click, and IIRC one of the knocks against Windows ME was that this was the default option. And it was godawful, along with the “click” noise it made on navigation. (I think it was WinME. I’ve probably suppressed the memory, and rightly so.)

But the long and short of it is if you want consistency between your UI’s in that regard you can indeed have it.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.