Darth Fluffy

Maglite, with Duracells.

So, the question that popped into my head was, "It's Canada, it's snow, ... how is this 'special'?" "We have a really weak cold front moving in, it's more like a cool front, really. But we don't want it to feel bad, so we're calling it, 'special'. You can do it, cool front! And that's our special weather statement. The mind is a terrible thing ...

If you figure out you want to delete before you hit submit, you can just leave the page. Afterward, all you can do is edit the second one into a quote and add a comment, "What an excellent post".

A little light humor, eh?

I never got the impression that Scotty was talking about an aluminum compound. I don't know if that's canon. Sapphire is hardly novel, as you pointed out; it's used in engineering applications and has been know for centuries. I also did not get the impression that he was talking about extremely thin sheets of aluminum, nor aluminum screen. I did understand him to mean transparent at optical frequencies, not at, say gamma wavelengths, which would be a given. He seemed to be talking about an allotrope of pure aluminum, or possibly an alloy that was primarily aluminum, like steel is primarily iron. Also, from the use in the whale movie to make a holding tank, it was stable at standard temperature and pressure (STP). It was clearly intended to be fictional in context; I would stop short of stating it is impossible, though. Sapphire is odd. Hard generally means brittle as well. While softer than diamond, sapphire is among the hardest materials we have, but it is also fairly tough. Hence the use in tank optics.

Super Wood. I am continually amazed at things in Star Trek TOS that looked ludicrous when it first aired, but are already possibilities. One such thing appeared in the animated series that aired shortly after TOS was cancelled. In one episode, the Enterprise gets trapped in a deep space Sargasso Sea; there are numerous trapped ships, one of which is a hated Klingon warship trapped. They are forced to cooperate in order to leave. (Most of the ships have been there for ages, and the crews are presumably dead.) I read a short story version of this episode, and one of the derelict ships is described as "made of wood". This was painful to read, at the time. Sorry, author, my apologies, it appears wooden spacecraft are a distinct possibility. Oh, yeah, the transparent wood described in the article could pretty much fill in for Scotty's transparent aluminum.

We don't associate bitter with pleasant, but not bitter at all can be bland. Most non-deserts are a little bitter. And it may be true that in modern beer, hops is added for flavor, but back in the day, it was a preservative,

Yes, finally got the d#%@ door to open.

Absinthe make the heart grow fonder.

I had a hard time figuring out what your first sentence meant, then I laughed. Church buildings are interesting in their own right, so I get that. My experience with mass has to do with weddings and funerals as well, and one Christmas Eve, I went with several friends to a big name Catholic Church in NYC, St. Peters in mid town Manhattan, if memory serves. It was different; the uhm, bishop?, was waving a large censer on a chain hanging from a long pole he was carrying. I didn't see any rats nor cockroaches, so whatever he was burning in it must have been effective. St. Peters was big and bright, and there were lots of people, I think he spoke some Latin, and that's all I can recall. I did not realize that there was a committee that rated drink names. I'll be sure to pass your assessment along the next time I see "Long Island Iced Tea" on the menu. Is this a truth in advertising kind of thing? Because if it is, you might also be interested to know that a Grasshopper contains no actual grasshoppers. There is probably some room for development here, where you could make a more nutritious version that actually used insect guts. See also, Girl Scout Cookies.

Yeah, there is a reason I moved away from all that, or rather, didn't move back to it. 20 F is unusually cold here. We have a few days each year. Rarely much below that.

Lol, to be sure. I was referring to the raw ingredient, not the finished product, but I know you know that.

I knew what it was, I've been to a couple of masses. The article said that Lutherans have mass. I went to a Lutheran church when I was little, and we never called it mass, but then again, there are different flavors of Lutheran. Quoting Wiki: Long Island Iced Tea:

No, ranches have fences and bison are rare. The modern engines out-mass their mid 19th century counterparts by a significant factor. I think the end result of a collision would be hamburger. It's a wild west trope that has some basis in history. It would not be as feasible today. For one thing, trains carried and distributed wealth. Today, not so much. When I was a kid, hundred car trains were not uncommon. It has been decades since I've seen those. Always freight. If there were ever such long trains of passengers, I'm not aware of it. The infrastructure, the passenger stations, do not support it. The typical Amtrak in our area is typically about four cars.

Kahlua is deadly, so smooth and so tasty.

We warmed up, like spring, then it got cold again. It will be like this through March. For being so far south, our growing season is much like the coastal portions of the northeast. I did not know that until I moved here and looked at the map on a seed packet.

So, churches that celebrate "mass" would be "massive"? So, if you are a little kid, that is being forced to attend, but you break away and run, that's a=F/m , right?

The 19th Century environment in Europe vs North America was quite different during the developing years of steam. North America had vast areas of wilderness, with massive herds of cattle and bison. My impression that train robbing was more of an American thing, because you could actually hope to get away with it, vs in Europe, you really have little area to hide in. Much less, anyway. Anyone happen to know if that is true? The main difference between North American trains vs European is the North American train is loosely coupled, with a lot of slack, no dampers pushing between cars (perhaps minor exceptions for specialty car sets), whereas the European trains are tightly coupled, with dampers pushing between cars and couplings pulling. When a European train starts moving, the entire thing more or less starts moving at one time; the engine has to apply the requisite torque to do so. North American trains start one car at a time; there is a slight delay between car, and it adds up. When you see it underway, it's all in tension, and there does not appear to be slack, but when it starts, you can see each car as it is jerked into motion. Imagine, if there is a centimeter slop in the coupling, in a hundred car train, there is an aggregate meter of slack to take up. Less initial torque is required, because of the progressive nature of the starting; however I'm pretty sure this method is much harder on the coupling mechanism, and the North American couplers are quite beefy.

I hear you. My take on Bernie is that he has big ideas with no foundation. He doesn't take the trouble to connect the dots. It fits with what you're saying, "The details don't matter", when, in fact, it's all about the details, isn't it? So I would definitely agree with 'unrealistic'. Still, Trump's 'bad' is off the scale. There are a lot of politicians I don't like, but they are on the map as politicians. Trump is just fractally awful at any scale of scrutiny. I would vote for a rabid racoon with Groucho glasses before Trump. (needs the Groucho glasses to get on the ballot) I don't think you have much to worry about. Bernie did well in his home state. Whoopie! I don't think he has a snowball's chance on the melting icecaps in our present global warming.

I have never heard this about him, now I need to investigate. In any case, the choice will be someone vs Trump, and whoever that is has my vote. Trump is dismantling all kinds of social protections. He appears to not have any sense of right and wrong, only what benefits him and what can he get away with.

Not not convinced beer doesn't hydrate you. I have experienced, and have heard others comment, that after a hot weather workout, like mowing a lawn or running, a beer is an effective thirst quencher. It's at least somewhat nutritious (I expect that depends greatly on the brand, style, and processing), in particular in the B complex from the yeast. It's toward the shallow end of the pool, alcohol content wise, even if you're not drinking US beer.

Then there's Sarah Palin; not being very effective, she's kind of a Palin drone.

Are you sure it's a cat? (Tag for the humor challenged: "Just kidding" - Thank you, now back to our regular discussion thread)

"30% chance of snow, 30% chance of Tequila, 40% chance of Margarita mix, a dusting of salt on the outskirts, and a slice of lime" Now, that's a weather report I can live with.

True and at back in the day they were a large feature of early steam locomotives, the classic big driver wheel Civil War locos and on into the prairie crossing era. at the time, free range and wild stock, especially bison, crossing the rails was not uncommon. I suppose that was part of the motivation for the massacre of the bison. But surely you've noticed that over the years, the cowcatcher got much smaller, and on a modern diesel, there is no cowcatcher per se. The metal enclosure is massive, you can tell from the light damage to the train when one hits a vehicle. And the locomotive needs mass to do it's job, more weight is better, to a point. Cowcatchers had an open construction, not a solid wedge, although you could probably search and find a counterexample. Actual snowplows are always solid, not mesh, and range from small, about the size of a cowcatcher, for regions with light snow, to massive plows, often on the front end of a separate plow car (I had photos of a beautiful old time wooden one that my ex managed to loose), to rotary snow throwers. All locomotives past some very early stage of development carry sand that the engineer can release onto the tracks for traction; one of the domes on steam locos is the sand dome. The train passing will heat the rails well past the melting point of any ice. The point of the comment, re: birds and turbines, deer and highways, cattle and trains, is that life will evolve to fit the environment. It happens fairly fast, but maybe not so much in a hundred years or two. I think mitigating the cattle on the tracks is the expense to cattle ranchers and subsequent building of adequate fencing to contain the cattle. Those cattle blocking tube steel entryways for ranch fields would be worthless if the cattle could easily go around them. Birds are pretty smart, maybe they'll learn faster than deer. OTOH, it's obvious squirrels do not understand electricity. They conduct numerous experiments (conduct, chuckle) and yet keep getting themselves fried.