It does look like the barriers are effective since I can only find a very small number of rescues from the area (mostly boats losing power). Nevertheless, that’s the kind of water feature that’s way, way more dangerous than it might appear at first glance.
Yes absolutely. From upstream it can convert an engine stall into a multi-fatality event.
I used to live on a recreational lake whose output dam was similar but steeper. 50 foot drop onto riprap. Ouch. Good news was the usual worst-case inflow didn’t produce a raging torrent at the output dam; it was real wide. But a true flood event w sustained high rains might’ve. Nobody went over while I lived thefe, but it’s been done. Shiver.
Back in Minneapolis…
From downstream, any human powered boat approaching the output rotor is likewise in mortal danger. The current is fast enough you’d have to try real hard to get into the danger zone. But woe betide the dumbshit who succeeds.
There are a bunch of similar lock and tainter gate dam facilities up & down the Mississippi & Missouri rivers near St. Louis where I used to live. Lotta opportunities to see large trees go over the lip or under the gate & spend 20 minutes being denuded while being rotored in the bottom scour. A human wouldn’t last 4 minutes.
“Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.”
Randall needs a good slappin’ for that one.
Now, now. To err is human, to forgive equine.
Randall’s not the only one who needs a good slappin’.
Jest saying.
It certainly behooves one to give them a fair trot, in the mane.
Don’t look a gift horse (or even two) in the mouth; you’ll find the stolen grain in there.
“The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.”
Beware of Greek gift horses bearing gifts in the mouth.
Pretty much me, except that I use a passive neighbor-source heat pump system. I live in a condo with neighbors below and on two sides of me. I have a much wider temperature tolerance than average. And so I can almost always depend on the heating/cooling effect I get by sharing walls and my floor.
One of the advantages of big-building living. 5 of the 6 faces of the bounding 3D rectangle of my apartment are interior areas whose HVAC is paid for by somebody else. And my exterior-facing face is the smallest of the surface areas; floor and ceiling are largest, side walls next, and end walls are least. I wag that about 10% of my surface area is exterior.
Xkcd in the news
The NYC torture scheme was just the latest example of a “wrench attack,” where a thief employs brutal physical violence in order to gain access to a target’s virtual cryptocurrency stashes. The phrase hails from a 2009 strip from the popular webcomic xkcd, making the point that any common thief could break into a user’s encrypted software simply by battering the owner with a $5 wrench “until he tells us the password.”
The Slate article links to an interview with Randall in 2019 where, amongst other things, he’s asked his take on interviews. He replies:
That’s only the beginning. Next, Munroe says he remembers reading a sci-fi story, though he can’t recall the title, about a first-contact scenario that involves people trying to negotiate light-years away. “They finally realize that the best way isn’t to send questions and wait for responses, it’s just to both continually transmit streams of information adjusting as they went because the interview format didn’t work,” he says. So that’s one option.
My Son the Physicist by Asimov (except it’s about communicating with Pluto and a time-lag of light-hours, not light-years).
Maybe they read the “Omnibus evil MFs” thread.
Why not just put advertising on the Moon? Don’t have to fight the glare to read it.
Yes, I’ve read the “Man Who Sold the Moon”. And I’m not looking forward to sleeping in a section of office building stairs.
Frederick Pohl’s The Space Merchants recycled that one.
One thing you have to remember about the pre-Space Age: once upon a time “the moon” was a synonym for the unobtainable, as in e.g. “I promised you the moon”. The surface of the moon was tantalizingly visible, but might as well have been in another dimension as far as anything humanly obtainable went. Heck, when I was a kid in the 1960s a reprinted “Tom and Jerry” comic book featured a story from the 1950s with Tom scoffingly declaring “no one will ever land on the moon”. The mental shift over ~20 years from 1949 to 1969 was profound. The Apollo landings were a triumph we have trouble appreciating these days.
Aside: That was part of a set of short-shorts written by various great science fiction writers. There was a company that was putting these stories in magazine ads, and contacted the writers to write them, with the only condition being that the stories had to be about communication. IIRC, Heinlein’s contribution was Searchlight. Clarke wrote one, too, but I can’t remember what his was.
Quarantine, I think
I think there was an additional condition: that the article could not suggest there would be a day where no communication technology would be needed. 