Archive of entries posted on 3rd December 2020

Thursday Night Unopened Thread: Apparently Even Fictional TV Characters Are Now Sending Us Spam

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I didn’t see Basil in the building, so I logged onto his computer, and now offer you this chance to chime in tonight.

For example, we got this from Mr. Bimmler, who is staying with that nice Mr. Hilter:

Hi there mates, how is the whole thing, and what you want to say regarding this piece of writing, in my view its in fact remarkable in favor of me.

One of the wild & crazy Festrov brothers:

Prone to can do it, your own blog too can pay you really. “Content is the king” — this remarks happens to be saying by people.

And the robot from “Lost In Space,” in a blonde wig:

hi, i am woo from Sweden and i want to explain any thing about “pandemic”. Please ask me.

Do you have something you’d like to share? A link? A joke? Some words of wisdom? A topic to discuss? It’s our nightly Open Thread, and you are having the floor.

Because Electricity Comes From the Socket in the Wall

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Musk: Electric Cars Will Require a Lot More Electric Power Than We Currently Have
PJ Media | Dec. 1, 2020 | Bryan Preston

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that electricity consumption will double if the world’s car fleets are electrified, increasing the need to expand nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources.

Increasing the availability of sustainable energy is a major challenge as cars move from combustion engines to battery-driven electric motors, a shift which will take two decades, Musk said in a talk hosted by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer.

There’s no unicorn energy source or free lunch. Currently, electric cars are primarily powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Those are the sources we use to generate electricity, after all, according to the Energy Information Agency. Renewables are growing but still account for less than 20% of U.S. electricity.

There’s no free lunch when it comes to renewable energy source, which may not even be all that renewable. Wind and sun are free, but the means of generating power from them are not.

They require batteries, which requires extensive mining and the use of toxic chemicals.

Mining is a dirty business.

The giant composite glass blades on modern windmills are not efficiently recyclable, so after they’re used up they end up in landfills, Bloomberg reported in February 2020.

Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.

They’re so durable they’re practically indestructible.
…
… the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet …

Removing them and transporting them to landfills increases windmills’ energy footprint over time.

Just Trying To Class This Place Up

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A Most Difficult Challenge

Try not to think of Taggert and a bunch of cowboys after viewing this image:

“I am the first person in motion [picture] history to fart. … Mel says I’m going to make you famous today. I knew what we were doing but I didn’t know I was going to be the first,” Gilliam said.

“If Mel was sitting here right now he’d say, ‘Warner Brothers gave me 3 million dollars and told me to have fun and that’s what we did, we had no idea of what it was going to become,” Gilliam said.

Gilliam was a fireman in Dallas, Texas when he got the call from Brooks to do the movie.

“We did that scene probably 35 times from different directions. We probably did it a hundred times. The first couple of times we did it, naturally we were doing our very very best, but after a few times unless you’re absolutely super human, we had to bring in the extras and let them do some scenes from off camera or something.”

— Source

My Numbers!

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And they’ve guessed my password and the combination to my vault, too!

South Africa’s lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn and 20 win
BBC | 12/2/2020

An unusual sequence of numbers drawn in South Africa’s national lottery has sparked accusations of fraud after 20 people won a share of the jackpot.

Tuesday’s PowerBall lottery saw the numbers five, six, seven, eight and nine drawn, while the PowerBall itself was, you have guessed it, 10.

The organisers say the sequence is often picked. But some have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way.

It is extremely rare for multiple winners to share the jackpot.

The organisers said 20 people purchased a winning ticket and won 5.7m rand ($370,000; £278,000) each.

Another 79 ticketholders won 6,283 rand each for guessing the sequence from five up to nine but missing the PowerBall.

The chances of winning South Africa’s PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200 – the number of different combinations when selecting five balls from a set of 50, plus an additional bonus ball from a pool of 20.