Pat @Pat@qoto.org

#solar #system #planet #astronomy #science #word

How do you pronounce Uranus?

#nasa #space #quiz #saturn #rocket #ship #lander #esa

We've never landed a spacecraft on Saturn because:

Just did a search and turns out there are a couple of them already out there. A dentist in MA goes by Trans-N-Dental, LLC. And another dentist in MA named Dr. Quon Tran calls his practice Trans Dental Care.

(Not sure if they offer hormone therapy, though. 🙂 )

#joke #pun #lgbt #lgbtq #dentist #trans

I'm going to open a new practice and offer hormone therapy and teeth cleaning.

I'm calling it Trans and Dental.

Warning: This is just a metaphor. If you actually try this with your kid, make sure you watch them closely because the strings of balloons could harm the baby.

#globophobia

Parental tip #42:

How to keep your baby distracted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4nVDQ8Rl2M

I forgot to mention that Tom Keene was in this film. Keene was a well known film and TV star who did mostly Westerns. This was his last film. He and Talbot gave the best performances in this film, in my opinion.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

How did this stupid film become the greatest science fiction cult classic ever? Who knows. This is Ed Wood’s magnum opus. Written and shot in a month, on a budget of $60k.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Wikipedia, “...his ideas tended to be too expensive to film, yet he tried to film them anyway.” and “[Wood’s films were] notable for their campy aesthetics, technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, use of poorly-matched (sic) stock footage, eccentric casts, idiosyncratic stories and non sequitur dialogue...”

Filmed in the San Fernando Valley, north of Hollywood, the movie contains many shots of historical interest from the area, including Tor Johnson’s house where Bela Lugosi did some unrelated test scenes before his death which were later worked into the film as his “last performance”. (Johnson was a professional wrestler and friend of Wood.)

Wood continued to make low-budget sensational films in the Valley, later shifting to porn in the late 1960s because they made more money. His productions were at the start of the boom in the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley, where 90% of porn films were make from the 60s through the 90s. (The industry declined significantly at the beginning of the 21th century due to the Internet.)

The film also starred Gregory Walcott, Bela Lugosi, Maila Nurmi, Tor Johnson, Lyle Talbot and Criswell.

The title was inspiration for the UNIX-like OS, Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

A biopic of Wood’s career was later produced, Ed Wood (1994), starring Johnny Deep as Wood and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi.That biopic covers his productions from Glen or Glenda (1953) to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). The former was about transvestism -- Wood himself was a cross dresser and many of his friends were in the LGBTQ community.

(View this film at: https://video.qoto.org/videos/watch/21371376-a49f-499e-acb8-af232c0dea8e )

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #SanFernandoValley #LowBudget #vampires #horror #GraveRobbers #plan9 #lgbtq #lgbt #vitamins #Criswell

The correct answer is the second one, "aware/attentive to issues of racial/soc. injustice".

Only three participants in the poll, so I guess not many people care.

So, I guess I won't be too concerned about it either. We'll just use the term as a marker -- when someone uses the term derisively, they are self-identifying as a racist.

#WordOfTheDay

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Today's word of the day...

Globophobia

🎈

#humor #lgbt #lgbtq #religion

There is only one true interpretation of Leviticus 20:13. It says that if two men have sex together, they have to smoke some weed first…

‘If a man lay with another man as he lay with a woman, they both shall be stoned.’

#poll #woke #BlackHistory

Which of the following are ‘woke’?

You can still see it with binoculars...

https://qoto.org/@Pat/109268224828108075

#BlackHistory #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackGenealogy #USPol #flotus #potus

Michelle Obama was the second black woman to be First Lady of the United States. The first black woman to be First Lady was Sally Hemings who was First Lady during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Hemings lived with Jefferson as his concubine during his presidency. They had three children while he was in office: Harriet Hemings (dob. May 1801), James Madison Hemings (dob. January 19, 1805), Thomas Eston Hemings (dob. May 21, 1808).

Because marriages between black and white people were not openly accepted at the time, they never officially married and Jefferson instead asked Dolley Madison to serve as hostess during official events. Legally, Hemings was considered one of Jefferson’s slaves. The exact personal dynamics of their relationship is unknown.

(Note: The term “First Lady” has no official meaning in law and it was not actually used in writing until the mid-19th Century.)

#Turkey #Syria #earthquake

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the death toll from the Turkey/Syria earthquake will top 3,000 people.

That's almost as many people who have died this past week in the US from COVID-19.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/powerful-earthquake-strikes-turkey-and-syria-killing-more-than-1-300-people-11675680084

#covid19 #deaths #respirator #CDC #ZeroCovid

Here are the latest totals in China and the US. (Source: Johns Hopkins Univ.)

China
Cases: (data unavailable)
Deaths : 100,922

US
Cases: 102,601,564
Deaths: 1,111,546

#press #humint #econ #finance #slang

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Fun Fact:

In the world of economics and finance the word “press” is slang for a source of money.

In the intelligence community, “press” is slang for a source of information.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #trains #power #future #climate #change #CW7 #class #postApocalypse

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Snowpiercer (2013)

I don’t like this film but I’m including it in the series because it’s original and a lot of other folks like it. It’s a post-apocalyptic film about a train that, as the title suggests, rides through a wintry Earth that has frozen over when an attempt at climate-change mitigation goes bad. The train is an ark that carries the last survivors.

Quite a bit of suspension of disbelief is required to watch the film because the entire premise is ridiculous, but it's really just a metaphor anyway, so that’s how you need to see it. The acting is really well done and the writing is very good for what it is, but the cinematography – particularly the lighting and exposure – is done in a way that makes it nearly impossible to see what is going on. A lot films do this to try to invoke a depressing or fearful mood, but its just irritating to not be able to see what's going on.

If you like post-apocalyptic movies about trains, big naked metaphors and poorly lit scenes, then you’ll probably like this one, otherwise I’d skip it.

Note: When this film was first released, Weinstein demanded that 25 minutes be cut from the film, however due to fan requests, a director’s cut was later released under TWC’s house brand, Radius-TWC. I think a review of both versions might give insight to how Hollywood censors and molds the messages in its films.

You need to make some assumptions, e.g., that the room is on Earth and that "no air in the room" means a vacuum (until the smoke is introduced). Also, smoke includes both particulates and gases, so the assumption is that the gases are not significant and would not cause Brownian motion (which is what causes smoke remain suspended in air for long periods).

So, I think the most correct answer is one second. If the smoke particles don't have significant vertical motion when they are "scattered" in the room, then they would just fall to floor just like a hammer, which would take less than a second for a room that was less than few meters high. (This is because there is no air resistance, like the lunar experiment with the hammer and feather). Some of the particles may come in contact with the walls or ceiling in which case they would likely adhere to them via electrostatic attraction.

However, if any particles were near the floor and had just the right amount of positive vertical velocity, they could first move upwards toward the ceiling coming close to it but not touching it and then fall back to the floor, which would take more than a second for a room with a 3 meter ceiling.

There is also a rare scenario in which a particle could be at just the right distance from the ceiling that the electrostatic attraction from the ceiling would balance out gravity and the particle would be suspended there. However, thermal motion in the molecules in the ceiling and the particle would quickly alter the balance so that the particle would either be pulled to the ceiling or fall. I don't know if this process could take more than a second or not.

So, the most correct answer to this puzzle is "less than a second", but "less than a minute" and "less than an hour" are also correct.