Fun stuff, but the guy is an idiot for not wearing safety goggles, and to light it on fire without any sort of protection other than some basic ass gloves. Darwin award for 3rd degree facial burns waiting to happen, this guy.

Yeah that was what i was thinking. Same thing with dropping the bottle: absolutely no control of the trajectory of the rocket, wouldn't want to be a cameraman there. Too bad he didn't shoot himself in the face with it.

I also expect i'll soon have some of my students asking me if they can test this out.

Hey J, better tell them to be careful when lighting a BBQ at the beach too!

http://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20170607_02915350

Early Hyperloop testing going well

http://gizmodo.com/footage-from-the-fir ... 1797463260

So a sinkhole appeared in Brussels and they cut power to the local substation for safety reasons, as the electrical lines in the ground were close to the sinkhole (and water). So while they were working on fixing the sinkhole situation they provided power to the neighbourhood around it with a large mobile generator.

All of that is pretty normal, but here's the fun/cool part: people in the area started noticing that their digital clocks were running faster than normal. So slowly their time started getting out of whack for them, resulting in problems with timed systems (heating, coffee makers, etc) and obviously simple clocks.

Turns out the generator runs at a slightly higher frequency than the normal power grid, which results in the digital clocks (and other devices containing digital clocks) getting slightly overcharged so they run faster than they normally would. Freaky huh? I had no idea this was a thing.

Found an article explaining the same phenomenon (but different time/place): https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/ene ... l-speed-up

Holy crap, Ox just linked to an article on the IEEE website. The world must be coming to an end.

It is some cool stuff, definitely, though I was aware of the phenomenon. Due to my job, I also know a silly amount about time synchronization using the internet and internal networks. At least when using SNTP (simple network time protocol), which is far, far from simple. Turns out some of the hardware my company manufactured years ago had timing crystals in them that were wildly inaccurate, to the tune of an hour or more per day. The fix was to turn on SNTP, which meant we had to learn how SNTP worked so we could troubleshoot why it didn't work. At any rate... time is cool, if completely bizarre. It's the only thing we use in modern society that's still base 60, for instance.

If it makes you feel more comfortable, I don't usually visit that site. I just looked for other articles describing a similar phenomenon.

Cool that you had to deal with issues like these for your work, but yeah I can imagine it can get pretty freaky. Re: base 60, did you know that France used a decimal time system for a few years around the time of the French revolution? Probbly yes, but here you go anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

Nope, I didn't know that. Very interesting.

Remember Boaty McBoatface? The government asked the public to name their new polar research vessel and the internet being the internet, people voted overwhelmingly for "Boaty McBoatface". Sadly, the British government overruled it and went for the more boring "Sir David Attenborough" (the nature documentary maker).

Now the Swedish railways held a similar poll and "Trainy McTrainface" won it. And unlike the crusty Brits, they are going to retain the winning name. Warms my heart. I don't think it's all that great an idea to ask the public what a boat or train should be named, especially on the internet, but if you're gonna do it then at least have a fucking sense of humour about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... dish-train

This is fun

Strangely enough, I already watched that video. I really love physics. Just wish math wasn't so hard for me.

This is seriously cool and looks like good fun

I've been watching a lot of Linustechtips + Rossmanrepairs videos recently. One for the (for me) unaffordable cool tech and gadget experiments, the other for the zen experience of close up PC repair with a voiceover explanation.

ok... so I started watching the bottom vid and it went from some barely intelligible rambling about pinouts, muxers and input voltages/amperages to a diatribe on having children. How utterly bizarre. But hey, I watch Let's Play videos to chill out, so who am I to judge anybody, right?