Cool

Whale Expedition

Chill Amusing, Cool

The 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, ladies and gentlemen:

Back when cars were still cars!

  • Turn radius: Ocean liner equivalent
  • Back seat: Orgy-ready
  • Grille: Larger than most European nations
  • Chrome: More than a trashy Las Vegas casino
  • Trunk: Body transpo for even the most prolific serial killer

What a classic. What a legend. I’d own one but don’t want to maintain a 1996 car.

Big Stop

Chill Cool

777 Stopping.

So that’s a maximum-energy landing test. That means flaps down, but no thrust reversers.

In that test, the plane takes off, climbs, and then comes back around to land at a chosen high landing weight and velocity. It touches down at a speed near the maximum operating landing weight and then the pilots apply full braking. The purpose is to simulate the worst-case kinetic energy the brakes must absorb after a heavy (can’t dump fuel, full cargo), high-speed landing.

If I remember right, it must sit there for a certain number of seconds before the brakes are allowed to catch fire. And they absolutely 100% will catch fire after a landing like that.

A lot of factors matter here (temperature, speed, etc.), but a plane like the 777 should be able to stop in about 4,000 feet.

But it fucks up the brakes, tires, and potentially other things too.

Comm Math

Chill Cool

I’ve taken a similar course. It was great!

In that class I learned Excel skills (and I was already decent with Excel) that I use in the business world to this day. People notice and call me an “Excel guru.” Not really, but the class taught me more about Excel in four months than I’d learned in two decades of using it prior. It also did a good job of covering various types of elections and how they work mathematically, compound interest, probability, some logic, and statistics. It was not nearly as basic as I thought it’d be when I signed up for it, partially because it attempted to teach an extremely wide range of topics to a fairly deep beginner level.

The course was infinitely superior to any math course I had in high school and actually connected the sterile math to the real world. I will never be a math guru and have absolutely no interest in that, but if any of my math instruction in high school or middle school had been like that course, I would’ve done far better.

Alas, I will never understand the quadratic equation, though.

Cetacea

Chill Cool, Cute

That’s one of the things I like about Sydney Sweeney. She’s only “regular” beautiful. Sure, she cleans up nice but she looks like about the average girl did during the 1980s — before all the obesity, people walking around looking half-dead due to poor diets, and the horrible tattoos1.

It’s not that Sydney is unattractive. She actually is beautiful! But so were the vast majority of women before they became purely cetacean and disfigured themselves with tattoos. And don’t fuckin’ argue with me. I was there; I remember.

  1. Sydney to her great credit has none.

Sema Four

Chill Cool

I bet it’s the semaglutides.

At least partially.

Party of None

Chill Amusing, Cool

True. I have a friend who is very extroverted, extremely quick-witted, beautiful and fearless. When I step away from her for five minutes she makes three new friends. I have no idea how. I simply couldn’t do what she does no matter how hard I tried. Even ignoring all the other things working against me, I’d be utterly exhausted within 10 minutes of living like she does. I mean it — I’d be dead tired and my brain would shut off.

When people good at meeting people give others advice, it’s kind of like when women give men dating advice. Both are completely useless.

The last time we hung out, my friend got us invited to a sex party by chatting to a woman at the next table at an Italian restaurant. We did not go, but that was funny.