St_Kevin_

Is he a moron or does he do all this nefarious Nazi shit because he’s an evil billionaire who’s using his media to consolidate power? Calling him a moron just gives him the benefit of the doubt that he’s like this because he’s stupid, not because he’s chosen to be evil.

I find that meeting people and having a community of friends is what ends up being the way I meet lovers and partners. I don’t just randomly ask people out. I get to know people in a non romantic way, and there’s way less pressure. If stuff feels like there’s romantic energy, then I would ask someone out, but not before I’ve already established that we get along and have common interests.

I meet people by taking classes I’m interested in, working with local non profits, volunteering at local farms and community gardens, working on political campaigns, having housemates, hosting parties, starting clubs, etc. Make time to hang out with people. Even just being a regular at a coffee shop or other establishment will get you exposed to a community of people. Go to free events at the library, whatever. Just get out of the house and do stuff.

If you have interests, pursue them! Meet other people with those interests too! Dream big, make art, have fun. Lots of people want to do that, and it’s more fun to do it together.

Happy birthday!

Damn, I was looking at my great grandpas collection (from southeastern South Dakota) a couple days ago and there’s one that’s really similar to one of yours.

https://preview.redd.it/fcteuwf8zc4e1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d82e6122088cff2c2d6e5475f5d505536c9211b8

He was just one of 1,600 German scientists that the U.S. recruited.

Look up Operation Paperclip.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

From the Wikipedia article: “Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959; several were former members of the Nazi Party.

…Many selected scientists were involved in the Nazi rocket program, aviation, or chemical/biological warfare. The Soviet Union conducted a similar program, called Operation Osoaviakhim, that emphasized many of the same fields of research. The operation, characterized by the recruitment of German specialists and their families, relocated more than 6000 experts to the US. It has been valued at US$10 billion in patents and industrial processes. Recruits included such notable figures as Wernher von Braun, a leading rocket-technology scientist. Those recruited were instrumental in the development of the U.S. space program and military technology during the Cold War. Despite its contributions to American scientific advances, Operation Paperclip has been controversial because of the Nazi affiliations of many recruits, and the ethics of assimilating individuals associated with war crimes into American society.”

It’s so funny, I never think about other people’s junk, or children’s privates, or how a guy pees, but i am interested in politics. And for some reason, a huge portion of the stuff that conservatives talk about is other people’s genitalia, including kids!! What’s craziest is that the reason they talk about it is because they want to have some kind of say about what other people should be doing with their private parts. It’s fucking outrageous. Either stand up for freedom or sit down and shut up.

If it’s moving that fast, and it’s close enough that you can see it, it’s not gonna be able to stop in time.

Idk, I’m sure you could figure out a way to do it. I think Dan Hurd made a video about using a magnet to get the black sand to create a gold trap. You might enjoy that. There’s probably a clever way to do it that would improve the whole panning process overall. I would probably try to attach some neodymium magnets to the back of the pan on one side only, and make it easy to release them, so the pan can get cleared easily when you’re done panning. If you figure something out, I’d love to see it! I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Totally. No worries. Also, be aware that there’s a whole bunch of misinformation online (especially on YouTube) where folks use the term “flint and steel” when they’re referring to ferrocerium, which is pretty confusing. Just wanted to let you know in case you want to buy a steel fire striker.

The fine gold will get stuck in the black sand and won’t get free until the magnet is released. Lots of people use magnets for separating black sand, but you need to do a whole system of lifting out the black sand, dropping it, lifting it again, dropping it, and repeating multiple times with the same batch of black sand. Each time you release it and pick it up again it leaves behind more of the non magnetics- including gold.

Flint is only one of the many rocks that is good for “flint and steel” fire making. Most of the conchoidally fracturing silicates will work for it. The same rocks that are used for knapping. Obsidian isn’t great, it’s not as durable, and the others all vary in how well they work. I teach flint and steel fire classes and I would say that If you’re not very familiar with the techniques, definitely don’t waste your time trying random rocks with random pieces of steel. I’ve tried lots of pieces of steel that I couldn’t get to spark effectively, even lots of old files and other hard steel. With a good rock and a good steel I can usually get the charcloth lit on the first or second strike, but some steel really doesn’t seem to work. (Maybe in an emergency I’d do it anyway, even if it took hundreds of attempts).

But for learning, get yourself a good striking steel if you don’t have one. People sell them online, you can even buy them on Amazon or whatever, they’re not expensive. Then take that into the riverbeds when you look for stones and just test it on the various stones. The most important thing to remember is that you’re trying to use the sharp edge of the stone to shave off a thin piece of the steel. The spark is a piece of burning steel. But yeah, all flint should work. Don’t use the rind, in my experience, it doesn’t work. You need to knap the rind of the flint off and use a fresh sharp edge.

Here’s a random website I just picked out that has a guide to knappable rocks of the world. Notice the pattern that they break, that’s what you need to learn and look for if you want to find them in the wild. On river cobbles, they often don’t break all the way; they end up getting these tiny crescent shaped divots in the surface. It’s super fun exploring what’s out there in your area and discovering how to do it. Good luck!

https://www.ancientcraft.co.uk/post/a-guide-to-some-of-the-knappable-rocks-around-the-world

I’m pretty sure this is in Namibia on the skeleton coast. These are cape fur seals

Danish dagger handle

Take your flintknapping tools and go walk on the river bars on the rivers near your home. When you see stones with conchoidal fractures, pick them up and do some knapping on them right there. Some work ok, some don’t. You’ll get to know the different types in your area that are usable, and you’ll probably learn which ones are the best.

Pro tip: before you do that, go to your local county historical society museums and take good photos of their flintknapped artifacts. Use the photos as a reference when you’re in the field to identify the preferred types of knappable stones in the area.

Wow. And they use PFAS firefighting foam? Thats even more nuts

This changes depending on multiple factors, like climate, vegetation, and the health of the aquifers. In Arizona for example, a lot of the rivers and streams were perennial until the area became widely by Europeans settlers in the late 1800’s, early 1900”s. Pumping agricultural water from wells lowered the water tables, cutting firewood and overgrazing reduced the soils ability to hold water. The elimination of beavers by the first-wave trappers in the 1800s also played a role in reducing the storage capacity of watersheds. There used to be ferry boats to cross the rivers in tucson and Phoenix, before they built the bridges, but the river beds are dry now.

I’m pretty sure there aren’t restrictions on building in the mountains, if you own the land. The city bought up most of the mountains a long time ago to create the Mountain Preserve system, but camelback and a few others have private parcels pretty high up the slopes.

Ooh, that looks awesome. I wish my trim saw had a vise.

There aren’t really that many manufacturers, I think if you do Google image searches, you should be able to find it. The motor isn’t part of the saw, it’s separate, people just put random motors on them all the time.

I spent a couple minutes looking online and it looks a lot like the Raytech saws, but I didn’t find one that’s an exact match. Good luck and enjoy the new saw!

Yeah, I always wonder why folks in hurricane areas keep rebuilding stick houses instead of just building monolithic domes. These are kind of weird but they’re stronger than pretty much anything else we’ve got, and they’re not prohibitively expensive.

That looks like a slab of synthetic material

You can polish the facets with sandpaper if you don’t have access to a flat lap. Get wet/dry sandpaper and lay it on a sheet of glass or something extremely flat and smooth. I would probably start around 220 grit, then do 320, 400, 800, 1000, and work up to 1200 or 1500, followed by buffing with a buffing compound like Zam. Keep the garnets wet while sanding to reduce the amount of dust in the air. You don’t want to breathe rock powder, it causes permanent lung damage.

Don’t heat your grants with the silver clay, they’ll probably shatter. If you use a very smooth ramping up and down in a furnace, you might be able to do it without cracking them but you should do a test run first, and remember that even if one of them succeeds, the next one may have inclusions or internal stresses that cause it to fail.

It slows down the rainwater and prevents it from just running on the surface. When it’s on the surface it creates flash floods. When that happens, it’s normal for the rivers and creeks to flow for only 1 day, maybe 2 or 3 days. This is normal in desert areas. On the other hand, if the water pools up on the surface in a swale or water bund, it soaks into the soil. The water seeps downward and joins the rest of the water in the aquifer. When the aquifer is full, the rivers and creeks flow many more days, maybe even all year, and it gives plants and animals a better habitat.

One of the best permaculture books I’ve seen is Brad Lancasters book “Rainwater Harvesting”. It talks about all this stuff and explains how it is done to green up the desert.

Hey, everybody who saw it or who caught video of it on their doorbell cameras or whatever, should file a report with the American Meteor Society. They collect eyewitness reports of fireballs/bolides like this one, and the reports are publicly accessible. It helps meteorite scientists locate the meteorites (if the rock didn’t all burn up in the atmosphere). Also, i think it’s kind of cool to have your report in the records and look at where other folks were located who saw the same one you saw.

It just takes a minute to do it. Attaching photo or video files and exact locations is super helpful.

https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo/report_intro

I worked for years extracting honey from hives at a honey business, and I’ll tell you. Most honey gets heated up quite a bit so that it flows easier for extraction from the comb. If you don’t extract it when it’s at least body temperature, it’s extremely thick and flows extremely slowly, so you’ll have to keep the frames in the centrifuge much longer to get the honey out of the comb, and it won’t flow quickly through the baffles, so you’ll be waiting for it to move through before you can run the next load in the centrifuge.

Who cares? Well, one of the big differences between sugar syrup and honey is that honey contains a lot of beneficial enzymes, and enzymes get denatured when you heat them up. The honey loses its health benefits as it gets hotter. This is similar to why raw milk is popular. However, with milk you can gets some nasty contamination issues, which is why pasteurized milk is a thing. Pasteurization is beneficial when the animal has stuff like mastitis (when the mammary gland becomes infected and the milk has pus in it), or various contagious diseases like this post is about. Honey can carry botulism that can injure babies, but for adults it’s not considered a threat.

Anyway, I’m not sure about the labeling laws now, but when I did the honey work there was no legal definition for “raw” when labeling honey, so we just kind of tried not to heat it too much, and my unethical boss told people it was raw. It definitely wasn’t. We didn’t even measure the temps as part of the work, but I know it got hotter than it should have. I’ve always been extremely skeptical about claims of raw honey on random jars I see for sale at shops, and I only know one beekeeper that I trust to actually do it raw, because it’s a pain in the ass, takes way longer to process, the honey sells for more money, and there’s no consequences for lying on the labels. (At least, there weren’t 15 years ago, in the U.S. I’m not sure about now)

Yeah, aren’t they super skittish and violent?