Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

The willow is too close to the house.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

When we show up, we win.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

People are weird.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

It’s the corruption, stupid.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Happy Birthday, Siubhan Duinne & Omnes Omnibus!

Reader Interactions

117Comments

  3. 3.

    Winston

    So this is the open thread. Wondering if anyone else is watching UFO on netflix. The documentary is implying we are already using alien technology, but not advertising it.

  6. 6.

    Mary G

    Happy Birthday to you both! Sorry to hear about the neck pain, SD, and glad to hear you have the good pain killers if needed. Thanks for responding to the bat signal so quickly! It didn’t seem like that long since I had seen your name, but the notice that you were missing for six whole days had me a bit worried.

  11. 11.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Thanks to everybody, especially AL for putting up a birthday thread. I’m heading back to bed with a hot pack for my pathetic neck, but I’m bound to wake up at some dismal hour and will check to see if the thread’s still going. Meantime, it’s all yours, Omnes!!

  17. 17.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Finally, a thread about me. And Subaru Diane, I guess. Thanks for the good wishes everyone.

  18. 18.

    WaterGirl

    Happy birthday you guys!  Omnes, have you made it to the big 35?  (Wise beyond your years!)

    edit: SD, I am so sorry to hear you are in so much pain.  I must have slept wrong is a strong second to I sneezed as an explanation of ways we hurt ourselves. :-)

  19. 19.

    Another Scott

    Happy Birthday++!!

    Back when Usenet was a thing, there was a group called alt.happy.birthday.to.me that had a daily list curated by someone named “Gabe” that would give a list of famous birthdays on that date.

    It looks like Wikipedia has something similar – August 3 Birthdays:

    1900 – John T. Scopes, American educator (d. 1970)

    Interesting!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  21. 21.

    Elizabelle

    @Mary G:   That is the best birthday present ever!  And it’s not even my birthday.  So, I will accept on behalf of Omnes and Siubhan.

    Congresswoman Shontel Brown.  Please, please, please, please, please.

  22. 22.

    piratedan

    @Omnes Omnibus: you keep it up mister and I’ll turn this into a music thread about music from the late 70’s, so go on and celebrate your mutual birthdays but remember to post with the usual safe social distancing guidelines

  30. 30.

    Dan B

    And here’s hoping NE Seattle & Woodinville (Opie Jean) came through the major thunderstorm.  There were warnings of half dollar sized hail and lightning.  Shelter in the center of buildings in the lower level and away from windows.  Muggy and dark here in South Seattle

    Seattle didn’t used to have summer thunderstorms.

  34. 34.

    Elizabelle

    @Another Scott:   Also share their birthdays with James Hetfield (lead singer, Metallica) and …. Haystacks Calhoun, American wrestler.  Love that name.

    And Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, another Very Good Guy.

  35. 35.

    Brachiator

    @Winston:

    The documentary is implying we are already using alien technology, but not advertising it.

    This idea pops up a lot in conspiracy theories and in science fiction I suppose.

    I would say this is very unlikely.

    Is there some movie or tv series where a physics or engineering student is brought into a secret room and introduced to the alien tech.

    And of course you might have aliens swooping down to retrieve their stuff. “Idiot! That’s a toy. Doesn’t do anything interesting.”

  37. 37.

    WaterGirl

    @Elizabelle: Ah election night.  Too tired to stay up, too scared to go to bed in case you wake up to results you don’t want.

    Please please please let the wretched Nina Turner lose tonight.

  40. 40.

    cope

    Happy natal day to you both, two stellar examples of the types of commenters that prompted so many kudos for this place in the big, long post earlier. Thanks as well to AL for giving the rest of us a chance to celebrate the occasion.

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    This is my birthday month and I usually just let it go by without notice or fanfare.  But very recently what I thought was a minor scratch somehow turned into an infection in my leg that had me going to urgent care.

    I got through the pandemic and got all my vaccines, so I thought that I could relax a bit.

    Instead I got a few surprises sneaking up on me.

  48. 48.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Omnes Omnibus: Can vouch for that. I’ve found that you can really get lost in a musical rabbit hole if you google a Billboard Top 100 list for random years of your youth.

    So a week ago or so I pulled up 1978, as we were talking about July 1978, the month we met and had our first date. Thought it might be fun to start playing the songs that were popular that summer.

    I found maybe two songs I felt like listening to on that list. It was a short evening, musically-speaking.

  55. 55.

    Another Scott

    @Steeplejack: Indeed.

    Infections can be tricky things, especially these days.  Get well soon!

    The news that Dr. First Lady Biden had some sort of foot wound walking on the beach in Hawaii on her way to Tokyo had me concerned about her too.  Gotta be careful!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  56. 56.

    Another Scott

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: That reminds me of a story my dad once told me:

    His bachelor’s degree was in math.

    He was in the hospital once when he was younger, sometime after college, and was chatting with the nurses that he bet a couple of them on the floor had the same birthday.  They were chatting amongst themselves and it looked like he was going to lose the bet until someone came in and had the same birthday as someone else.

    The math is against one’s gut feeling, but it only takes 23 (random) people to have better than a 50:50 chance of having two people with the same birthday.

    So there are probably some more regulars here who have the same birthday, also too!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  57. 57.

    StringOnAStick

    My birthday was a couple of weeks ago; I was not pleased to find out I share the day with Senator Sinema. Sharing it with Bill Cosby is bad enough.

  58. 58.

    Dan B

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: My B-day is Chinese National Day.  This was “not well known” in small town near Akron.  The two Goldwater for pres camps,, who despised each other, didn’t seem to know that fact.  It was a surprise to discover that I was born on the very day Chairman Mao declared the PRC.

  63. 63.

    H.E.Wolf

    Happy Birthday to two of the commenters who always lift my spirits when I read your words.

    Wishing each of you many happy returns of the day!

  70. 70.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @H.E.Wolf: That’s a heavy responsibility.  Can’t I shoot for the more achievable “doesn’t always depress the fuck out of me?”

  73. 73.

    debbie

    Happy birthday, SD and OO!

    After realizing TFG’s guy won in the 15th, I thought I’d drown my sorrows in a sappy movie, so I watched Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. Oy! This sugar high may never end.

  78. 78.

    prostratedragon

    January 30 is a real shit-will-hit-the fan trip, both as to birthdays (ex: me and Dick Cheney) and events (ex: 47 ronin day as translated from the Japanese calendar of that time). An interesting thing is the number of notable actors who have that birthday.

  81. 81.

    Ohio Mom

    Brachiator:
    When you really have to worry about an infection is when you see a red line and it’s getting longer. That’s cellulitis.

    Glad you are taking care of yourself. If things aren’t improving, check in with your PCP.

    SiubhanDuinne And Omnes Omnibus, Many Happy Birthday Wishes. All the best in the year ahead.

    Now it’s my bedtime. Sweet dreams all!

  84. 84.

    CaseyL

    Happy Birthday Subaru Diane and Omnes Omnibus!

    Hope you did/will do something fun.

    Very sorry to hear about your neck, SD. I once pinched a nerve in my neck between discs by craning my neck to see a folk band play (“Folk Music can be bad for your health!”) After 2 weeks of pain and pills, PT put me right miraculously quick.

  91. 91.

    Dan B

    @Yutsano: That explains the lightning and downpours plus hail!  You devil!!  The gay weather control facility has its commander back at the controls.

    Next hurricanes?

  93. 93.

    satby

    Well I was way late on the other thread, so to replay: Happiest of Happy Birthdays to you both Siubhan Duinne & Omnes Omnibus!

  96. 96.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Happy Birthday to the birthday people, and very glad to hear Subaru Diane will be back

  98. 98.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Winston:  The documentary is implying we are already using alien technology, but not advertising it.

    Are they, and have they bothered to explain how faster than light travel is possible?

  102. 102.

    Yutsano

    Thanks folks. 3 GI bleeds in four years is definitely some kind of underlying problem. I’ll be talking to a gastroenterologist here soon. Going to be making some changes in diet and lifestyle as well.

  103. 103.

    Another Scott

    Lots of good things happening today. ScienceMag:

    So-called thermoelectric generators turn waste heat into electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions, providing what seems like a free lunch. But despite helping power the Mars rovers, the high cost of these devices has prevented their widespread use. Now, researchers have found a way to make cheap thermoelectrics that work just as well as the pricey kind. The work could pave the way for a new generation of greener car engines, industrial furnaces, and other energy-generating devices.

    […]

    Over the past 2 decades, researchers have produced thermoelectric materials with increasing ZTs. The record came in 2014 when Mercouri Kanatzidis, a materials scientist at Northwestern University, and his colleagues came up with a single crystal of tin selenide with a ZT of 3.1. Yet the material was difficult to make and too fragile to work with. “For practical applications, it’s a non-starter,” Kanatzidis says.

    So, his team decided to make its thermoelectrics from readily available tin and selenium powders that, once processed, make grains of polycrystalline tin selenide instead of the single crystals. The polycrystalline grains are cheap and can be heated and compressed into ingots that are 3 to 5 centimeters long, which can be made into devices. The polycrystalline ingots are also more robust, and Kanatzidis expected the boundaries between the individual grains to slow the passage of heat. But when his team tested the polycrystalline materials, the thermal conductivity shot up, dropping their ZT scores as low as 1.2.

    In 2016, the Northwestern team discovered the source of the problem: an ultrathin skin of tin oxide was forming around individual grains of polycrystalline tin selenide before they were pressed into ingots. And that skin acted as an express lane for the heat to travel from grain to grain through the material. So, in their current study, Kanatzidis and his colleagues came up with a way to use heat to drive any oxygen away from the powdery precursors, leaving pristine polycrystalline tin selenide.

    The result, which they report today in Nature Materials, was not only a thermal conductivity below that of single-crystal tin selenide but also a ZT of 3.1. “This opens the door for new devices to be built from polycrystalline tin selenide pellets and their applications to be explored,” Kanatzidis says.

    […]

    As always, there’s more work to do, but this is a great step forward and presumably can be extended to other materials (there are a lot of thermoelectric materials that people have looked at over the decades).

    (The Nature Materials paper is here)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  104. 104.

    prostratedragon

    @Yutsano:  Oh my, you were back in with that?! I recall that you and I both had serious episodes around late December 2019 or so. I’ve had several surveillance endos since then and will have another this fall, but no recurrence of bleeding, so far. Hope they can find out why you’re having the problem.

  111. 111.

    Tony Jay

    Happy Birthday to the pair of you. Many more to come, you’d expect. That is the tradition.

    Speaking of shared birthdays it has recently come to light that four of Great Britain’s most successful multiple Olympic Gold medal winners of recent times share the same birthday. Chris Hoy, Mo Farah, Steve Redgrave and Jason Kenny all get cake and cards on 23rd of June, which also just so happens to be International Olympic Day. Accident or intentional? We can only speculate.

    That’s the thing with slow-burn conspiracies. You don’t know who or how or why, but you know what, and that’s enough for me.

  112. 112.

    SFAW

    Happy Birthday, youse two.

     

    Wait, is it still your birthdays? Did I miss it? Damn, late again.

  113. 113.

    SFAW

    @Tony Jay:

    Sir Steve Redgrave is March 23rd, not June 23rd, according to Wikipedia. [Apparently they’re all on March 23. Jeebus, this throws into doubt EVERYTHING you’ve ever written. I’m now wondering if BoJo really IS PM for you Brits.]

    I wish I could row one-quarter as well as he did/does. Of course, maybe if I put more work into it, I might get closer than I am. I was also surprised — OK, “amazed,” I guess — to learn that he rowed both port and starboard. Either way, he was/is a great, great rower.

  114. 114.

    J R in WV

    @Yutsano: 

    Be hurray Yutsano, hospitals are dangerous places full of contageous things. Glad you’re outa there.

    And happy belated birfdays to the natal jackals, Siubhan-Duinne and Omnes Omnibus, two of my favorite Jackals. Yes, really!

  115. 115.

    Tony Jay

    @SFAW:

    They lied to me! Blood will flow for this, I swear it upon the lives of my enemies and their acquaintances to the third degree.

    I will have my revenge!

  116. 116.

    cope

    @Another Scott:  When I was in 7th grade (’62-’63), I built a device that created an electric current (thermoelectric generator) using the Seebeck Effect, the flow of an electric current resulting from a heat gradient between different conductors. That project took me to Illinois State Science Fair competition where I won an “Outstanding Award”, higher than First Place.

    My mom, a truly great thinker, asked me what would happen if I ran a current through the dissimilar wires of the device, thinking it might create a temperature differential. It did. She had stumbled inadvertently upon the Peltier Effect, the flow of heat due to an electrical gradient. My 8th grade science project was building a thermoelectric cooler. That science project took me to the national Junior Engineering Technical Society competition. That competition was held in the newly constructed Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois. Glad to see the technology finally getting some where beyond plutonium powered thermoelectric generators on various space craft.

    And belated congratulations to Yutsano for being released from captivity.

  117. 117.

    Another Scott

    @cope:  Neat. J’s father had a patent on a thermoelectric device idea back in the day. When I was a kid I was fascinated by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and wrote to NASA asking what it would take to make an electric car from them. A few months later I got a nice letter from an engineer and a paperback book about them and a back of the envelope calculation that showed that they weren’t quite practical for autos. ;-)

    Maybe we’re now closer to having thermoelectrics that can do the job! Coal powered electric cars, here we come!!1

    There’s a lot of practical, useful things that can be made when one really understands how the various particles and forces and interactions all fit together in materials.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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