deathmtn

As many of you know, the audio engineer and musician Colin Marston was recently forced to close his studio Menegroth the Thousand Caves after its host building changed hands.

Colin is the linchpin of the heavy + weird music scene here in New York City; he plays in several of the best metal bands in the world, and has facilitated the recorded output of more notable artists than it makes sense to name here.

Hi Jim,

People ask me all the time, "Chuck, are you crazy? Why do you give so many pizzas away for FREE?"

I might be crazy. For some reason I get so pumped up when Tuesday comes around. I think it's awesome.

To help find out, in 2022 NASA commissioned an independent study to determine whether current satellites and surveillance systems have sufficient sampling depth to detect “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs (government talk for what could be alien spaceships). The researchers’ conclusions:

NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites collect the most data within the Earth system, yet they typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP....
Commercial satellite constellations provide imagery at sub- to several-meter spatial resolution, which is well-matched to the typical spatial scales of known UAP.... The limitation on this data is that at any given time most of the Earth’s surface is not covered by commercial satellites at high resolution—for a particular UAP event, we will need to be fortunate to obtain high-resolution observations from space.

It seems that Earth’s atmosphere is unintuitively large, just as microorganisms are unintuitively small. While the atmosphere is so transparent and so close, we do not have a complete grasp of everything inside it. Consider that the average depth of Earth’s oceans is 2.3 miles, while the atmosphere extends up to about 6,200 miles, where it gradually transitions into space.

Rain pounded down, soaking the streets with so much water that cars stalled and police shut down traffic. They felt their own car rattling, and they abandoned it in a nearby lot. Deciding they’d walk to safer ground where Mandli’s brother could pick them up, they waded hand-in-hand into murky water “until we reached the middle point of the road,” Mandli recalled, “where it just sucked us both inside.”

They were both suddenly underwater, being pulled toward a large black vacuum that seemed to be guzzling anything and everything into its wide, open mouth. Mandli managed to grab part of a bridge railing, but Reddy clutched only her hand. She shouted for help as she tried to wrest her fiance from the vortex. But it was just too wet, too slippery. Reddy disappeared. Mandli was left holding his empty jacket.

As South Plainfield police searched for Reddy, who had been sucked into a 3-foot-wide stormwater drainage pipe that ran underground, they looked where they thought it might spit him out, on the other side of the road.

…

To get a sense of how much force can be in play at the entrance of these pipes, consider that every cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 pounds. So if someone is standing in 4 feet of water, that’s nearly 250 pounds of force. “And that's not including any velocity that's heading toward the pipe,” said MacKenzie, the Denver flood district director. “And so if you have a full-grown man at maybe 200 pounds, he’s up against 250 pounds of water pressure pushing into the inlet of that pipe.

The Gaza Ministry of Health has called for “an immediate halt to the Israeli aggression,” saying the presence of the poliovirus is the direct result of “the destruction of infrastructure.” The Israeli government should provide clean water, repair sewer lines, and reduce overcrowding in the camps for the displaced, the ministry said.

Meanwhile, the ministry and its international partners are searching for ways to vaccinate many thousands of children amid an unrelenting war. “Speed and high coverage” with a vaccine specifically targeted against poliovirus type 2 will be essential to stop the outbreak, O’Leary says, and the partners are working furiously on the logistics of getting the vaccine, known as novel OPV2, into the territory quickly.