Ichthyosaur roadkill

Ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils neat enough to be described as “they look like ‘roadkill’ ” from the comment “Something happened with the chemistry that’s really good for bone preservation. Some skeletons are pale white even though they’re in black shale”. This includes “the monster”, a pliosaur probably measuring 8m long.

Comments include:

You can’t walk for more than 100m without finding a skeleton. That’s amazing anywhere in the world

...and...

Everything we’re finding is articulated. It’s not single bones here and there, and bits and pieces — these are complete skeletons

...which is quite remarkable, compared to many “boneyard” collections.

I guess Jorn Harald Hurum & the other officials of the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum will be both excited & busy for some time in their section of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago (a set of Acrtic islands north of Norway).

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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