“Nonviolent Communication” by Marshall Rosenberg.

The lessons for communication and non-reactivity will pay dividends in every aspect of your interpersonal relations. Work, friendships, romantic relationships, even dealing with customer disservice.

Having seen firsthand what happens when someone unknowingly enters a hypoxic enclosed space, I think the difference is foreknowledge. Thrashing sounds like acidosis from holding one’s breath. I was helping an acquaintance work on his old steel boat. There was a watertight compartment. The risk of steel-enclosed spaces is that rusty steel in an enclosed space can consume all of the oxygen, leaving only nitrogen rich air.

He opened the hatch and, before I could stop him, he just strode on in like it was nothing. He was unconscious before I could get to him, maybe ten seconds. Fortunately, he was near enough to the hatch that I could just reach in and grab him, rather than trying to find an air tank and regulator, and then put it on.

He recovered just fine, but had a terrible headache. He didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t thrash. There was no drama. He walked in and fell unconscious. Lucky for him it was a small space, so the bulkheads kept him from doing a full header into the steel deck.

As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster’s sucking hunger.

So… like running a blender in reverse? 😁

I see a lot of specific examples, but here is a good engineering guideline: do not skimp on physical interfaces. **Anywhere energy is changing form or if it touches your body, don’t skimp on those. **

For example

• tires
• bicycle saddle
• heaters/furnaces
• electrical inverters
• keyboard
• mouse
• engines
• shoes
• eyewear
• clothes (buy used if necessary, but always buy quality clothing)

Quality usually means more money, but sometimes one is able to find a high quality and low-cost version. In my experience though, trying to find the cheap version that works well means trying so many permutations; it would have been more economical to just get the more costly version in the first place.

I’m fascinated by the fact that there is a whole site dedicated to ENF and CMNF, which is the first time I’ve heard of these. Ask 20 people what their arousal constellation is, and you’ll get 100 different answers.

We hoi polloi think in money numbers and what we can afford to purchase. For the Capital Class, it’s all about power. Money is just how they keep score.

According to Consumer Reports, Topo Chico consistently tested the highest for PFAS among carbonated waters. But they also said almost all store-bought carbonated waters tested positive for PFAS.

How do I subscribe to acoustic propagation facts?

Sailing, scuba diving, cooking a big meal for friends, having a lazy start morning sipping coffee with my partner.

Right there with ya. Oh, I tried so hard. Walking and junk collection simulators in a depressing, ugly setting. The humorous bits are way too infrequent to make up for the litany of misery.

A recumbent racing league would be awesome, both fared and non-faring

Oooooh! I’d watch this. Hell, I’d probably get back into racing. And I don’t even like recumbents that much (but still think they are the superlative design for most people). Without the UCI interference, we’d see some crazy cool stuff. I feel like the best we can get right now are the recumbent speed/distance records.

The UCI could fuck up a wet dream. They actively harm the advancement of bicycling. Whenever the UCI starts administering a race type, that whole industry sector is permafuct. Disc brakes (regardless of how one might feel about discs) were banned for many years, resulting in delay of that technology despite the demand being there. Recumbents are a superlative bicycle design for most humans, but thanks UCI ban.

One of the main reasons gravel bikes have innovated so quickly is because the UCI has yet to stick its stupid nose into the races. But they’ll be along shortly to ruin the fun.

If my juggling of balls catches your fancy, you might also be interested to know that I also smoke meat, play the flute, and churn butter. 😆

Oh, throughout the whole thing, he and his employees were treated like garbage. He would get through security, go directly to the person’s office, and reassemble the pistol in front of the manager. And then my friend (or one of his employees) would get interrogated for hours on unrelated questions, like it was somehow my friend’s fault that the TSA failed their audits.

I travel a lot for work. US Customs and the TSA are absolutely a sick joke. I could easily write a novella on the extremely poor training of TSA employees. I have a small permanent retainer (read: braces); about 25% of the time, that is considered suspicious, and I get an enhanced inspection. “Ya know, I could just open my mouth and show you what’s in there.”

The TSA always determines that my juggling balls are suspicious, so I never pack them in carry-on anymore. I have NEXUS, yet I always get an enhanced inspection on return to the US. Literally every other country to which I have flown just waves me through, even before I got Pre-Check/NEXUS/Global Entry.

My partner had her rigging knife in her backpack on a flight out and back. She was unpacking and found it in her backpack after the trip. Good catch, TSA.

And the absolute frosting on the TSA shit sandwich: one of my close friends owns a private security firm. His company was approached by the TSA to assist in security audits at a major international airport. He and his team were contracted to “smuggle” fake firearms through TSA checkpoints, any way they could. The TSA repeatedly failed to detect the firearms for each of five audits. The TSA division (district? regional?) manager, frustrated at his group’s 100% failure rate, determined that my friend’s company must have specialized criminal training, and everyone who worked that contract were put on the no-fly list. It took him about 18 months to unfuck that mess for him and his employees.

I had written a few more paragraphs about TSA hassles, but I think y’all get the picture.

I miss lawn darts, but the ban made sense. Holy hell, people were stupid with those things.

It’s sofa king exhausting. Craft a cover letter and tweak the resume for each application. And still get crickets.

For the entirety of my engineering career (25+ years), I’ve been accustomed to getting an offer for every position to which I applied. This time around, something is way off. I’m at 78 applications, despite being a perfect fit for almost all of those applications. There have been only two responses, and those were for interviews, still in progress. The fake listings makes a lot sense, but I can’t help but feel that the problem is way larger than this article indicates.

You and me both! 😆 We continued to live together and were besties for another four years, and she would never talk about anything relationship-related, even as her next three relationships imploded.

Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.

In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:

-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time

-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly

-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS

-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need

-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive

-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis

Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.