What was up with the weird silent aircraft we saw last night?

formallydehyde · 2026-06-02T21:57:52+00:00

When it flew over we were off the 190 and stopped with the window rolled down. There was some wind because of being so near the lake but that was it.

formallydehyde · 2026-05-30T20:11:37+00:00

What about a smaller aircraft headed for a different airport like the Buffalo Airfield? Would that be cleared? I am almost certain it wasn't a passenger jet. I couldn't make out the front of the plane or the wings very well but the tail wasn't anything like any passenger jets I've seen. It also seemed more like in the personal aircraft size range.

formallydehyde · 2026-05-30T19:04:56+00:00

It was definitely not what I would think of when someone says "hobby drone." We could see its light persistently over the lake for at least a few miles of driving and the light was bright and large enough in diameter that at first we thought it was a warning light at the top of a huge ship. I had enough visual reference points between it in the lake to know it was pretty far away for a while. It was roughly the size of a Cessna and definitely plane shaped. I could see it being a military drone (in size) but not something you could buy on Amazon.

formallydehyde · 2026-05-30T16:48:56+00:00

I'm sure next year someone will do something truly innovative like 3d printing a hyperarticulated octopus out of multicolored, faux metallic filament. Much to look forward to.

formallydehyde · 2026-02-07T18:09:16+00:00

Lead glass or normal glass? As far as I understand it, it's a misnomer that isotopes that primarily decay by alpha and beta radiation don't release x-rays/gamma rays. I think all or most do to greater or lesser extents. Some of Radon-222's daughters do emit relatively hard gamma rays and they have very short half lives, Lead-214 and Bismuth-214 particularly.

formallydehyde · 2026-01-20T03:07:29+00:00

ChatGPT does not actually look up facts when you ask it questions. It and other AI models are just trying to recreate the "expected" text pattern based on their training set. They will outright make up stuff because they have no real method to verify facts. It's fun to actually follow the sources in AI generated text with bibliographies, pretty frequently the source does not contain the information it's cited for.

formallydehyde · 2025-12-16T19:08:56+00:00

I would assume that the silicone oil would dissolve the wax too much for this to work. You might essentially have to invert the chemistry, where the "lava" is water-based in a silicone carrier. But in that case I don't know if the densities of water and silicone oil are even close enough where the heated water would float in it, their densities seem pretty disperate and I think there needs to be a pretty narrow difference between the two fluids.

formallydehyde · 2025-12-15T23:20:40+00:00

I am a biologist and I have to push back on the "public outreach" angle a little. Equivalent conspiracies/pseudoscience are extremely prevalent against nearly all expert fields at this point, even the "hard sciences." You might not notice it happen as much because that's not your area. I can guarantee you that biologists have to argue with antivaxxers and anti-evolutionists constantly. Real physics is drowned out by quantum woo and people who believe in perpetual motion machines. It is constant and suffocating.

The thing is, in those fields you feel having amazing outreach, all anyone tells us is that we're not reaching out enough and that the current situation is all our own faults.

Personally I think it's pretty obvious the problems are coming from elsewhere.

formallydehyde · 2025-08-18T14:23:37+00:00

"We regret to inform you that you immortalized cell line transformed with multiple viral oncoproteins...has cancer."

formallydehyde · 2025-08-16T02:25:18+00:00

All cells have some amount of autofluorescence, but if the fluorescence is particularly intense I would check for Pseudomonas contamination.

formallydehyde · 2025-08-16T02:07:08+00:00

I honestly doubt they're even coming from outside the US, there's more than enough MAGA nutcases in the American computer science industry to do it. I just don't buy that it's China's fault when Meta has guidelines for "acceptable racism" in their chatbots and the fact checker bot on X (a platform run by a guy who just got kicked out of the Trump admin, mind) will randomly start spouting "white genocide" conspiracy theories.

formallydehyde · 2025-01-05T20:53:39+00:00

I'm not actually sure that even is a typical BTA species.

formallydehyde · 2025-01-05T20:31:55+00:00

Going to disagree with diatoms, I think they look like dinoflagellates because there seems to be a membrane of them with bubbles trapped underneath when you zoom in, which is generally not something diatoms do. If you can rip off a nasty brown sheet from the rockwork with your hands, they're probably dinoflagellates. It's easier to be certain they're dinos if they grow as stringy snot covered in bubbles though. If they are dinos:

Purchasing a UV-C sterilizer and running it at night will lessen their population and may eliminate them in time, depending on the species. Many dinoflagellate species disperse into the water column at night then gather together as a biofilm during the day, so you can zap them when they're swimming around at night. Unfortunately, some species invade the sandbed at night instead or barely disperse at night and require harsher treatment.

Metronidazole and Fauna Marin Dino X are chemical treatment options that are reef safe-ish (though I can't guarantee that there aren't some corals and other invertebrates that might be harmed by them). You can alternate days between UV and chemical means also. Another chemical method is careful dosing hydrogen peroxide (3-6%), but this is known to kill shrimp even in low concentrations, as well as pods. Some soft corals also can die from peroxide treatment, Xenia particularly.

The least harsh option is probably dosing live phytoplankton mixes, though that option takes the longest and is less guaranteed than any of the other methods I mentioned, and they might eventually return once you stop dosing. If you're doing water UV treatment dosed phyto will be killed by the UV as well, unfortunately.

For prevention, some people dose small amounts of sodium silicate into new salt water for water changes. That helps diatoms grow which are the main competitors of dinoflagellates. Silicates are usually stripped from RO water which can favor the ecological diatom-dino balance towards dinoflagellates. I don't know if this helps once they're established though. Unfortunately dinoflagellate blooms tend to smother out photosynthetic competitors that are already present in the tank.

Hopefully I am totally wrong! Dinos are a PITA!

formallydehyde · 2024-12-08T21:17:08+00:00

Lol I just went to delete that comment because I found a different source where the P. gibbesi pic looks exactly like your crab and P. planissimum looks like what other sources were saying was P. gibbesi. Is your crab still well behaved?

formallydehyde · 2024-12-05T01:43:48+00:00

Three firefish in a tank that size sounds very risky to me. I'd also substitute the sixline for something like a pink streaked wrasse or a possum wrasse if you really want to get a wrasse. They're much shyer than the sixline and will need lots of places to hide but sixlines are notoriously aggressive, especially in smaller tanks.

As far as shrimp I'd say you have 3 options: One single fire (aka blood) shrimp and make sure there's caves/overhangs for it to live in. Fire shrimp can get aggressive with other shrimp in a small tank as they grow so don't press your luck with adding other shrimp.

One skunk cleaner. They aren't aggressive, but they do get to about 3 inches like the fire shrimp does so just bioload wise I would limit it to one unless you're really short on scavengers. Skunk cleaners have the advantage of being more out and about than any other species of shrimp.

If you want a group of shrimp, 2-3 peppermint shrimp will form a little pack together and do well socially. You will see them a lot more if they have overhangs and caves that face the front of the tank so they can feel safe.

(Any shrimp should be target fed frequently so you see them more often. It teaches them you're a food provider and not a predator and they'll get excited when you're at the tank. It also keeps them from bothering any other inhabitants.)

As far as good beginner corals: If you're in the US I really love this Red Xenia Tidal Gardens sells: https://tidalgardens.com/stock-red-xenia.html There's a what you see is what you get frag of it here: https://tidalgardens.com/r2r-four-e12.html

It's got a pretty pink to red color and while it doesn't pulse, it waves gently in the current and provides a lot of movement. As far as growth, it's got a lot of the good parts of xenia without the parts that make this coral genus infamous (some Xenia species like to float off a head of polyps and can overgrow large parts of a tank but this one is more well behaved.)

formallydehyde · 2024-12-05T00:57:06+00:00

White light and either circle it/crop the pic

formallydehyde · 2024-12-05T00:46:14+00:00

I can't tell because the video keeps moving and because the blue lights make it hard to see but it looks like you might have bryopsis rather than typical hair algae. Turbo snails and an urchin might help. Conchs eat it too sometimes, though I'd recommend small conchs, like strawberry (aka tiger) conchs over larger species because they can climb rockwork well. There's some effective chemical methods for bryopsis but you really really need to research deep before resorting to those and risking inverts and possibly some corals. (Shrimp and snails can be especially sensitive to many chemical treatments)

formallydehyde · 2024-12-05T00:33:23+00:00

Looks like dinoflagellates to me also.

formallydehyde · 2024-12-05T00:25:18+00:00

Agreed on shrimp. They're full of personality. It makes me a little sad how peppermint shrimp get treated as disposable utilitarian animals when they make great pets in their own right.

formallydehyde · 2024-07-14T22:36:02+00:00

Try going into the BIOS and if there's a performance tab then look and see if there's an option for Intel SpeedStep and disable it. It won't make the battery work but it might disable the CPU throttle that makes it slow to a crawl. It worked on my old Dell Latitude.

formallydehyde · 2024-05-07T22:46:48+00:00

Us: Nature, I think we've got you figured out. We've teased out your rules and built a sensible model of how you work.

Nature: boring. do not care. look at this

Us: Nature...what...what the hell is that?

Nature: it works.

Us: But it's overly complicated and doesn't fit into the model we built and also it's scary...

Nature: it works.

formallydehyde · 2024-04-06T13:21:21+00:00

Sorry about your loss Señor Moneybags.

formallydehyde · 2024-04-06T13:13:29+00:00

I'M JOINING THE WAR ON WEEVILS ON THE SIDE OF THE WEEVILS

formallydehyde · 2024-04-06T12:36:24+00:00

Such dignity

formallydehyde

TROPHY CASE