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Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
blind guy named Josef 'Joybubbles' Engressia, who figured out how to generate a 2600hz tone just by whistling.
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My parent company has this old South Korean engineer who is blind. We bring him in on jobs with harmonics issues. When I first met him I thought it was bullshit until I watched him work. He could triangulate noise in drive rooms, transformer yards. It was fucking unreal. We had him outside of transformer yard, so many transformers. It is just wall of humming. Old dude points and says "Problem is on secondary of transformer over there. I think it is last phase"

I roll my fucking eyes. Three days of testing later, I was eating my fucking words.

When I do industrial motor installations, I have to use a metal rod to my skull on one end and to the bearing housing on the other so I feel the bearing noise. I have to be able to tell many different noises to indicate like bearing flooding, unrounded rollers, shit like this. Its 32 different distinct noises I am listening for because I cannot just open up the bearing. It took me years to be able to do this. And I cannot make it out over the noise of the industrial site otherwise.

The old dude, just has to be in the fucking room. It is creepy. He can tell how many people are in a room just by their breathing. And then he trips over a trash can.
 
JustStopDude said:
My parent company has this old South Korean engineer who is blind. We bring him in on jobs with harmonics issues. When I first met him I thought it was bullshit until I watched him work. He could triangulate noise in drive rooms, transformer yards. It was fucking unreal. We had him outside of transformer yard, so many transformers. It is just wall of humming. Old dude points and says "Problem is on secondary of transformer over there. I think it is last phase"

I roll my fucking eyes. Three days of testing later, I was eating my fucking words.

When I do industrial motor installations, I have to use a metal rod to my skull on one end and to the bearing housing on the other so I feel the bearing noise. I have to be able to tell many different noises to indicate like bearing flooding, unrounded rollers, shit like this. Its 32 different distinct noises I am listening for because I cannot just open up the bearing. It took me years to be able to do this. And I cannot make it out over the noise of the industrial site otherwise.

The old dude, just has to be in the fucking room. It is creepy. He can tell how many people are in a room just by their breathing. And then he trips over a trash can.
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That's badass.
 
The shuriken used by ninja weren't actually the cool, elegant designs we see in modern media, they were essentially two nails welded or tied together with the head filed down to a point, or sometimes they would just throw long nails like darts. They also would often stick them in various festering piles of animal shit for days on end so they would give anyone that was stuck by one a debilitating and often lethal infection.

The cool bladed kind we usually think of today were actually used by some samurai. In order to intimidate opponents the samurai would often brag about their swords being so sharp that the wind from their blades could cut people, and then perform an elaborate series of swings through the air, while using sleigh of hand to launch the shuriken at the opponent while they were distracted to create the illusion that the samurai was able to cut them without getting close to them. Feudal Japan was fucking insane.
 
Count groudon said:
The shuriken used by ninja weren't actually the cool, elegant designs we see in modern media, they were essentially two nails welded or tied together with the head filed down to a point, or sometimes they would just throw long nails like darts. They also would often stick them in various festering piles of animal shit for days on end so they would give anyone that was stuck by one a debilitating and often lethal infection.

The cool bladed kind we usually think of today were actually used by some samurai. In order to intimidate opponents the samurai would often brag about their swords being so sharp that the wind from their blades could cut people, and then perform an elaborate series of swings through the air, while using sleigh of hand to launch the shuriken at the opponent while they were distracted to create the illusion that the samurai was able to cut them without getting close to them. Feudal Japan was fucking insane.
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Also, your average ninja wasn't "that guy in the black jumpsuit doing backflips and shooting ninja stars all over the place", he was more "that nondescript grubby peasant who stabbed the local diamyo in the gut with a poisoned dagger and disappeared into the crowd".
 
Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
Also, your average ninja wasn't "that guy in the black jumpsuit doing backflips and shooting ninja stars all over the place", he was more "that nondescript grubby peasant who stabbed the local diamyo in the gut with a poisoned dagger and disappeared into the crowd".
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Not true, man! You just have to learn parkour and practice killing people and look super awesome and you can be a ninja.
 
Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
Also, your average ninja wasn't "that guy in the black jumpsuit doing backflips and shooting ninja stars all over the place", he was more "that nondescript grubby peasant who stabbed the local diamyo in the gut with a poisoned dagger and disappeared into the crowd".
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Pretty much this. The stereotypical black garb comes from stagehands wearing black in Kabuki performances when the stage dressing would be changed for a change of scenery or moving something through the air to make sure it hit the target, I think they started doing this for the ninjas just to show how an attack from one could come from seemingly nowhere.

And let's not get into Naruto, ha!
 
DrJonesHat said:
@Galvatron when I got up this morning, I can honestly say I was not expecting to read the words "Starfish Hitler" in any context. So, thanks for breaking my expectations, I guess.

In France, during the late 80s run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys, the name was changed to "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles". Depending on who you ask, it was either due to a translation error (most likely) or because the French though "Ninja" was too violent.
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That's the beauty of Japanese costumed hero shows. If you try to describe them to someone-- anyone who isn't familiar with the genre, it sounds like you're describing an extremely fucked up fever dream

Here's a perfect example
kyoryuger5-1003.jpg


Debo Battisier from Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger

A baker themed monster with a whisk and pastry injector for hands.

Now, try to explain this THING without the context of Sentai:

"OK, so there's this monster, right? He was created by an ANOTHER evil monster that likes to steal joy from humans. So she created this monster that looks like a french baker, except his face looks like a gargoyle made out of cupcakes. Ok, so he makes desserts that make humans irrationally happy, so his master can steal their joy. Oh! But he was mutated by taking TOO much "sweet energy" which turned him into his "Violent Cavity" form. And then he was able to shoot a laser at humans that gave them cavities."

People would ask just how much Ambien you took before going to sleep the previous night
 
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Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
Also, your average ninja wasn't "that guy in the black jumpsuit doing backflips and shooting ninja stars all over the place", he was more "that nondescript grubby peasant who stabbed the local diamyo in the gut with a poisoned dagger and disappeared into the crowd".
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Something that will never stop to amuse me about all that fancy Ninjutsu nonsense:
Every course about poetry, flower arrangement or tea ceremonies will be of more use than any course on self-defense ever will be.
Being vaguely trained in buddhist writings is more useful than being an expert user of poison.
Having a knack to draw sketches and maps or being able to imitate various dialects will make you more useful than being able to use a weapon.

A Ninja is a spy, not some Richard-Harris type superhero assassin, so what you want is the ability to blend into a crowd or to reliably and believably pretend to be someone you're not (ie: a wandering priest, a tea master or just some random schmuck on his way to a famous temple).

No disrespect to the martial arts being taught in Ninjutsu, but I really hate what I suspect is pure marketing on behalf of its founder by claiming his hodgepodge of various techniques to have some vague relation to the mostly fictious history and tradition of Ninjas.
 
Due to a surveying error, there's a two and a half mile wide, thirty-five mile long stub of New Mexico that projects over Texas where the Oklahoma panhandle should actually connect. You can clearly see it on this map:

StatelineFire_3-10-2018.jpg
 
If you are ever in the tropics you can catch prawns easily by tying a piece of chicken liver to a tree limb at night, letting it dangle over a stream so that the wind rocking the branch dips the bait in and out of the water. When the prawns come out to get the bait scoop them up with a small net. Easy dinner.
 
Count groudon said:
View attachment 402710
This was the ceramonial helmet belonging to king Henry VIII, given to him by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. It's so fucking weird looking that the people who discovered it weren't really sure what its purpose was, and it was believed that it eventually found its way into the hands of Henry's royal Jester who used its bizarre appearance to spice up his routine.

It also has glasses bolted into it's forehead because Henry had fairly atrocious eyesight and horns because they seemed like a neat idea at the time.
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The Helm of the Wise in Dark Souls 1 is a reference to it as well
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German Emperor Friedrich II was the man that introduced large-scale potato farming to Germany.
He instructed all his realm to grow potatos and even had the military control whether his orders were being followed or not.

There's a nice little myth according to which the regular people still didn't trust this new-fangled weird food and didn't pick up on it, so Friedrich ordered some soldiers to stand guard next to the fields and storage sheds to "protect" the new crop. Soon, people figured "If the military is guarding this stuff, it must be good". Apparently, this lead to them being accepted into german cuisine.
 
If you've ever played a world war 2 game then doubtlessly you've seen somebody hipfire the MG-32, bullshit right? Wrong. The Ausbildungsvorschrift für die Infanterie – Heft 2a – Die Schützenkompanie (Training Regulations for the Infantry Book 2a - The Rifle Company) Has a section regarding the hipfiring of the MG-32 and how it should be employed, including notes on how shorter riflemen should prepare the MG to better suit them.

Another MG-32 fact, the Königstiger (Tiger II) uses MG-32s instead of MG-42s because swapping the barrel of a MG-32 is a difference process. On the MG-32 you swing the entire gun minus the barrel itself and pull the barrel out of the rear while the MG-42 has it pulled out the side, an impossible thing to do in the Königstiger.
 
The terms 'airline' and 'airliner' were coined by a baseball player turned aviation pioneer turned complete lunatic named Alfred Lawson, who started a cult called 'Lawsonomy' and who believed that the earth was hollow and had an 'intake' at the North Pole and an 'exhaust' at the South Pole.
 
Gabriel Weinberg (the DuckDuckGo guy, probably not related to Dr. Alvin Weinberg) ran an internet phone book where he collected and posted people's email addresses before the DDG gig.

Now I'm not saying DDG is sketchy, but if there was ever a prime candidate for a sketchy "privacy-focused" search engine...
 
Holding guns gangster style isn't actually entirely ineffective. Some people with a dominant eye opposite of their dominant hand will sometimes shoot this way as opposed to training themselves to use their offhand or eye, and in WWII some soldiers would fire grease guns sideways because the recoil was so odd that holding it sideways and letting it swing from side to side was actually a pretty useful strategy for gunning down advancing enemy troops.
 
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