NO! That Is Not A Typo!
It is an hilarious pun, I tell you, hilarious!
Those of you with long memories may remember that, waaaay earlier in the year, we put up pictures from the vlogger Mark Rober, who is a mechanical engineer with a NASA background. He would have a bonkers idea and then make it reality - the South Canadian equivalent of Colin Furze, except not quite as hazardous to health. Art!
Colin goes to the shops
Your Humble Scribe has just come across one of Mark's vlogs where he defeats 5 'scam' arcade games using SCIENCE and also cheating.
Game One: Skeeball
The idea is to get a ball into one of those numbered holes, which generates a score. Mark's advice if you're not playing with a patented Rober-backpack is to ignore the '100' holes but instead aim for the '40' one, because if you over-pitch you'll likely hit the '50' hole, and if you under-pitch you'll hit the '30' hole. Art!
He used a fake water-bottle to load up the balls, for beneath that backpack is a modified softball pitching machine, rigged to run off a battery, which will throw balls at a variable velocity, consistently and without human deviation. Art!
Heh
He shoots, he scores, three balls into the 100 point hole one after the other.
GAME TWO: Basketball
This game is pretty self-explanatory. You put the basketballs through the hoop. Simple, right? Mark then explained that the ball falling through the hoop interrupts a laser beam, which causes your score to be racked up. Thinking like an engineer (and a criminal) he realises that, to make an impossibly high score, you need to repeatedly interrupt the beam. Enter Robo-ball. Art!
This is how to suspend the 'ball' over the hoop; with a couple of retracting hydraulic pistons triggered by remote control. Once that's in position, the lower part of the ball then activates another set of pistons, and Hey Pesto! Art?
This cybernetic substitute is smuggled into the arcade in the trusty backpack. Mark also said that, if you lack his engineering skills, then you need to sign up to two games and use both sets of balls on one game, as this cuts down on having to wait for the balls to return, and you need to practice getting another ball instantly after having thrown one.
GAME THREE: Quick Drop
This one was new to Conrad. You have a game where you need to drop all 50 balls into a set of rotating buckets, against the clock. Art!
The clock starts at 22 seconds and 500 tickets for a win, but for every unsuccessful go the number of tickets goes up and the time increases. Mark calculated that once it got above 600 tickets the timer will be sufficiently long enough to accurately place the balls.
Or you could do it his way. Art!
All that circuitry is used to control a retractable pin on the underside, which will go over the button you need to press to drop the balls. Art!
And he got 545 tickets.
I think we'll save the other two for tomorrow. Don't forget to like and subscribe to Mark's Youtube channel so that he continues to earn revenue, because the last thing you want is someone with his skills and imagination turning to a life of crime.
That Dog Buns! Crossword AGAIN
Lord Peter had a library and friends to help him, all I have is me.
By the way, yesterday's solution was TESTAMENT. Let's have another bizarrely convoluted clue. "Any loud cry would do as well; Or so the poet's verses tell".
And the solution? HI. There's a note in the Solutions that "He would answer to Hi! Or any loud cry" is from "The Hunting Of The Snark" which is the poem we get BOOJUM! from. Thank heavens for armoured underwear!
Shall we try another one? Yes we shall. "Little and hid from mortal sight; I darkly work to make all light"
The answer is LEAVEN. I can see where the making light comes in, but that first line? Baffling.
What the well-dressed Snark hunter is wearing this season
Another Type Of Sea
"The Sea Of Sand", actually. The Doctor is pondering over how the bio-vore's home planet got into such an obvious mess.
Why not try moving on to other worlds? Nearer worlds? Earth lay over nineteen light years from the constellation Pavo and the Doctor knew there were other planets nearer the home of these bio-vores that could have been colonised.
Why not? Because they could not. They had no ability to travel between planets by spaceship. Trans-mat, yes, but not spaceship.
Back to chicken and egg, he pondered. 'Without space vessels, they couldn't land a trans-mat platform on another world.
Deciding that his luck had lasted long enough, he hurriedly scanned the panels and racks and banks of instruments, before making a quick selection.
Listening hard, both Albert and the Professor waited for the shooting to die down and stop. Initially it had helped them, seeing the parachute flares casting a weird light over the desert, and the flashes of gunfire.
They had been lost, gone astray from the track back from Makin Al-Jinni. Albert couldn't quite understand how he'd come to lose the way so badly. He didn't dare to put the headlights on, not with those monsters stamping around The Temple and their killing machines.
Then the gun battle suddenly erupted in the night, making them both jump with fright.
I bet you'd forgotten about this pair, hadn't you?
Bring On An Astronomy Photograph
Another from the BBC's display of winners and runners-up in the International Astronomy competition. Art!
"The Milky Way Bridge" courtesy Lun Feng
This is a corker. It was taken on a mountain in Sichuan, China, meaning the location was well away from any nearby light-pollution, which will obscure one's view of the heavens. And yes, that it our own galaxy that you're looking at.
Just to up the word count a little, autumn has definitely arrived. I put on a cardie last night for the first time in months.
"The War Illustrated" Issue 164
This one has a publication date of October 1st 1943. Art!
A Ruffian anti-aircraft gun and crew, back when the Sinisters were our ally and not an international pariah. The gun is a Sinister knock-off of the Swedish Bofors gun and Conrad bets they didn't pay any licensing fee, either, the swindling rascals. There is some fatuous blather about the Teutons losing 40,000 aircraft on the Eastern Front and only having obsolete types left, which is nonsense. Teuton aircraft losses for the whole war came to 40,000.
Ask A Silly Question
And I usually ignore it. I refer, of course - obviously! - to Quora and the spectacularly daft questions some people ask, perhaps after having come back from the pub or the bar or having ingested drugs, which are bad, okay?
Here's one:
No, the RAF stayed away from that whole sordid affair, so the soldiers had to make do sticking feathers into their uniforms and flapping their arms.
OF COURSE IT DID! Kreplach, some people abuse the right to be stupid. Art!
The Brylcreem Boys on their way to give the Argentinians the good news. Operation Black Buck, FYI.
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