Dry coarse-grained sand may be used as a substitute for the insulation required by code in a buried pipe situation. The sand should have a maximum particle size of ¼” and a moisture content of 1% or less. The thermal conductivity, K, of coarse, dry sand varies between 0.15 – 0.25 W/mK. Converting to Imperial units = 1.7 Btu.in/ft2.oF.hr. R-value is the reciprocal of conductivity, therefore, the R-value of coarse dry sand = 0.58 ft2.oF.hr/Btu.in.
1-inch of fiberglass insulation with a conductivity of 0.27 has an R-value of 3.70. Conversely, 6″ of dry coarse sand has an R-value of 3.46; 12″ would have an R-value of 6.92.
In addition, some provisions need to be made to keep the insulating sand as dry as possible.
"Hoist the Colours", also written as "Hoist the Colors", was a haunting sea shanty known by all pirates across the Seven Seas. The song was related to the action of hoisting of a pirate's flag, though it was mainly used as a call ... //
Lyrics by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio
Music by Hans Zimmer and Gore Verbinski //
Hoist the Colours was first mentioned in the 2007 reference book Pirates of the Caribbean: The Complete Visual Guide,[1] prior to its first appearance as "an old pirate song" in T.T. Sutherland's junior novelization for the 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.[2][3] In addition, "Hoist the Colours" would be heard in full in the film's soundtrack as well as the film itself.[6][3] "Hoist The Colours — The Story Behind The Song" was a bonus feature for the various DVD/Blu-ray releases for the film, "The tale of house this haunting shanty was created. An anthem for pirates across the seven seas". //
Here's exactly what made this possible: 4 documents that act as guardrails for your AI.
Document 1: Coding Guidelines - Every technology, pattern, and standard your project uses
Document 2: Database Structure - Complete schema design before you write any code
Document 3: Master Todo List - End-to-end breakdown of every feature and API
Document 4: Development Progress Log - Setup steps, decisions, and learnings
Plus a two-stage prompt strategy (plan-then-execute) that prevents code chaos. //
Here's the brutal truth: LLMs don't go off the rails because they're broken. They go off the rails because you don't build them any rails.
You treat your AI agent like an off-road, all-terrain vehicle, then wonder why it's going off the rails. You give it a blank canvas and expect a masterpiece.
Think about it this way - if you hired a talented but inexperienced developer, would you just say "build me an app" and walk away? Hell no. You'd give them:
- Coding standards
- Architecture guidelines
- Project requirements
- Regular check-ins
But somehow with AI, we think we can skip all that and just... prompt our way to success.
The solution isn't better prompts. It's better infrastructure.
You need to build the roads before you start driving.
I've always been a scaredy-cat. Horror movies were my kryptonite, the kind of films that left me sleeping with the lights on and checking under beds like a paranoid child. So this newfound ability to chuckle at cinematic terror felt like discovering I could suddenly speak a foreign language.
As I reflected on this mysterious transformation, three influences kept surfacing in my memory, all carrying the same powerful message: fear loses its grip when you laugh at it. //
The first was Stephen King's IT, specifically the scene where the Losers Club finally confronts Pennywise. These kids, terrorized by an ancient cosmic horror, make a crucial discovery: the creature that feeds on fear becomes pathetically small when mocked. They literally bully the bully, turning their terror into ridicule. "You're just a clown!" they shout, and suddenly this omnipotent force becomes just another playground antagonist.
The second was from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Professor Lupin teaches his students to defeat boggarts, creatures that manifest as your worst fear, with the Riddikulus spell. The magic isn't in complex incantations; it's in forcing yourself to imagine your fear in something ridiculous. Snape in your grandmother's dress. A spider wearing roller skates. Fear transformed into comedy. //
All three sources delivered the same revolutionary idea: laughter is fear's kryptonite. //
This shift represents something profound about how we consume media. Stories don't just entertain us; they literally rewire our neural pathways, teaching us new ways to interpret and respond to the world. Every hero's journey we follow, every coping mechanism we witness, becomes part of our own psychological toolkit.
One simple AI prompt saved me from disaster.
Not fancy security tools. Not expensive antivirus software. Just asking my coding assistant to look for suspicious patterns before executing unknown code.
The scary part? This attack vector is perfect for developers. We download and run code all day long. GitHub repos, npm packages, coding challenges. Most of us don't sandbox every single thing.
And this was server-side malware. Full Node.js privileges. Access to environment variables, database connections, file systems, crypto wallets. Everything.
If this sophisticated operation is targeting developers at scale, how many have already been compromised? How many production systems are they inside right now?
Perfect Targeting: Developers are ideal victims. Our machines contain the keys to the kingdom: production credentials, crypto wallets, client data.
Professional Camouflage: LinkedIn legitimacy, realistic codebases, standard interview processes.
Technical Sophistication: Multi-layer obfuscation, remote payload delivery, dead-man switches, server-side execution.
One successful infection could compromise production systems at major companies, crypto holdings worth millions, personal data of thousands of users. //
If you're a developer getting LinkedIn job opportunities:
Always sandbox unknown code. Docker containers, VMs, whatever. Never run it on your main machine.
Use AI to scan for suspicious patterns. Takes 30 seconds. Could save your entire digital life.
Verify everything. Real LinkedIn profile doesn't mean real person. Real company doesn't mean real opportunity.
Trust your gut. If someone's rushing you to execute code, that's a red flag.
This scam was so sophisticated it fooled my initial BS detector. But one paranoid moment and a simple AI prompt exposed the whole thing.
Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.
Last fall, the house of Bezos announced a $500 million investment in SMR startup X-Energy. On Thursday, the e-tailer revealed that X-Energy's Xe-100 SMR designs would eventually supply Washington State with "up to" 960 megawatts of clean energy.
"Eventually" is the key word here as construction isn't expected to start until the end of the decade and the plants won't begin operations until sometime in the 2030s.
The highest altitude recorded for a bird is 11,300 m (37,000 ft) for a Rüppell's vulture (Gyps rueppellii), which collided with a commercial aircraft over Abidjan, Ivory Coast on 29 November 1973. The impact damaged one of the aircraft's engines, causing it to shut down, but the plane landed safely without further incident. Sufficient feather remains of the bird were recovered to allow the American Museum of Natural History to make a positive identification of this high-flier, which is rarely seen above 6,000 m (20,000 ft).
On November, 29 1973 a bird strike occurred at an altitude of 11,300 m over Abidjan. The engine was shutdown during the collision, and was not restarted.
Altitude
The altitude is that recorded by the pilot shortly after the impact, which damaged one of the aircraft’s engines and caused it to be shut down. The plane landed safely at Abijan without further incident.
Backblaze is a backup and cloud storage company that has been tracking the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of the hard drives in its datacenter since 2013. As you can imagine, that’s netted the firm a lot of data. And that data has led the company to conclude that HDDs “are lasting longer” and showing fewer errors. //
Biffstar Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
2y
152
My 320mb (megabyte) IDE IBM hard drive from 1994 still boots Win3.1 and loads Doom II just fine.
Who says older drives are unreliable?
An elderly woman just scored a landmark court win against her neighbor that forces him to stop smoking weed in his own home.
Josefa Ippolito–Shepherd, 76, of Washington, DC, said the “feces” or “skunk” smell emanating from 73-year-old next-door resident Thomas Cackett’s doorway made her dread coming home.
“The basic math is whatever product you have, you divide it by .3, and that’s what the product should cost to the consumer to operate at that healthy margin,” Brafman told Fox News Digital. “If the prices continue to increase, there’s only [so much] that the consumer will be willing to pay.”. //
“I think about margins less than percentages,” he said.
His approach often means absorbing part of the cost to preserve the dining experience.
“At the end of the day, we’re in the business of taking care of people, nourishing them, making them feel good … and making them feel good about spending money. That’s our job.”
Alvarenga was more than 10 years older than Córdoba. Alvarenga believes he survived, in part, because of his experience in the open sea, but he also credits simple optimism and faith that God would save him.
He focused on finding food. He prayed more and sang hymns, even in the most devastating moments at sea. Alvarenga remembers numerous cargo ships passing him by, but he doesn’t know if all the ships were real or if he imagined them. “I would signal them and nothing would happen,” he said. “But I thought God will determine which boat will save me.”
In the end, it was not a boat, but land that saved Alvarenga. After 438 days of floating on endless water, he saw mountains. When he felt he was close enough, Alvarenga dove into the water, swimming toward what he would later learn was one in the string of the Marshall Islands.
“I hit the ground first. My boat hit the ground second. I felt the waves, I felt the sand, and I felt the shore. I was so happy that I fainted on the sand. I didn’t care if I died at that point. I was so relieved. I knew at that point I didn’t have to eat any more fish if I didn’t want to.” //
Alvarenga didn’t care that journalists didn’t believe his story. The University of Hawaii and a number of independent oceanographers would later say his improbable survival was entirely possible. Buoys and weather models show an ocean drift matched his 6,000-mile journey west. He’s collaborated with journalist Jonathan Franklin in a book about his remarkable survival, called “438 Days.”
Common sense dictates that you should never fully rely upon someone else to do fact checking for you. But who has time for common sense?
If you’re reading this page, chances are you’re here because something about one or all of the entries in The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL) section of this site struck you as a tadge suspect, if not downright wrong.
If any or all of the stories in this section caused your internal clue phone to ring, we hope you didn’t let the answering machine take the call. That niggling little voice of common sense whispering to you in the background was right — there was something wrong with what you read.
You’ve just had an encounter with False Authority Syndrome.
Everything in this section is a spoof. Mister Ed was no more a zebra than the origin of the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence had anything to do with pirates on a recruiting drive. As for Mississippi’s doing away with teaching fractions and decimals in its school systems because kids find them too hard to master, that’s no more true than Kentucky’s imposing a licensing fee on uses of its name, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ naming his celebrated apeman after the city he lived in (other way around, actually), George Bernard Shaw’s penning a poorly-attended play called Closed For Remodeling, passengers on the Titanic viewing a 1912 silent version of The Poseidon Adventure while their doomed ship was sinking out from under them, the design of California’s flag being the result of "pear" being taken for "bear," or mobile homes having gained their name from the city in which they were first manufactured.
Lost Legend
These legends aren’t really lost — we’ve known where they were the whole time! We created The Repository of Lost Legends (TRoLL for short) for those of you who don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. If you have a taste for the unusual and arcane (and can suspend your disbelief just a little), sample some of these precious gems.
Astro is a sans serif typeface that suits modern trends; it is created following the rules of gold ratio in order to convey its luxury
PF DIN Stencil Font -- handcrafted stencil lettering versions on the basis of DIN
Affected users have found relief by often uninstalling KB5066835 alongside KB5065789 using command line tools like wusa.exe, followed by a restart.
Alternative workarounds include disabling HTTP/2 through registry edits under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IIS\Parameters or updating Microsoft Defender Antivirus definitions via KB2267602, which resolves the issue without full rollback in some cases.
Fresh Windows 11 installations appear immune, suggesting the error stems from interactions with existing setups rather than a core flaw.
According to the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is a dividing line in human history. As such, it cannot but have implications for the Sabbath.
The Gospels are united in reporting that Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week. //
In addition to this, Jesus appears to his disciples on the first day of the week several times. //
In summary, when the disciples were gathered together on “the evening of that day, the first day of the week” (John 20:19), Jesus blesses that gathering with his presence and with the pronouncement of the peace that he has secured by his death and resurrection and that they enjoy through faith in him. Furthermore, he commissions them to proclaim Christ as Savior to the nations in the power of the Spirit. Thus, the presence of Christ with his people and the proclamation of the gospel to gather sinners and to edify the people of God are marks or traits of this “first day of the week.” //
Overall, understanding what the resurrection is and means for human history helps us to understand its implications for the Sabbath. The Sabbath, we have seen, is a creation ordinance. God instituted it at the creation so that human beings might remember God’s creation of the world in six days. By setting the Sabbath on the seventh day, God was showing humanity his goal for human existence—the worship of him who made all things. Later, in Deuteronomy, the Sabbath comes to take on added significance as God tells Israel that it is a day to remember how he redeemed them from bondage in Egypt.
Connected to both of these purposes, the resurrection is equally the dawn of the new creation in human history and part of the unique, once-for-all work of Christ to save sinners from among the nations.
The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
“People Sleep Peacefully in Their Beds at Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready to Do Violence on Their Behalf.”. //
Indeed, Orwell did make thematically similar statements. He wrote an essay in 1942 about writer Rudyard Kipling in which he stated, “[Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
In another essay, Orwell included a line with a similar sentiment while discussing pacifists: “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” //
The website Quote Investigator traced the quote to columnist Richard Grenier’s 1993 article in The Washington Times, where he wrote, “As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Some readers likely mistook Grenier’s attempt at summarizing Orwell’s viewpoint for a direct quotation, even though Grenier’s sentence did not enclose the expression in quotation marks.