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Whales, seals, and other marine mammals seem to do alright in the chill waters of the arctic seas, so the US Navy is developing a type of "artificial blubber" to allow divers to work in freezing conditions for hours on end. Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the collaboration between MIT and George Mason University uses an off-the-shelf wetsuit permeated with inert gases to triple a diver's resistance against the threat of hypothermia.
[...] The modification involves replacing the air trapped in the neoprene foam that provides heat insulation with heavy, inert gases, such as xenon and krypton, which make the neoprene act like fat-concentrating blubber. This is done by putting an ordinary neoprene suit into a bespoke pressure tank the size of a beer keg and pumping in the inert gases. After several hours, the gas permeates the suit, forcing the air out.
According to ONR, this makes the suit effective at 10° (50° C)[sic see note] for hours instead of minutes. The treatment isn't permanent as the gases leak out over 20 hours, but the team points out that this is much longer than the time divers spend in the water.
Why not recruit divers with more blubber?
[Note: This conversion error appeared in the original story; it should have read: 10°C (50° F). Story updated 20180907_011649 UTC --martyb]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 08 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
No, see, you can't cast aspersion and then claim you didn't. It's dishonest, and doesn't constitute the clever rhetorical trap you suppose it does.
"Dog whistle" might have strictly negative connotations for you, but its valence is neutral. That is how I used it. A dog whistle is a device everyone can see you blow, but which only other dogs will hear. You use it to signal identity or a reference that only the cognoscenti will recognize.
I used several classes of folks who use dog whistles, and identified as one of them. If freemasons are a favorite target of alt right groups then how does it make sense to you that i would say, "i am a freemason, so..." and then proceed to target myself?
The parent cited the use of "bespoke" in an article, so journalists were his mention; thus they served as the segue for my examples.
But i suspect none of that is what triggered your inference. I surmise it was the example of Yiddish syntax that Jewish screen writers frequently inject into movies, TV shows, and other such material to signal their presence to other Jews. Now, i used the example because there are a great many TV shows and movies produced in America any of us can check out and test the theory i was expounding. Also, for native speakers of English, English words placed in a Yiddish/Germanic word order are quite noticeable. They leap out at you.
Now, if, say, the American entertainment industry was replete with South Asians who wrote the South Asian head bobble that indicates assent into every scene, then i would have chosen something like that as an example to say, "see? That story set in kansas, with blond haired blue eyed kansans? They're bobbing their heads side to side in South Asian fashion to mean yes, instead of nodding American style. That's a dog whistle from south asian writers to other south asians in the audience."
But, you know, they're not. Neither are screen writers in Hollywood predominantly Mexicans who write "pendejo" into the mouths of WASP Wall Street bankers, or southerners who put "y'all" into the mouths of prim school marms from Connecticut. Such a thing might be out there, but is so rare that I, at least, can't cite any examples.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday September 09 2018, @03:34AM
By your own admission here you ascribe intent. I place the blame fully on lazy writers who live in a bubble and never bothered to learn how different people can be since they never leave their home city. It isn't intent it is just bad writing and an extremely sheltered life. Remember the reporter who scoffed at the idea of even knowing someone who owns a pickup truck when a truck is the most common vehicle in most states? Like that, they have no clue how weird they are because everyone they know is like them. Truthfully in all of these examples except masonic city designs the "in group" wouldn't notice, it is the outsiders who notice. Y'all will never sound out of place to a southerner but is so out of place to the rest of us that it is a principle characteristic in stereotypes of southerners. Half of the humor of the movie Fargo comes from how funny they sound and act to the rest of the country. Bespoke may sound like someone trying to be fancy to you but the first American use I recall is from the show Archer, which tells an entirely different story about the person using it.
For the record you were wrong about the Jewish thing. I am not and not from a place where they are a larger portion of the population. It was Kant and the categorical imperative. I am not a college graduate but I have read Kant and many of the Great Books because I believe in educating myself. I have had a lifetime of being mocked for reading things like that without a teacher cracking the whip. In that time my patience for people being anti intellectual has worn very thin.