Australians are currently paying him billions for 2nd hand nuclear submarines (which are not likely to ever be delivered), so that they can protect themselves from their biggest trading partner.
Mel Brooks did not even try to defend against this. He is a huge admirer of her. He thought it was appropriate to pay her and apologise for any offence she may have taken from the gag.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQef9PqjKbG/
The 'flys' are the enormous curtains and backdrops used in theatre productions. They are raised and lowered to set new scenes in a production. They need a large space to be raised into, above the stage--which is known as a fly tower.
I wasn't sure what you were discussing. Like, what is a fly tower? So I went down a barbican rabbit hole and found this part of a video, where one of the theatre fly techs describes the same thing as you!
"It turns out that GPS must account for both special relativity and general relativity to deliver position at 1-meter level and time at 100-nanosecond level to its users."
I recall reading Kay Cottee's account of her solo unassisted circumnavigation in 1988. She was the first woman to do so.
Part of her preparation was removing the labels from all tinned food, and then re-writing what was in the can with a permanent marker on the lid, before fully immersing each can in laquer. Presumably this was done to help deal with corrosion problems.
> The use of mathematics to produce sounds resembling real instruments quickly became obsolete once we could just go out and sample the real thing. Sampling is a boring, brute-force approach to sound synthesis, but it’s a relatively straightforward one, now we have the computing power and memory.
I guess this is true, but the next thing to come along that made me leave the DX7 at home was an Ensoniq EPS-16+.
The article mentions Sydney harbours 18 foot racing skiffs. These are very light 3 man racing vessels with far more sail than boat. They are very fast and require all 3 crew to be suspended on trapeze wires far from the hull, just to stay upright.
They are fun to watch because they flip and capsize a lot.
> A lot of prescience is just paying enough attention
Terry Gilliam said much the same thing when talking about making Brazil in the 1980s.
"People think I am a prophet and that Brazil described the world we’re living in now a few years ago. But we were living in that world then; people just weren’t paying attention the way they do now."
> draft obituaries ready for all living celebrities, which have to be constantly updated
I was responsible for doing this for a news radio network 30 years ago.
Mostly I was able to stay on top of things, but Princess Diana really ruined my weekend. No-one was ready for that one.
My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.
Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.
I'm not sure that Infinite Fun Space is used to simulate the real. I got the impression that IFS is where Minds go to unwind and play in synthetic universes with rules of their own imagining. And that humans cannot really even properly conceive them.
The Culture is also very cautious about running high fidelity simulations for ethical reasons. Useful simulations approach the real in fidelity which makes them problematic to delete -- But they still do it.