It's funny, because I actually went to the website to buy some

'Becoming a problem'

It was instead posted by a parody account mimicking him.

Andy Timmons is a musician of the highest caliber. He’s recorded hair metal records with Danger Danger, got down with it alongside members of funk outfit Tower of Power, and has dropped some of the most melodic-meets-bluesy instrumental guitar music of the last 20-odd years. Timmons’ last solo record, 2020’s Covid-recorded Electric Truth, was yet another step forward in his progression as a masterful maestro of all things six-strings. Lately, he’s been on tour around the States and has continued to release a series of signature gear with the likes of JHS, too. Even more recently, in April of 2024, The post An Interview With Andy Timmons on Working with Peter Frampton appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Featured Essays Farscape On Watching Farscape in an Election Year It’s easy to feel like nothing you do makes any difference. Don’t despair—instead, take a lesson from “Farscape.” By Jenny Hamilton | Published on August 13, 2024 Credit: The Jim Henson Company / Syfy Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: The Jim Henson Company / Syfy When you are living in the proverbial interesting times, the easiest and worst thing to do is nothing. The number of my fears is uncountable, and the scope of my ability to prevent those fears from coming to pass if they haven’t yet, or continuing to happen if they have, is very small. I am just one rickety lady with a mental illness and a lot of books. I was not designed to withstand a nonstop firehose of situations. My first-draft inclination—always, but especially in an election year—is to lie down on the ground and wait for the world to stop happening. And what I have discovered is that when the difference between doing nothing and doing something starts to feel so vanishingly tiny that nothing and despair are the preferable options, the best cure for what ails me is Farscape. In case you’re not familiar with it, Farscape is a television program that aired on the Sci-Fi channel from 1999 to 2003. It’s about an astronaut named John Crichton who gets shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the universe, where he’s stuck on a ship (a living ship!) with a bunch of alien escaped prisoners. Tumblr user doctorharleenquinzell described the Farscape crew with searing accuracy as “a found family who loves and cares about each other but will also betray one another for a single corn chip.” They’re staggering through the galaxy half-assedly trying to keep themselves fed, watered, fueled up, and un-apprehended by space cops. They never have a nice day. John Crichton, especially, never has a nice day. He is mentally and physically miserable at every moment and in every possible way. If it starts to look like he might have a nice day—for instance, if the radiantly beautiful ex–space cop Aeryn Sun condescends to teach him combat maneuvers and make out with him in his spaceship—you can be certain that he will soon be forced to endure a torturously painful procedure that will turn him into a marble statue for eighty years. He is being driven slowly mad by a voice in his head. He is so intensely despised by one of the two sentient ships in his life that the ship manufactures a fake sex tape just to ruin his day. He has not watched a football game or drunk a glass of milk in four years. But the main thing about John Crichton, and the reason I have been watching Farscape with the desperation of a drowning man swimming to land, is that he always has a next idea. Chiana: When do you give up?John: I don’t.Chiana: Well, you got to give up sometime.John: No, I don’t. When I say that he always has a next idea, I do not want you to infer that his ideas are always good. They aren’t even usually good. We are not talking about a man who’s operating at a high level of competence. When he first comes aboard Moya, John does not know how to open doors. In the fourth episode, “Throne for a Loss,” as he and D’Argo and Aeryn are trying to rescue Rygel from kidnappers, John blows up their only gun because he doesn’t know how pulse weapons operate. Another time, he makes a snotty remark to the bad guys to show how unbothered he is (valid!), and only later does he realize that his snotty remark has ensured they’re going to devote all their resources to finding and conquering Earth. John Crichton loves his friends and he hates cops and he’s doing his best, but he does not know how to function in this world. D’Argo: Have you ever heard of anything like this happening before?John: D’Argo, I haven’t heard of anything like anything before. This is me. This is election years. One year I spent hours and hours writing postcards for a political candidate who turned out to be, like, pretty corrupt once in office. One time I spent my whole monthly charity budget on food for our community fridge and then there was a massive power outage and all the Go-gurts, milk, and tamales went bad. I can’t see the future; I can barely comprehend the present. I can’t keep waiting around to figure out the One Right Thing that will heal our shattered democracy and rebuild Grenada and undo the book bans and secure medical care for trans folks and ratify the ERA and end the wars in Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan. All of us will die, and the world will end, and the heat death of the sun will occur before there will exist that One Right Thing. John Crichton is so wildly outmatched by the world he finds himself in that if he waited until he had learned enough stuff to fix the problems he’s having, he and all his friends would be dead a hundred times over. This is why he never wastes a moment arguing with the universe about what’s real. Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock both taught me, very young, that you can make a problem unsolvable by first making it unbelievable. You won’t fight a giant that shows up in the supermarket because there are no such things as giants. You won’t stop the principal from putting your kids in a junior Iron Maiden because a principal wouldn’t do something so crazy. We can also look to the real world: You can’t stop encroaching fascism by pretending it isn’t encroaching and it isn’t fascism. Nobody on Farscape has this problem. In the late second season, they finally acquire enough money that they won’t have to subsist on an exclusive diet of Saltines, but when they get the money into the ship’s hold, the money turns into ship-eating spiders. I admit that I would probably require at least a few minutes of adjusting to that truth before I could start thinking of a plan, especially considering that the plan they eventually arrive at is to burn the spiders to death by setting large portions of their ship—who, again, is a living person—on fire. Only once does a Farscape character try to insist that what’s happening (in this case, a shrink ray) can’t really be happening, and she receives a comprehensive dressing-down from Rygel: Do you think this is all just a hallucination? … Who cares? We’re here, they did it, and that’s that… I’ve been around long enough to know how ignorant I am. I don’t assume the universe obeys my preconceptions. But I know a frelling fact when it hits me in the face. Here’s what Farscape knows, and what I am trying to remember: There’s no One Right Thing. There’s just whatever you can do next. Whatever moves you further away from the bad outcome or closer to the good one. In season three’s “Season of Death,” John and D’Argo are being chased by an alien who is stronger and faster and better armed than they are. They have no hope of winning against it. But the weather outside is really, really awful, and strong fast well-armed aliens probably don’t like blizzards, either; so they go outside. D’Argo: We’re going to bring him out here and see how he likes being in the cold!John: And what if he likes it?D’Argo: Look! One plan at a time! One plan at a time: Attend a city council meeting. One plan at a time: Write postcards for swing state elections. One plan at a time: Pester your elected officials by phone and by fax. One plan at a time. The post On Watching <i>Farscape</i> in an Election Year appeared first on Reactor.

Elon to Trump: The Media's Covering Up Kamala's Track Record

Walz Describes Hitler-Loving Hamas Cleric as a 'Master Teacher'

When it comes to venom’s toxicity, scientists work out quite how powerful it is by predicting the median lethal dose, or LD50. According to the University of Florida’s Book Of Insect Records, harvester ants take the crown for insect venom toxicity in mice – and hoo boy does it pack a punch.Harvester ants: the most potent insect venom?Harvester ants encompass several species, but it was the venom produced by ants of Pogonomyrmex maricopa that had an LD50 value of 0.12 milligrams/kilograms when injected intravenously. That means it would take just 12 stings from these ants to kill a 2-kilogram (4.4-pound) rat – one about the size of the bodacious alpine woolly rat. Theoretically, that means it would take around 500 stings from harvester ants to kill a human, according to a display at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.Harvester ants conform to the colony way of life sharing digs in their thousands, and typically harvest seeds. However, they have been known to scavenge small insects and can sting larger vertebrate animals when threatened, with a single ant being able to sting multiple times, and often multiple ants stinging a single target.Harvester ants: are they dangerous?As a defensive strategy that requires such a stronghold of ants, death by Pogonomyrmex isn’t something you need to worry about. However, you probably want to avoid falling on and thrashing around in their nests – for example – and avoiding these should be easy enough given harvester ants don’t do colonies by halves.Despite their small size, harvester ants can have a big influence on the environment.Image credit: Christopher Seno / Shutterstock.comWhen harvester ants form colonies, they clear vegetation creating “nest disks” that can reach over 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter. They can account for between 1 to 15 percent of land area in suitable habitats, earning them a reputation as a pest in agriculture that’s arguably unfair given the beneficial impact they can have on the environment.Harvest ants: eco-warriorsIn a 2021 issue of Annals of the Entomological Society of America, it was argued that it was high time we ditch the "pest" label for harvester ants in favor of seeing them as keystone species. This was because of the remarkable influence they have on the ecosystem by moving seeds around and creating what the authors coined “islands of fertility”.As they put it, the enormity of harvester ant nests can best be appreciated from an aerial perspective, and they noticed a curious phenomenon at the edge of these nest disks following a forest fire. It seemed that nest rims often hosted the first plants to grow back, dictating what would go on to establish on the rest of the scorched landscape.Harvester ants: friend or foe?So, given that an accidental nip from the odd harvester ant should at worse afford you a few hours of pain, versus the enduring influence they can have on our wild spaces following extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent under the ongoing climate crisis, we say that lands these ants firmly in the friend column.Toxic venom be damned.

China has carried out another successful test of their answer to Hyperloop, an ultra-high-speed maglev train that they plan to travel at speeds of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) per hour. While it hasn't yet achieved this blazing speed – despite some misleading news reports – the latest tests suggest their pipe dream is going to plan.The maglev train recently completed a test at a 2-kilometer-long (1.2-mile) pipeline with a low-vacuum environment in the Shanxi province of North China, according to a report by Chinese state media network Xinhua. The demonstration reportedly showed the advanced transport system can perform “controlled navigation, stable suspension, and safe stopping.” Development of the trailblazing transport system is being led by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, the Chinese state-owned enterprise behind the country’s spacecraft, launch vehicles, and missile systems.Just like other iterations of maglev technology, their ultra-high-speed train system uses magnetic levitation to eliminate friction between the train and tracks, allowing for smoother and faster travel. The low-vacuum tubes also reduce air resistance, allowing trains to travel faster with less energy by minimizing drag.  Some Western media outlets have reported that China’s maglev transportation system has recently achieved speeds of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) per hour in the latest demo, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. The report did not explicitly mention the speed it achieved, instead stating that the transportation technology is still "aiming to achieve" these ultra-high speeds.Nevertheless, previous tests have shown the vehicle is capable of whipping up speeds of over 623 kilometers (387 miles) per hour at a full-scale test track.Off the back of the recent test in China, companies in the US are hoping the news could kickstart some renewed interest (and no doubt investment) in Hyperloop technology elsewhere in the world."China's recent success with their T-Flight high-speed maglev system is a clear demonstration that hyperloop technology is not a distant dream, but a rapidly emerging reality. This breakthrough underscores the immense potential of hyperloop as the future of transportation, offering unparalleled speed, efficiency, and sustainability,” Andrés de León, CEO of US-based company HyperloopTT, said in a statement sent to IFLScience.“The technology is proven, the benefits are clear, and the time for action is now. With the right combination of political will and private sector engagement, we can accelerate the development and implementation of hyperloop systems to ensure that the US remains competitive in building the most efficient high-speed transportation solution of our time,” he added. 

For many years, astronomers have predicted that the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large galaxy to us, is approaching the Milky Way. It is widely believed that this will result in an inevitable collision and merger between the two galaxies in about 4.5 billion years. The outcome of this event is expected to be the formation of a new, massive elliptical galaxy. However, in this scenario, the Milky Way would cease to exist in its current form, and the Solar System, along with its planets, would occupy a completely different position in the new galaxy, potentially leading to unpredictable changes in its structure. However, a new study published on the arXiv preprint server suggests that the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy might not be inevitable, and a cosmic catastrophe could be avoided. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy around 13.6 billion years old with large pivoting arms stretching out across the cosmos. Our home galaxy’s disk is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and just 1000 light-years thick, according to Las Cumbres Observatory. For over 100 years, astronomers have observed the Andromeda Galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. For decades, predictions have suggested that this large galaxy is gradually moving towards the Milky Way, likely resulting in a head-on collision. Such collisions are not uncommon in the Universe and often lead to the formation of new galaxies. It is believed that the merger of the two galaxies will produce a gigantic elliptical galaxy. Several years ago, scientists using data from the Hubble Space Telescope determined that the Andromeda Galaxy is moving towards the Milky Way at a speed of approximately 400,000 km/h. This led to the conclusion that a cosmic collision could occur in about 4.5 billion years. After the collision, as modeling suggests, the two galaxies would continue to merge over the next 2 billion years. In the new study, researchers analyzed the movements of the largest galaxies in the Local Group using data from the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes. These galaxies include the Andromeda Galaxy, with roughly 1 trillion stars; the Milky Way, with about 100-200 billion stars; the Triangulum Galaxy, with around 40 billion stars; and the Large Magellanic Cloud, with approximately 20 billion stars. These galaxies have different masses, and thus, different gravitational influences. Scientists believe that the gravitational interactions between these galaxies could alter their trajectories over the next 10 billion years, as simulation data suggests. Astronomers now estimate that there is only a 50% chance that the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way will collide and merge during this period. In other words, the scenario of an inevitable collision, as suggested by past studies, is not certain. The study’s authors propose that the Milky Way could avoid such a fate and continue to exist as a separate galaxy. Nevertheless, there remains significant uncertainty in these calculations, and astronomers will continue to observe nearby galaxies to refine their understanding. Even if the collision between the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way does occur in 4.5 billion years, by that time, the Sun may have already reached the end of its life cycle, transforming into a red giant and potentially destroying the Earth. By then, humanity may have already left our planet and settled other worlds—perhaps not even within the Solar System, as its structure may be disrupted by the merging galaxies. The post Milky Way vs. Andromeda: New Study Suggests Collision May Be Avoided appeared first on Anomalien.com.