Tara

Communication. Live and let live.

[Tara @tarainthewest]

@nmlinguaphile Your stories are refreshing and don’t read like textbooks but like experience and understanding.

[Tara @tarainthewest]

In sun-drenched New Mexico can solar energy solutions help independent producers bring down energy costs while lowering evaporation rates on crops?

[Albuquerque Journal @ABQJournal]

New PBS “Colores!” episode follows a Sabinal native using solar tech to protect Rio Grande Valley crops and conserve water. https://t.co/zWWyAX86P6

[Judianna @Judianna]

Monopoly - I didn't know this!

(You'll never look at the
game the same way again!)

Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape...

Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing
not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of 'safe houses' where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.

Paper maps had some real drawbacks -- they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.

Someone in MI-5 (Similar to America 's OSS) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.

By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war.

Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:
1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set -- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square.

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets... Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.

The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

It's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail' Free' card!

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

I’m currently Texas-bound to hopefully witness Starship’s second integrated flight test.

Here’s a composite moon photo to hold you over until I get some rocket photos to share 😜

[Smarter Every Day @smartereveryday]

Do you think it will again become economically viable to make large scale sailboats commerce? Think of what fuel free sailing speeds we could achieve by harvesting the wind with newer technologies like composites, new fabrics, better ropes or even solar sails powering a propeller

[Lee Fang @lhfang]

There's nothing more pathetic than seeing so much of society give up any systemic solutions to big problems and focus obsessively on censoring content they don't like.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

In 2001 tiny Chōshi Railway company of 24 employees bought two of these 1962 trains second hand for about $1,000 each and fixed them up in-house. They run perfectly. You don't need foreign made state of the art shiny new stuff to build small local commuter railways in your city.

[KT Harding ⚔️ @harding_kt]

@The_OtherET Last year a study showing that people who recovered from SARS 17 years ago AND *uninfected healthy individuals* exposed to other coronaviruses had cross-reactive immunity to SARS-CoV-2 gave me false hope all Covid strategies would include cellular immunity https://t.co/ivkuBP2uxj

[LogicallyConsistentMD @LogicalMD33]

@The_OtherET No shit. It’s not like we have high concentrations of antibodies against every single pathogen we’ve ever encountered circulating in our blood ad infinitum. Our blood would be a thick slurry. It’s exactly why we have memory B cells and T cells.

[Tara @tarainthewest]

It’s so brilliant when a casual conversation is inspiration. #albuquerque #communities #sharedinterests #differentworlds #small #livable #sustainable

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

“Hey Siri, show me a good way to further heighten ‘flyover country’ suspicions of the medical establishment (article below).”

Left map is 1999 US drug OD’s per 100k people; right map is 2014.

#NoSkinInTheGame
#HeadsIWinTailsYouLose
#DeathsOfEconomicHopelessness
#FourthTurning

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

Marginally Compelling: Every State's COVID Numbers in Context, August 2021 https://t.co/7TVq9m9JDP

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

Usually when I do my monthly COVID report, I only look at the last 4 months

I'm thinking about starting to look at the last 12 months of data b/c... that gives a *lot* of context

[Edouard Mathieu @redouad]

Some countries have started to report COVID cases/hospitalizations/deaths, broken down by vaccination status.

France's data is here: https://t.co/4AQitIdmPr
Israel: https://t.co/w7QdjoDbc8

Are there others?

[Nathan Ballantyne @nathanballan]

What epistemic trespassing is and is not. A thread. 🧵

Does “epistemic trespassing” = “stay in your intellectual lane”. Emphatically no. Nor is the idea an endorsement of gatekeeping. 1/

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

Watching people talk about the Sturgis rally and how it kicked off a COVID spike last year and it's kind of weird how powerfully people misremember things

Sturgis was in August

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

They want to build a massive industrial wind farm right where the critically endangered whales are. Look

https://t.co/crGADpLebg