Most Expensive Warplane Built So Far Taken Down By Tiny Bird

 I said years ago that the F-35 sucks. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFo-5TBIRPI

When I tried to share the above video on Facebook, I got this:

How To Think Like A Machine

 

My Fort Gordon Alligator Encounter

 

I was stationed at Fort Gordon (now Fort Eisenhower) from January 2018 to May 2021. One night in April of 2021, I met with an alligator near the Leitner Lake campground. 

There is a big sign on a gate near the campground that says "WARNING: ALLIGATORS". The gate is on the boundary between Upper and Lower Leitner Lake. 

Late one night, I couldn't sleep, so I took a walk on the trail that loops around the upper lake. Bad idea, it turns out. I mistakenly thought that since alligators are cold-blooded, they are inactive at night. Oops.

It was just light enough that I could see, but not clearly. Not taking a flashlight was my second mistake. Seems it was mating season; the gators were out in force and ornerier than usual. As I walked around the lake, I could hear splashing noises that kept getting louder.

Suddenly, a large shape bolted out of the water and scampered into the woods. It was hard to tell how big it was, but it sounded big. It was at this point I decided it was time to head back to camp posthaste. I heard another loud splash, so I decided to fight fire with fire and let out an intimidating shout, a technique I learned from World of Warcraft. 

I walked at a brisk pace back to camp, periodically yelling and clapping my hands whenever I heard a splash or a gator bellow. 

I made several foolish decisions that night and was lucky to come away unscathed. My adventures in Africa gave me a false sense of security. After all, after you've eaten lunch a few feet away from a bunch of wild hippos. there's not much left to be afraid of.

"In the jungle you must wait until the dice read 5 or 8" - Jumanji

An Informal Proof of Lockhart's Inscribed Parallelogram Theorem

Screenshots from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1gT2f3Fe44

Lockhart observes in his book Measurement that if you mark and connect the midpoints of the sides of ANY quadrilateral, you will inscribe a parallelogram. 

Here is my informal proof of why that is:

1. By induction, any quadrilateral can be formed by joining 3 pairs of congruent triangles where all the triangles are similar. 

2. In order to form a quadrilateral from such a set, one and only one pair of congruent triangles must share a side. 

3. The pair that share a side must form a parallelogram because they are congruent.

4. In order for the quadrilateral to have straight sides, all the triangles must be similar. That is, the other four triangles must share a side with the ones forming a parallelogram. 

5. Marking and joining the midpoints must create a set of congruent triangles because each set of opposite midpoints will be equidistant from midpoint of the shared side where they form a parallelogram. 

Not an elegant proof, but hey, at least it's shorter than that time Russell and Whitehead took 360+ pages to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica

As a lemma, if you connect the opposite instead of adjacent midpoints, you will cut the figure into four smaller versions of itself. 

There's probably an interesting progression for how many congruent circles of a given number can fit inside a larger circle. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. 

Is there a relationship between the Mandelbrot Set and the Riemann Zeta Function?

 Rotate one of them 180 degrees, and they look similar.

How My Brain Works

 See boobs:

Think traditional Arabic numeral for 5:

Mysterious Black NSA(?) Screens

Below is a screenshot from the following YouTube video I made of a strange event on my old laptop back in 2021:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y38c59YfAY

I count 4 windows that look like command prompts. They would appear on the screen for less than a second before vanishing, and only when I was connected to or about to connect to the internet. At the time, I'd had that laptop for 7 years and never seen anything like that. I've spent thousands of hours using computers of all sorts for 30+ years, and I'd never seen anything like that until 2021. The screens appeared rarely, and I was lucky I had my camera ready to capture this image. After I uploaded the video to my old laptop, I never saw the screens again. 

As a former NSA employee, I find all of this suspicious, and the most likely explanation seems obvious.