The New Coffee Room

Oooooh. Would not have guessed that. LOL. Doesn't seem very good looking for those types of films.

@Horace In addition to the above interesting video, I also learned that there is a formula for figuring out how long the chain should be

Vessel size (LWL): Length Overall (LO) - 2 x Beam
Draft (D): Depth of water below the vessel’s keel
Cargo type: Liquid, dry bulk, or general cargo

Results:
The results of this study are presented in the following formulas:

Cargo ships: Minimum chain length (Lc) = 0.5 * LWL + 2 * D
Tankers: Minimum chain length (Lt) = 0.7 * LWL + 3 * D
Passenger vessels: Minimum chain length (Lv) = 0.9 * LWL + 4 * D

Long article in The Atlantic about Director Patel

Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

and

He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-director-drinking-absences/686839/

@Horace said:

Also it's obvious nonsense that the earth is round.

555

Whoever he is, he is better than me, but in my opinion, he is not super great.

@jon-nyc Was that Rahm Emanuel in the video? Is he going to run for president?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.72964?__cf_chl_tk=vCnxPECYl2x7clNqf8geF4VtMe2eqnEMtlJ0l8YX9dw-1776649506-1.0.1.1-vCuAtkYEFiDZ1lU7YyHDl2NYzUtXtnOevzKQ7R.3kmE

In the remote, hard-to-reach cloud forests of Costa Rica, is where you’ll find the rarest of toilets. Up there, quite literally among the clouds, is where you’ll find a communal bathroom shared by a variety of mammals high among the canopy, built into the branches of a strangler fig tree.

The team set up some camera traps to capture footage of the animals relieving themselves all over the tree, proving that there is a fine line between research and being a criminal perv with a toilet cam fetish. The recorded 17 different mammals visiting a single site, including porcupines, kinkajous, monkeys, and margays. The tree averaged a few visits a day, suggesting that this was routine behavior and not just random chance. To several mammal species in the region, this was not a tree: it was a gigantic toilet.

Soon after his first day at the Pentagon in early 2025, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll walked into his boss’s office with a proposal. Driscoll, a longtime friend and aide to Vice President JD Vance, offered to organize a visit by Vance and President Trump to meet soldiers and talk about reforming the Army.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raised his voice, telling Driscoll that he, Hegseth, was in charge and ordered Driscoll to stay in his lane, according to people familiar with the encounter.

The encounter, which hasn’t been reported previously, was just one early episode in what has become a rocky relationship between the Pentagon chief and the Army secretary.

and

But the unusually public nature of the spat, along with the firing of a highly respected general during a war, has triggered fresh criticism within the Pentagon and in some Trump circles of Hegseth’s leadership. It has prompted questions about whether he allows personal vendettas to drive some decisions in a time of unprecedented military commitments around the world.

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, panned Hegseth’s decision to fire George. (4* Army Chief of Staff)

“Effectively stripping the Army of a senior leader in a wartime environment, while trying to undergo transformation procurement-wise, I couldn’t think of two things I’d rather not do than that,” Montgomery said.

and

Hegseth has fired or sidelined several senior Army generals, including Lt. Gen. Joseph Berger, the Army’s former top lawyer; Gen. Douglas Sims, the former director of the Joint Staff; Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee, the former director for strategy, plans and policy at the Joint Staff; and Gen. James Mingus, the Army’s former vice chief of staff.

and

Some Republican lawmakers praised Driscoll’s leadership of the Army, while lamenting Hegseth’s treatment of George. “You are the right person, in the right place, at the right time,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.).

Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.), a retired colonel in the Army National Guard, said the former chief was a “distinguished representative of our Army, and I, too, regret the fact and conditions he left the service in, and I think our country will regret that circumstance.”

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/hegseths-feud-with-army-secretary-spills-into-public-view-ee2e5687

@Mik Cool story.

Couple of random comments:

I think that they got her age at death wrong, or maybe her year of dying.
Ephraim is a name that has gone out of style I think.

@Mik said:

It's really not that. This is just what he does. It is as constant as the north star, but that very consistency is its weakness.

Ok, but a lot of people seem to gloss over how much that diminishes him, the office of President, the United States, etc. and give him a pass. "Oh, that is just Trump being Trump."

I remember when he said (during his first campaign I think) that he could "shoot someone in Times Square NY and none of his followers would care."

When I first heard that, I was like, "No way. No way people would accept that." But now, after all that he says and does, I can see that he was telling the truth.

It is that déjà vu feeling all over again. LOL

I am starting to get this forum thread confused with the "sad cognitive decline of a president" forum thread.

Icon, a 3D-printing construction company, is launching a dedicated defense-and-space division dubbed Icon Prime.

It's led by Will Hurd, the former Republican presidential candidate and CIA clandestine officer.

Why it matters: The business specializes in government work, including construction of military barracks and potential space bases, as well as the advanced robotics needed for such ventures.
"We need an ability to build infrastructure, to have this force projection, in really hard places," Hurd told Axios, mentioning both the Arctic and the Indo-Pacific.

State of play: Icon is already building — printing, rather — at Fort Bliss, Texas, where the company is on contract for 10 barracks. That $63 million project will eventually house hundreds of soldiers.

The company also secured millions of dollars from NASA to figure out lunar construction. That involves building with local materials, often referred to as regolith, and contending with incredible temperature swings.
In 2020, it helped Marines print a shelter for a large vehicle at Camp Pendleton, California.
Friction point: Traditional military housing has been under the gun for years.

The Government Accountability Office in 2023 documented instances of hot-water outages, malfunctioning elevators, broken locks and methane leaks.
What's next: Hurd wants "to build 900 barracks in the next five years."

"This is about making sure their quality of life allows the warfighter to be ready to do their ultimate job," he said.

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/15/icon-3d-printing-will-hurd-texas

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-the-weirdest-planet-in-the-solar-system/

Nothing too technical, but some fun facts about the different planets in the solar system.

In recent weeks, as criticism of President Donald Trump from his own supporters has reached a fever pitch, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold: Some of the president’s biggest supporters are now claiming, without evidence, that Trump staged the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024 and is covering it up.

"I think that maybe it was staged," Tim Dillon said on his show last weekend about the assassination attempt. Dillon, who was previously a staunch Trump supporter, went on to share that Trump should now come out and say, “Some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”

Some of these claims began months ago. In November, former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson promoted the idea that the FBI was somehow involved in covering up the shooting, writing on X that the “FBI lied” about the shooter's online footprint.

https://www.wired.com/story/maga-is-increasingly-convinced-the-trump-assassination-attempt-was-staged/

https://gizmodo.com/iceland-just-got-its-first-mosquitoes-scientists-arent-ready-for-what-comes-next-2000747401

Until recently, Iceland was considered the last Arctic nation without mosquitoes. That changed in October 2025, when insect enthusiast Björn Hjaltason discovered one male and two female specimens of Culiseta annulata in his garden in Kiðafell, Kjós.

and

Arthropods (which include mosquitoes and all other insects) make up the most biodiverse animal group in the Arctic, accounting for roughly 90% of all known species near the poles. These tiny invertebrates have a huge influence over the broader ecosystem.

“They pollinate plants, recycle nutrients, regulate populations through parasitism, and sustain foods webs that connect plants, wildlife, and people across the region,” Culler and Koltz explain in their editorial.

But as the Arctic warms four times faster than the rest of the planet, arthropod populations, distributions, and patterns of activity are rapidly changing, too.

@Klaus I apologize. Not doing it intentionally. Just my fingers are moving too fast when I type and I don't notice. No disrespect intended.

I thought you were going to be talking about becoming a Ninja with a samurai sword.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-wild-chimps-have-been-fighting-in-a-civil-war-for-nearly-a-decade-its-the-bloodiest-split-ever-seen-among-their-kind-180988527/

Since 1995, scientists have kept a watchful eye on the Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. For around two decades, the wild apes coalesced as a unified group that mated and hunted together, although they divided themselves into three tighter-knit factions: the Western, Central and Eastern clusters.

However, on June 24, 2015, researchers witnessed an unusual change.

That day, Aaron Sandel, now a primatologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleague John Mitani, a primatologist at the University of Michigan, watched as chimpanzees from the Western cluster approached members of the Central one. Instead of their usual mingling, “all hell broke loose,” Mitani tells Carl Zimmer at the New York Times.

Screaming and fighting ensued. The Western chimps ran away, but the Central ones chased them. “Nothing like that had been observed before,” Sandel tells Scientific American’s Jason P. Dinh.

After that confrontation, things got more violent—and two distinct groups eventually emerged, culminating in an ongoing “civil war” among the largest-known community of wild chimpanzees.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/china-tests-an-undersea-cable-cutter-as-suspected-sabotage-incidents-grow/

A Chinese ship has tested a new device capable of slicing through submarine data cables thousands of meters beneath the ocean surface. That demonstration may exacerbate security concerns over a spate of suspected sabotage incidents targeting undersea communications and power cables from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

The trial took place at a depth of 11,483 feet (3,500 meters) during a deep-sea science expedition involving the Chinese research ship named Haiyang Dizhi 2, according to the South China Morning Post. That ship is equipped with a 150-ton crane, a 10-kilometer fiber optic winch, and a helicopter landing platform. It has shown the capability to deploy deep-sea remotely operated vehicles in previous missions.

That was fun