Yes

You can literally hear the power going through the lines.

Which is the problem. People get scared of them, even though there’s no danger, but they convince themselves there is, and they get a Nocebo Effect.

This has been widely tested. Some people claim that WiFi makes them ill, so they did tests. The tests showed no difference in people’s reported symptoms when they were next to a real WiFi router that was emitting WiFi signals vs. a sham WiFi router that was designed to look real but didn’t have any active radio components.

They’ve also done studies that show that exposure can result in symptoms. Exposure to media claiming WiFi is dangerous, that is.

He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person

Which can’t be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that’s only the physical part of it. It doesn’t explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was “a figure” and moved like a person.

That’s like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn’t there, while ignoring the elephant ghost in the room. Except it’s even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to “see something that isn’t there” is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it’s true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn’t there isn’t something that has been tested. It’s pure speculation.

So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone’s eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn’t there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.

Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.

There’s a humongous jump there from “a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle” to “and therefore that’s why he saw a ghost”.

Ok, that’s a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There’s nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed “resonant frequency of the eye”, but then they say:

The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz

If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.

The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious “smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles.” So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that’s all just speculation, saying “this seems like it could be possible” rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.

It’s pretty clear it’s a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn’t mean that Chuck is lying, it’s also pretty clear from the show that it’s some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn’t want to believe he’s a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this “solution” to the problem.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

It says “these industrial sites” so it’s making a generalization, it says “as high as” so that’s presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is “loud” but the high frequency sound, which doesn’t as easily travel through the ground, etc.

Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound’s source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.

So, that “96 dB” figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person’s home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.

Again, it doesn’t mean there’s no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.

Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.

Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.

I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten… if she heard about infrasound she’d add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.

That’s right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn’t mean the science is true. It’s one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.

Exposure to this level of infrasound

What level is that?

[citation needed]

I fully believe that at times infrasound can result in anxiety, nausea, etc. But, in 2026 so can reading the news. So can thinking that your health is being affected by a datacenter, resulting in you worrying and losing sleep.

This whole thing about the “resonant frequency of the eye” and that causing someone to hallucinate… that smells like utter BS. A much more likely explanation in a basement is carbon monoxide.

Yeah. It’s just that the salaries of the voice actors are well known, and probably represent a large fraction of the cost per episode.

I really wonder what the writers’ salaries are. That was what made the Simpsons so good, with so many quotable lines in the first 8 or 9 seasons. My guess is that the writers make a tiny fraction of what the voice actors make. If they paid writers $400k per episode, could they attract superstar writers who could re-capture the magic of those early seasons?

From the Wikipedia page:

The Simpsons has been named by Time as the greatest television series of the 20th century.

The 20th century ended in 1999. The last Simpsons episode from the 20th century was season 11 episode 9. You can see it was already in decline by then. The vast majority of the episodes were released in the 21st century. We’re a quarter of the way to the 22nd century and they’re still releasing them. But, it hasn’t been good since the last century even if Homer’s probably saying “it’s just a little slimy, it’s still good, it’s still good!” (S7E5, 1995)

Despite the colours, red isn’t “bad”, it’s a 5 to 6 out of 10. It’s mediocre.

In the early seasons the show was something you planned around because you didn’t want to miss it. It would be what everyone was talking about the next day (at least for certain age groups). Now it’s a show that probably people put on while they doom scroll.

If you look at lists of quotes from the Simpsons there are a lot of memorable ones:

• “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords”
• “You don’t win friends with salad”
• " I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was, and now what I’m with isn’t it. And what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me."
• “Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter”
• “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”
• “My cat’s breath smells like cat food”

But, none of those is from a 2 digit season number, and we’re now on season 37? 38?

What’s especially amazing is how the quality and cost are going in opposite directions. The good seasons, 1-8, were ones where the voice actors were paid $30k per episode. 1998-2004 they were paid $125k per episode. That’s about seasons 9-15 when the quality was already clearly dropping. Since around 2013 they’re making about $400k per episode. That’s season 24 or so, and look at how much the quality has already dropped. It’s just amazing to me that it’s profitable to have a show that’s that expensive to make and yet is so consistently mediocre these days.

I still sometimes download the Treehouse of Horror episode. They’re not very good, but at least sometimes there are vaguely interesting twists. You can see they’re slightly higher rated than most other episodes. Season 14 has only 2 episodes in yellow not orange, the opener and closer, and the opener was that season’s Treehouse of Horror.

There are many other kinds of salmon though, and some of them are native to parts of Japan, like Hokkaido. It just wasn’t traditionally part of Sushi. Even tuna wasn’t considered sushi-worthy for a long time. It used to be food for poor people.

Also, Salmon sushi isn’t a Japanese thing.

This sentence from the Wikipedia article makes a lot of sense to me:

The style was further popularised in a 1955 essay by architectural critic Reyner Banham, who also associated the movement with the French phrases béton brut (“raw concrete”) and art brut (“raw art”).

So, the adjective wasn’t “brutal”, but “brut” meaning raw. The buildings were supposed to be raw. Instead of decorations in the stone like gargoyles, or even basic things like a decorative frieze, they’d just leave the raw lines required to make the structure sound. From that point of view, I get it. Reduce all the decoration to a minimum and let the structure “speak” for itself. Brutalist architects weren’t intentionally making buildings ugly and “brutal”. They were trying to make them clean, simple and undecorated.

A brand new brutalist building that’s dry and unweathered on a day with bright sunlight and a blue sky might look nice. It would showcase the architect’s design of the building, rather than some other artist’s design of a gargoyle or other decorative feature. But, like in the picture, a wet, weathered building on a grey, overcast day is different. There’s not much contrast between the building and the sky. The clean, monochrome concrete looks weathered much more quickly than natural stone. Also, it just looks like it’s function over form, which is something we associate with places that aren’t built for the public to enjoy: warehouses, military structures, even prisons.

It was more the incompetence and possible treason of Charles Huntziger.

The Maginot Line was only intended to delay an attacking army. It wasn’t going to stop them on its own. So, when it was attacked the army needed to gather its forces and counter-attack before the Maginot Line fell. But, when the Germans attacked that didn’t happen. Not only that, but before the attack, Huntzinger stood out for being one of the few generals not asking for more troops to reinforce his position.

It’s hard to believe that Huntzinger was that incompetent. So much so that some historians think that he was actually a Nazi sympethizer and intentionally caused the French collapse. That might just seem like French historians diverting blame. But, Huntzinger not only failed completely at stopping the German invasion, he was also one of the first who was pushing for an armistice, then he also somehow became the person who met with the Germans and signed France’s declaration of surrender. Then, during the Vichy regime, he was a promoted to an even higher position.

It seems to me that concrete definitely does age and it eventually leads to collapse.

But, even ignoring the structural issues. Concrete is especially bad at looking discoloured over time. It’s not that that doesn’t happen to stone. But, stone starts off with its own patterns and colours which hide any discolouration. Concrete starts as some even shade of grey, which makes any discolouration much more visible. So, rust stains are more obvious, growth of mold or mildew is more obvious, efflorescence is more obvious.

If people actually did paint the concrete, like in the picture, it would help a lot. It’s probably much easier to paint concrete than other things too. Because it’s a manufactured material that’s very even, it probably handles being painted a lot better than other kinds of stone, and especially than stone joined by mortar.

I like greebles because space is a vacuum and there’s no drag. Too many series have spaceships that are basically fighter jets in space. Greebles are common on things like Star Destroyers (which are really more battleships than destroyers) and on Star Trek ships. But, the Star Wars ships look too much like the ships you’d find on water. The Star Trek ships at least have a unique look with their warp nacelles. But, the skin of the ships is too smooth. A real ship would probably be more like the ISS than the Space Shuttle, something that never has to worry about air resistance.

The Expanse is one of the few that has reasonable space-shippy type ships. But, even then, they imagine a kind of conflict with ships boosting around at high G. Real space combat would probably mostly be long-range sniping rather than manoeuvring. There’s nothing at all to hide behind in space. If you can be spotted thousands of km away, why would there be any high-G maneuvers at all? Also, why use chemically-propelled kinetic slugs rather than lasers or particle cannons or something. Space is huge and speeds will be vast. Hitting something with a bullet sounds incredibly hard compared to just using a beam of light.

I may be an audience of 1, but I want some near future hard sci-fi combat without FTL travel but with in-system battles.