seriously dark

friends I sense dark times ahead, with twin work and music-work landslides bearing down on me and not having gotten nearly far enough ahead of the curve so far this month. that said, as brutally dark as things may get, apparently this is darker

a carbon nanotube carpet that is apparently literally the darkest thing ever made! the one in the middle obv. the grey looking bro on the left was apparently the previous record holder, doesn't look that dark to me. potential solar applications, fashion (really fucking black is the new black etc), etc

super soakler

fyi, Lonnie Johnson, the inventor of the super soaker, is also a nuclear fucking engineer who used to work at NASA's jet propulsion lab before his revolutionary water gun made him a multimillionaire independent inventor, and now he's developed a totally innovative way to generate power from heat, including from sunlight - it's not a stirling engine, it's not photovoltaics, it's just totally clever and seemingly technically plausible (or so an engineer coworker tells me) and could cut solar power costs in half!

all b/c we all bought a bazillion supersoakers growing up in the 80s/90s! this is a picture from the article, I'm really hoping that that's Lonnie in red and that the photographer came over kind of unexpectedly, and Lonnie just happened to be out back tending to the massive supersoaker arsenal he keeps fully loaded at all times 'just in case,' like "hey, uh, do you just want to take a picture of me right here, with the guns?" "uh, yes, yes I definitely do Mr. Johnson"