Vimeo description:
Atmospheric refraction plays with the light of any object near the horizon. Here stars, startrails and the sun, filmed in timelapse photography from two major observatories in Chile, display immense distortion above inversion layers in the outskirts of the Atacama desert, Chile. The moon scene is filmed near Boston at the Atlantic Ocean shoreline. The mirage is an optical phenomenon in which light rays are refracted and bent in the atmosphere and produce distorted or multiple images of the object.

Obama is the origin of his troubles,

Back in the day when his publish indicated so and he did nothing to correct it
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/booklet.asp

Then, as president he puts a document that does nothing to quell the issue and makes it worse. There was no reason for a scanned certificate to PDF to have 14 layers in Illustrator. He should have just posted a Jpeg.

Why did Trump did what he did - who knows. But the media did get played that day.

It sure beats the alternative, which is sharing a windowless IT tech room with someone who doesn't bathe every day but instead throws on another layer of some dime-store spray, powder or gel. So it's like working in a Greyhound bus restroom with the industrial-strength masking agent covering the organic human stink.

That was a question I had based on my first impression of the product but he actually addresses this issue in the video. They've built the process so that they can actually use edible materials as the non-stick coating layer to ensure that it is safe, sometimes using the actual product that the container will hold in order to not adulterate the taste in any way.

A bit minimalist in spots considering the deep layering of the source material, but damn good for a live solo.
Also, she seems to be missing the soul crushing depression required to properly sing Nine Inch Nails, still *quality

Yep, that puzzled me too. Note that the pipes are covered with ice and snow, and the tie downs are cutting grooves (circumferential) into the pipe you reference but not the lower one on the right hand side, so something "soft" there - I ascribed the marks to perhaps lifting or handling cut into the snow and ice that seems to be stuck fairly well on that joint. Perhaps different cladding, though looking end on before things start to move shows fairly clearly that there is some form of coating on the pipes (why can't everybody just use the same 323 Scotchkote color and keep things simple). If you have a look after the first big shift at 1:05, you can find a clear frame where the end on view of the same pipe doesn't appear to have any layer beyond the assumed coating (ie. no 2x4's) and much of the snow / ice has been shaken off (another clear frame around 1:09). Normally if they're stacking coated pipe, even a full joint, two or three bands of heavy polypropylene rope (1" - 2" diam) with the ends hot melted together to make a single hoop keeps the pipes from scuffing one another in transport. But then again, there's nothing normal about how this load was built, so anything's possible I guess. Cheers.

Pause it right at the beginning. The second layer of pipe, first pipe, under the snow, seems to have lengths of 2x4 wrapping it like a barrel. Now I think about it, they probably wrap each other layer for protection of the layer above and below, which would suggest coated pipe.

Solution, no. Semi-mitigation....possibly if it could be done, but there would be tradeoffs, it wouldn't be a simple 'now it's only CO2' solution....as if that was a solution, there's still too much CO2 too.

I'm intrigued by the engineered bacteria idea...at this point it couldn't be much worse than just releasing all the methane (OK, it could), but it's like that one time I went to the lake to bone my girlfriend, but the mosquitos were going crazy and she said there is no way. By the time people decided it was worth the risk and started developing them, it would be too late anyway, but we might mitigate the extinction event for the insects....who knows?

Um....uninhabitable for 100 years? How do you figure? It's likely that when the ocean temps rise enough, and are acidic enough, most sea life dies, sinks, rots, and releases massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide killing anything that's left.
(WIKI-Kump, Pavlov and Arthur (2005) have proposed that during the Permian–Triassic extinction event the warming also upset the oceanic balance between photosynthesising plankton and deep-water sulfate-reducing bacteria, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide which poisoned life on both land and sea and severely weakened the ozone layer, exposing much of the life that still remained to fatal levels of UV radiation.)
Along with all the other damages of climate change, and the apocalypse that >7 billion people will cause on the way out, it's going to be way longer than 100 years before humans can live off nature if ever....way way longer.

We are hard to kill, but we aren't extremophiles. We'll die, or become mole people, but some other life will continue.

Love me some sand dunes. I've heard low droning sounds while out in Guadalupe sand dunes in central california and in Death Valley. I remember researching why and there were some theories - something about grain size (changes pitch), friction & amplification from a layer of moisture below the surface and sand collision upon the surface creating vibrations that in turn create a feedback loop of low frequency. Stony stuff, lol!

Funny that I was literally thinking about this on my way home 10 minutes ago. But, in a different context: These days corporations are looking for your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts... especially if you work in marketing/tech/apps. It's all an annoying system of control; more layers added to their elitism. Fuck them, stay out of my life, you are just a fucking job! Companies should be absolutely required to stick to resumes & CVs by law....

*Warning I've only gone and done yet another wall of text again! This may or may not get read by anyone on here (good god I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping it), but at the very least it's formed the backbone to a video script so it's not a complete waste of my time! (he tells himself)*

This is as much @bareboards2 as yourself, but he already made it clear he wasn't willing to engage on the issue, so you're getting it instead MWAHAHAHHAHA! *coughs*

I don't wish this to come across as over condescending (though I'm sure it will none the less as I'm in one of those moods). But pretty much every (successful) comedy premise operates on the same underlying principle of irony. i.e. there is an expectation or understanding, which is deliberately subverted, and what results is comedy.

In this case, amongst other things we have the understood premises that:
A. rape is a bad, often horrific thing.
B. that there is an established social taboo about praising such behaviour.
C. that there is a section of society inherently opposed to making light of things of which they do not approve (or in a way in which they do not approve)
D. most words and phrases have an expected association and meaning.

What Jim Jefferies (an accomplished and well respected comedies amongst his peers) has done here, is take these commonly understood premises and subverted the audiences normal expectations in order to evoke a sense of irony, from which the audience derives humour and amusement.

A simple joke might take a single such premise and perform a single inversion of our expectation. e.g. my dog has no nose, how does he smell?....terrible!

By subverting our assumed meaning (that the missing nose refers to the dogs implied lack of olfactory senses), the joke creates basic irony by substituting this expected meaning for that of the odour of the dog itself.

This is of course a terrible joke, because it is as simple as a joke could be. It has only one layer of irony and lacks any sense of novelty which, might tip such a terrible joke into working for any other than the very young or simple minded.

We could of course attempt to boost this joke by adding more levels of irony contextually. e.g. a very serious or complex comedian Like say Stuart Lee, could perhaps deliver this joke in a routine and get a laugh by being completely incongruous with his style and past material.

And herein we see the building blocks from which any sophisticated professional comedy routine is built. By layering several different strands or ironic subversion, a good comedian can begin to make a routine more complex and often more than just the sum of its parts to boot.

In this case, Jim is taking the four main premises listed above, layering them and trying to find the sweetest spot of subverted expectation for each. (something which usually takes a great deal of skill and experience at this level)

He mentions the fact that his jokes incite outrage in a certain section of society because this helps to strengthen one of the strands of irony with which he is playing. The fact that he also does so in a boastful tone is itself a subversion, it is understood by the audience that he does not/should not be proud of being merely offensive and as such we have yet another strand of irony thrown into the mix.

You know how better music tends to have more and/or more complex musical things happening at once? It is the same with comedy. The more ironic threads a comedian can juggle around coherently, the more sophisticated and adept their routines could be considered to be.

Naturally as with music there's no accounting for taste as you say. Some people simply can't get past a style or associations of a given musician or song (or painting or whatever).

But dammit Jim is really one of the greats right now. Like him or lump him, the dude is pretty (deceptively) masterful at his craft.

There are at least 4-5 major threads of irony built into this bit and countless other smaller ones besides. He dances around and weaves between them like some sort of comedy ballerina. Every beat has been finely tuned over months of gig's (and years of previous material) to strike the strongest harmonies between these strands and probe for the strongest sense of dissonance in the audience. Not to mention, tone of voice, stance, timing etc.

I think Ahmed is basically terrible too, but it is because the jokes lack much semblance of complexity or nuance. Jeff Dunham's material in general feels extremely simple and seems like it uses shock as a mere crutch, rather than something deeper and more intelligent.

Taste is taste, but I feel one can to a reasonable extent criticise things like the films of Michael Bay, or the music of Justin Beiber for being objectively shallow by breaking down their material into its constituent parts (or lack thereof).

Likewise one could take the music of Wagner and while not enjoying the sound of it, still examine the complexity of it's composition and the clear superiority of skill Wagner had over most of this peers.

I guess what all this boils down to is, Jim seems to me to be clearly very very good at what he does (as he ought after all these years). Reducing his act to mere controversy feels a lot like accusing Black Sabbath of just making noise and using satanic imagery to get attention (or insert other less out of date example here).

The jokes were never at the expense of victims, they are at the expense of our expectations. He makes his own true feelings on the matter abundantly clear towards the end of the section.

As as he says himself his job is to say funny things, not to be a social activist.

I take no issue with you not liking it, but I do take issue with the suggestion that it is somehow two dimensional, or for that matter using controversy cheaply.

Offensive initial premises are some of the most ironically rich in comedy. It's like deliberately choosing the brightest paints when trying to create a striking painting. Why would you avoid the strongest materials because some people (not in your audience) find the contrast too striking?

Eh, much love anyway. This was more an exercise in intellectual masturbation than anything else. Not that I didn't mean all of it sincerely.

Think about it this way. Stack the corn trays just once and you just doubled your output for a given area.

You're right about getting less mileage from taller crops. But every vertical layer would in theory still double the area you have to work with each time you added one.

Scale this up to a skyscraper sized building and you could supply any city with all the food it could need locally.

It probably could start to skew the market towards squatter plants as you say, but I can't see why most if not all of the things we grow now couldn't be viable. (doubly so if they ever nail the process of growing meat)

Good questions. My family operates farms for wheat and corn, and I've been involved in that process, so I can take a stab at answering the last bit:

Corn stalks get quite tall -- 6 feet / 2 meters or so. Each stalk usually has 1 or 2 ears of corn. On our farm, the experience I had suggests that each plant needs quite a lot of healthy leaves for Photosynthesis as well as quite a lot of available ground water. Irrigated corn often produces 2-3 times as many bushels per acre as compared to "dryland" / non-irrigated corn.

So the issues I can see potentially clashing between corn production and vertical farming are:

1) You'd have a greater space requirement for layers of corn since you'd need probably 8-10 feet per layer, as compared to what looks like 2-3 feet per layer for leafy vegetables in the video. Approximately one story per layer wouldn't allow for the massive footprint savings like in leafy plants without getting extremely tall, which would be expensive for water pumping etc.

2) Corn root systems are pretty deep to support a tall and relatively bulky stalk. Getting that to bite into a thin layer of fabric / recycled plastic to provide structural support for the plant would be difficult. I think you'd need to have a thicker bottom layer *and* to manually place further support lines on the stalks as the plants grow, which would get very labor intensive and therefore expensive.

3) The vertical nature of a corn stalk suggests that the overhead motion of the sun might be pretty important for getting light exposure onto all of the leaves. Fixed overhead lights might mean that the top leaves get plenty of light but the ones lower on the stalk would be shaded by those above and get nothing -- which isn't a problem if the sun progresses through low angles at sunrise/set to overhead at noon throughout a day. So you might have to have lighting that hits from all sides to account for that with corn, which would again add expense.

4) To maximize the output, corn needs a LOT of water. Pumping that up the vertical expanse to get lots of levels could easily get problematic. Corn will grow without optimal / abundant watering, and their misting system would likely be more efficient than irrigating to add ground water, but the main benefit of vertical farming seems to be high output in a small land footprint on the ground. So without LOTS of water, you'd be limiting that benefit.


So basically, my guess is that vertical farms are a fantastic idea for squat, spread out plants like lettuce, but a lot of the advantages disappear when you're talking about something tall like corn. I could easily be wrong about any/all of that though.

Every 5 years you can vote in yet another rigged / slanted election.

Who need another fucking layer of overseers to ruin their lives.

So, firstly, I must agree with @ChaosEngine, a commencement speech is no place for political commentary. A commencement speech's purpose is to allow one who has paved a complex path through life and come out on top, or one who has overcome something great, (and) has a important lesson for those less-learned to share their knowledge, that it may be used for good.

(God that sentence is long, let me catch my virtual breath...)

Next, why, if he is to provide political commentary during a commencement speech, as so many do nowadays, does he slam Trump?

Anybody? Is it his hair? Is it his puffy little face? Is it because he looks like a pumpkin? No? Perhaps its because he is a disaster waiting to happen, because that seems to be the general sentiment from many people who are allowed to speak their minds en-masse nowadays...

But how is Trump worse than Clinton? Hmmm? Perhaps there are buried rape cases THAT WERE MADE PUBLIC BTW, in Trump's past? No?

Perhaps making billions of dollars FROM ONE MILLION is just inherently evil? Hmmm, no?

Okay, that Hairdo, it must burn a hole in the Ozone layer wherever he walks... Or flames must flower at his feet, as lotus flowers did for the Buddha? NO?

Perhaps he was wrong about the people that you blokes are letting into the country? Yes? Then how come one of them, (whom you could never tell is a radical, HE HAD A WIFE AND CHILD), just killed 50 members of the LGBT community in the horrible massacre in Orlando?(which was so bad we are getting news coverage of it in LONDON)

Hmmm, maybe electing someone who actually admits there is a problem, destroying political correctness, and being damned with the "established order" which supposedly keeps you Americans safe isnt such a bad idea...

Maybe electing a Woman with a hideous blot of a record, and a long standing member of said establishment is one such bad idea...