Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

Turned out to be really good for Russian cinema. Watched it on Netflix in one go. They really can deliver when they want to 🙂 It seems like a typical road movie, but it still draws you in.

https://www.kinopoisk.ru/series/1108682/

I remember how we all watched Felix Baumgartner’s jump from an altitude of 39 km. Back then, everyone was writing about it. And two years later, as I recently discovered in a space museum, Felix’s record was quietly broken by Alan Eustace, the senior vice-president of Google’s science division, who fell from 41 km reaching speeds up to 1320 km/h. Well, not so quietly. He talked about it at TED: https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_eustace_i_leapt_from_the_stratosphere_here_s_how_i_did_it?language=en

This is the first decorative (non-functional) item that I designed and printed. Tried it on two printers right away. Of course, the right one is completely unsuitable as a backpack decoration. Printed it (gray) in two versions – the larger one with a 0.2 print step (compared to 0.3 for the smaller gray one) and a size one centimeter bigger (5cm).

Lying on the grass, reading about cicadas. Suddenly, a familiar dog comes by. She licked my ear and lay down next to me. Her name is Sasha. A husky. She has heterochromia and is very nice. We’ve been lying here for about 10 minutes, reading together.

Cicadas are interesting creatures. This year, our periodical cicadas have emerged en masse from the ground and are clumsily flying almost everywhere. Their males scream so loudly that you have to shout over them. It’s said to reach up to 100 dB. How do they all simultaneously understand that after 15-17 years underground, it’s time to emerge? Molecular clocks, set in the same way for all cicadas of the same species in one place. On the year when it’s time for them to emerge from the ground and turn into adult cicadas, the massive exit of larvae is triggered by the soil reaching a certain temperature. As a result, they often synchronize to the hour.

One intercepted!

Something new indeed – “remote guides”. You walk up to the monitor, ask a question, below which a real-time voice recognition subtitle runs – both for you and the guide. The same kind of monitor is installed at the museum information stand. The only humans present are security staff.

In the photo behind the remote guide is the shuttle Discovery. This particular one flew to space 39 times from 1985 to 2011, covering 240,000,000 kilometers.

Didn’t I mention that I got into volleyball? Just came out of the infrared oven. About 10 cm in size. The design isn’t mine, of course, but I’ve been learning for several days in a row how to do such things in Blender from scratch using photos.

Now the phone holder is beautiful. I can post patterns on Thingiverse

I’m diving into the topic of Prohibition in the USA — it’s when they added an amendment to the constitution prohibiting all alcohol, completely, including beer. Back then, Fruit Industries was producing briquettes of dried grape juice, which, of course, being dried, contained no alcohol (by the way, the pills called “dry alcohol” sold in the USSR also contained no alcohol, as alcohols cannot be in a dry form). So, in this packaging, as stated on every corner, there was an instruction: “After dissolving in water, do not allow the mixture to stand in a dry and dark place, or it will turn into wine.” Apparently, millions of Americans hoarded these briquettes for two years and, of course, didn’t dilute them. Until the court finally banned them. It’s claimed that they were sold across the entire USA, and only in the first year a million gallons were sold (hm, dry concentrate in gallons?). But what’s interesting is that there are almost no images of these packages on the web, and absolutely no images of that very instruction. How can this be? Such things always puzzle me. Either they sold too few, or someone made up the instruction, or both. https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bricks-how-to-not-make-wine

Another piece of art. A gyroid intersected by a sphere. A gyroid is a continuous (non-self-intersecting) structure that infinitely repeats in three dimensions and lacks reflection symmetries. By the way, it’s the only such structure known to science. Essentially, it consists of sinusoids along three coordinates.