Satadru Pramanik
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satmandu.bsky.social
Satadru Pramanik
@satmandu.bsky.social
1.6K followers 7.8K following 9K posts
DO, BME MEng, MPH.
Smarter half: @kimbeast.bsky.social
He/Him. Cinema snob, ST pessimist, LT optimist.
Also at @[email protected]
Open Source Dev at Chromebrew, and contributor to OpenZFS + sundry other projects.
Signal: satadru.01
🌩️👀 jr-q3e79ZL9H
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satmandu.bsky.social
Is this shocking in any way?

There are ads from the 80s celebrating the use of asbestos fireproofing throughout the WTC complex.

Yes it was depraved to hide from the people working on cleanup & recovery at the WTC site that they were being exposed!

abc7ny.com/amp/post/fdn...
Ad from November 1981 magazine celebrating the use of Asbestos in the WTC complex: WHEN THE FIRE ALARM WENT OFF, IT TOOK TWO HOURS TO EVACUATE NEW YORK'S WORLD TRADE CENTRE. The bigger the building, the more important fireproofing becomes That's why today's buildings have asbestos-cement walls and even floors containing asbestos Asbestos contains fire, cannot bum and holds up after metal and glass have melted down, giving vital time for people to escape You'l also find asbestos sealing plumbing joints, insulating heating pipes, electric motors and emergency generators. Asbestos. We couldn't live the way we do without ASBESTOS When life depends on it, you use asbestos. Asbestos Corporation Limited, Sun Life Building. Montréal, Québec H3B 2X6, Canada Represented by: Becker & Haag (GmbH & Co.) P.O. Bos 100 548, Spadestrich13 2000 Hamburg 1. Germany FOR WEST GERMANY. EAST GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY) Other representatives world-wide.
November 24, 2025 at 10:51 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Gods bless India! The cheapest place to find bot nets you can outsource your online astroturfing/influence peddling accounts to.

Comparative Advantage wins again!

old.reddit.com/r/LateStageC...
Reddit post mentioning that “twitter briefly allowed people to see where each account was operated from. turns Out, the official DHS account is run from Tel Aviv” The follow-up suggests that this erroneous setting on Twitter “lasted only few hours before disaster struck. a sizable chunk of European right wing nationalist accounts and israeli accounts were found to be run from india.”
November 22, 2025 at 5:11 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
This showed up on Reddit for me alongside the Mamdani with Trump pictures.

Is Mamdani Batman in this metaphor?

old.reddit.com/r/science/co...
The Batman effect: A female experimenter, appearing pregnant, boarded the train. In the experimental condition, an additional experimenter dressed as Batman entered from another door. Passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seat when Batman was present (67.21% vs. 37.66%).
November 22, 2025 at 12:51 AM
satmandu.bsky.social
Thinking about this wonderful missive from yesterday by @jzellis.bsky.social about the films from our youth that were and which ones now are considered to be classic films.
I was just watching a random clip and it was a film critic guy talking about the "classic film Predator". And look, I love Predator, and I do think it's a classic film, but I was there, Gandalf, and fucking NOBODY IN 1987 THOUGHT THAT FILM WAS A CLASSIC. Arnie did that and The Running Man that year and probably something else I forget like Red Heat and the idea that anyone would even remember the fucking thing in ten years was absurd. Platoon won best picture that year and I've seen people compare and contrast the two as jungle warfare cinema and if you'd told Oliver Stone OR John McTiernan that back when those films came out, I bet both of them would have laughed their asses off at you. I went back a couple of years ago and watched a lot of the big critical darling films I remember from the 80s like Prizzi's Honor, and it's a hunk of shit movie. Sorry, but it is. It's badly paced, badly scripted, all the performances are way too broad, it wouldn't pass for a Netflix pilot now. But it did a big sweep for nominees at the Oscars in 1985. It didn't win Best Picture, though it was nominated, along with Out Of Africa, The Color Purple, Kiss Of The Spider Woman and Witness. Out Of Africa won. You know what movie wasn't nominated for Best Picture for 1985? Wasn't even nominated? Back To The Future. You know which film has had far more lasting effect on the way films are literally made than any of those films, including the Spielberg flick? Yep. Back To The Future. It was considered a teenage popcorn flick, unlike a *serious* film like Prizzi's Honor... that probably nobody has actually seen but me in this millennium? Never underestimate how the shit that kids rented with their parents video store card were the *real* classics of that era. Kids like me didn't rent Kiss Of The Spider Woman, or at least after one of us did and came back with the news that there were no spider women to be found, though there was, uh, kissing. We didn't rent Witness because that was the period when Harrison Ford was making grownup movies nobody remembers or gives a shit about. We rented Predator and Big Trouble In Little China and The Monster Squad and Beverly Hills Cop II, and then we grew up and started directing movies a decade or two later. I just watched Quentin Tarantino - a man who, whether you like him or not, knows film obsessively - rant for three minutes about Gremlins 2: The New Batch. And that motherfucker wasn't even a ten year old! He was, like, probably college age when that shit came out! Great art sometimes inspires great art, but so do movies with big sweaty oiled up dudes getting hunted by a Rasta lizard in a jungle. Cheap revival theaters showing already elderly Republic serials from the 1930s and 1940s gave us the biggest films of all time: Star Wars and Indiana Jones, which gave us everything since. Does anybody even remember The Goodbye Girl or Julia or The Turning Point? Because those were the films that competed with Star Wars for Best Picture that year; it lost to Annie Hall, which is the rare critical darling people watched after awards season was over. But I guarantee you far more filmmakers, for good and for ill, have been influenced, in the nearly half century since, by George Lucas than Woody Allen. Shit, I think one of the best films of this century is still Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, written and directed coincidentally by Predator co-star and uncredited script doctor Shane Black. And I bet a lot of kids a decade younger than me feel about it the way I felt about Big Trouble, or Black's earlier screenplay, The Last Boy Scout, which is a film which was considered an atrocious failure when it came out but has been reappraised largely because of kids like me. You never know what shit is gonna stick to the wall, is my point.
November 15, 2025 at 5:01 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Had no idea the home multi-antigen tests were finally on the market in the US!

Test for COVID and Flu-A and Flu-B all at once!

This is great because these tests affect management! If these tests are positive there are drugs for these that will make you feel better and shorten your illness!
Picture of a box of Walgreens-branded combination at-home COVID-19/FluA/FluB tests.
November 10, 2025 at 9:48 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
This comment about the pilots in the Louisville UPS plane crash who managed to guide their fatally damaged behemoth past a UPS warehouse before it finally went down spoke to me.

www.reddit.com/r/aviation/c...
A while back, somebody left a comment on one of Admiral Cloudberg’s write-ups that really stuck with me. They said that the pilots in the stories she tells tend to fall into two categories: desperately unlucky and doomed from the start, or steely-eyed avatars of determination wrestling small miracles out of their dying aircraft. These three men were *both*. Heroes indeed.
November 7, 2025 at 1:10 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Planning our domestic holiday travel on airlines that use non-Boeing airframes.

www.reuters.com/world/us-jud...
O'Connor, in his ruling on Thursday, noted the government's position: "Boeing committed crimes sufficient to justify prosecution, failed to remedy its fraudulent behavior on its own during the (deferred prosecution agreement) which justified a guilty plea and the imposition of an independent monitor, but now Boeing will remedy that dangerous culture by retaining a consultant of its own choosing." O'Connor said the families were correct in asserting that "this agreement fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public."
November 6, 2025 at 5:47 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Our use of AI is taking us dangerously close to a civilizational own goal.

Via old.reddit.com/r/aviationma...
Was working the other day and a coworker comes over to ask me a question. He was doing cable tension checks and was unsure of which way the tensions would go with the temperature. I tell him that a warmer day will make the cables tighter because the airframe expands more than the cables, and that this is a really common one for people to get confused by. I then proceed to help him look through the AMM for the cable tension/temperature table for the check he was doing. He then reads out something from his computer about how higher temperatures will make the cables looser, before proudly declining that AI told him so.
November 2, 2025 at 1:18 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Don’t threaten me with a good time!

www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...
“If the Democrats had won the majority, they probably would have tried to nuke the filibuster, and then you’d have four new United States senators from Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. You’d have a packed Supreme Court,” Thune said. “You’d have abortion on demand.”
October 15, 2025 at 1:51 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Amazing.

partiful.com/e/rt6qbgKNHY...

(h/t old.reddit.com/r/NYCbitches... )
Flyer in the NYC Subway titled “Join the Rat Rally” for a meetup this Friday to support free birth control for women, just like rats have.
September 25, 2025 at 1:40 AM
satmandu.bsky.social
Object Permanence is believing that things don't go away when you don't see them anymore. Humans normally achieve this at about 9 months of age.

And then there's actively looking away so you don't see what you don't want to see.

There are worse forms of selection bias, and yet...
“In the latest draft of the National Defense Strategy (NDS), which reportedly landed on the desk of War Secretary Pete Hegseth last week, the U.S. War Department is expected to almost entirely shift away from priorities established under the Trump Administration's NDA in 2018 and the Biden Administration's in 2022, which instructed the department and military to prepare for a future full-scale conflict with China and Russia, and instead will prioritize domestic and regional missions in the Americas.”
September 7, 2025 at 2:39 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Visiting the family homestead, I found my extremely well-worn Nancy & Sluggo collection, which I had read when I was a kid, and rediscovered inside the comic that has lived rent-free in my head for decades.

@nancycomics.bsky.social
First panel: Nancy asks Sluggo, “Would you like to stay for dinner?” Sluggo responds, “I’ll tell you in a minute.” Second panel: Sluggo is pictured rummaging through the rubbish bin looking at empty cans. Sluggo says, “First I want to check on what we're going to eat.”
August 17, 2025 at 2:07 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
XKCD without context.

This is the best alt text for an xkcd comic I have seen in a long time.

xkcd.com/3126/
You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.
August 9, 2025 at 6:04 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Reminds me of this post I saw today:

reddit.com/comments/1mj...
I've been reading all the Ian Fleming James Bond novels recently, and surprisingly I've not seen this comparison before.. Donald Trump and Goldfinger . Not just in general vibe, but in the way they actually behave. Both are completely obsessed with gold. With Goldfinger, it’s literal. He hoards it, smuggles it, even paints women in it. It’s not just wealth, it’s almost religious. Trump: apartment, his Saudi plane plans, his branding, and now... Even the white house, everything is gold. Then you’ve got the cheating. Goldfinger cheats at everything. Cards, golf, business deals. Trump has the same approach. He’s known for cheating at golf, dodging taxes, spinning the truth. To him, winning is what matters. The rules are just obstacles for other people. But seriously, the golf scene and the video from Scotland is almost copyright infringement.
August 7, 2025 at 4:26 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Crossed the East River into Roosevelt Island for the first time in a decade for the first day of the Open Healthware Conference put together by the Open Source Hardware Association, which starts today.

Let's go!
Screen showing the text "Open Healthware Conference."
August 1, 2025 at 12:46 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Just learned that Montreal’s Metro (the 3rd busiest in North America after NYC & Mexico City) uses wooden brakes with peanut oil to make braking quieter and avoid creating the hazardous metal dust created by brakes as are used in NYC’s subway.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montrea...
Montreal's Metro trains use electromagnetic brakes, generated by the train's kinetic energy until it has slowed down to about 10 kilometres per hour (6.2 mph). The train then uses composite brake blocks made of yellow birch injected with peanut oil to bring it to a complete stop. Two sets are applied against the treads of the steel wheels for friction braking. Hard braking produces a characteristic burnt popcorn scent. Wooden brake shoes perform well, but if subjected to numerous high-speed applications they develop a carbon film that diminishes brake performance.[citation needed] The rationale for using wooden brake shoes soaked in peanut oil was health concerns – the use of wooden brake shoes avoids releasing metal dust into the air upon braking.[96] It also reduces screeching noise when braking and prolongs the life of steel wheels.
June 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
More from above...
Quebec City view of bollards on street from above.
June 15, 2025 at 7:02 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
One of the nice things about traveling is discovering how our places do things to make life better.

This sign in Quebec City indicating which sides of an intersection also have stop signs is an example of that.
Stop sign in Quebec City at an intersection with a sign pointing out which sides of the intersection also have stop signs.
June 15, 2025 at 4:41 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Bravo Quebec City! This is how you reclaim streets for pedestrians, with solid bollards.

@worldbollardassoc.bsky.social
Picture of bollard-protected sidewalk built into Grande Allée E in Quebec City.
June 15, 2025 at 2:40 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Rekt.

Mamdani responding to his disgraced opponent Cuomo last night...

Gift Link:

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/n...
“To Mr. Cuomo, I have never had to resign in disgrace. I have never cut Medicaid. I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the M.T.A.,” he said. “I have never hounded the 13 women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment. I have never sued for their gynecological records, and I have never done those things because I am not you, Mr. Cuomo.”
June 13, 2025 at 12:53 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
This is how you write.
Now, Stephen Miller is a little rat-faced Nazi bitch. Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage.
June 12, 2025 at 1:01 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Look at this asshole parked at 71st and West End Ave Car with NY EKD-4975 license plates who has scratched off their license plate to try to avoid tolls.
Car with NY EKD-4975 license plate with scratched off license plate.
May 10, 2025 at 11:19 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
The correction for this article is amazing.

If Your Vibe Is Right, He Might Let You Into the Club www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/n...
He stared at his Converse hightop sneakers, glancing up only occasionally at Mr. Brienza who was letting in people both in front of and behind him. Finally, not long after 2 a.m., Mr. Brienza opened the rope for the man. “He was there for two hours,” Mr. Brienza said and shrugged. A correction was made on May 10, 2025: An earlier version of this article misidentified the man wearing Converse sneakers and standing in line in front of Paul’s in the early morning. His name is not Cameron Gucker.
May 10, 2025 at 7:48 PM
satmandu.bsky.social
Sigh. That's a positive test. I wear a mask to protect people around me and to protect myself, but I don't mask all the time everywhere I'm around people in places with bad ventilation, so I should probably be better about that.

Now to see what antivirals are still available...

😷
Picture of a COVID-19 Rapid Antigen Test showing a slight positive.
April 28, 2025 at 11:56 AM
satmandu.bsky.social
Harlem on Election Night in 2008 was an experience I will never forget.

So much love...
Projected TV screen at ACP and 125th st, Harlem, Election Night 2008.
April 18, 2025 at 11:01 AM