Sort of.

Yes, SDR black levels are technically the same, but they tend to be washed out in a lot of productions, especially with brighter images. This is because a lot of video (yes, even high-budget stuff) isn't shot to full spec. Laziness, lack of skill, lack of time, or sometimes just a director going for a certain look.

Shadows in SDR tend to be shot a little "hotter" because of dynamic range issues, though, so you end up with "blacks" that are closer to 10% (or much more) grays in many situations. Most phone-camera videos tend to have problems of this sort (mostly because the scene they're shooting isn't lit that well).

A good SDR-to-HDR conversion process often does some fiddling with shadows to make the blacker parts actually black while recovering some details.

Poor QA/QC? That IS laziness.

Then it's either astounding laziness/ineptitude, or someone did it on purpose.

There's going to be detailed records of who worked on what - and who signed off on those actions.

This projector has a laser light engine, which has a life of about 20,000 hours of run time.

At eight hours a day, every day, that's almost seven years. Longer if you use it less.

By that point, it'll probably be cheaper to buy whatever new projector is out there instead of trying to hunt down parts for an old one.

The article danced around that part, but the 20% or so they left out was nuclear.

Ignoring the fact that they immediately raise prices enough to cover the costs.

It's really just a tax that's being collected at the cash register.

People are funding out that solar and wind are NOT cheap, especially once you count "externalities."

Basically, wind is slightly better than break-even on costs vs outputs (at best), and when you count the recycling failure (basically, they go straight to landfills when they die after a couple of decades), they're pretty bad.

Solar is a disaster for the environment, mostly from when you have to start dealing with square miles of toxic-waste-ridden solar panels that are a royal pain to try and recycle. And that's if you completely ignore that whole "miles and miles of panels" thing in the first place.

"It is just sterile saline."

Well...

The problem is that, if you're a scammer who wants to make money off of something that doesn't work in the first place, it's a very small step from "actually sterile saline" to "filtered water with some salt in it" or "just tap water." "Sterile" is just a marketing feature.

Even the people who think they're selling something that works tend to have minimal training, and will often make boneheaded mistakes - such as ordering their entire supply from somewhere with not-too-stellar quality control.

Wow - and a single 737 (the smaller one) carries a fuel load of over 16 tons.

So this entire plant could supply fuel for three planes. Once.

Including Jim Hansen's famous 1989 "the West Side Highway in New York will be underwater by 2019" prediction, which would indicate a ten foot rise in sea level?
(hint: not even close)

Or the "Hockey Stick" graph? Which overstated warming by about FOUR TIMES the actual average?

Or "children won't know what snow is" by David Viner of East Anglia University?

Or Hansen (in 2008) claiming the Arctic would be ice-free in five to ten years?
(Another hint: not even close this time either - there more now, on average, than there was in 2012-2013)

The hard part is finding an actual ACCURATE prediction over time...

It's just the 2020s version of the old AAA-prefixed business names from the old printed Yellow Pages phone directories.

Yes, really.

Because that negative pressure does NOT fix a bad fit. If your glasses are fogging, you've improperly fitted it around your nose, and a little inhale won't fix that. If the mask is loose enough to ALLOW the top to puff out, it's a bad seal. They taught us that in chem/bio warfare class in the military. A good seal means "too tight for comfort," and very few people even come close.

Likewise (as I mentioned in another reply), beards make a tight seal impossible. How many guys have beards nowadays?

And, of course, most people don't even bother to get anything at all like a tight seal, even if they claim to care. I saw a woman lecturing a cashier about mask wearing - and I could see the woman's mouth _from the side_ while she was talking.

So no - despite all of the pathetic attempts to claim "it could work if you put one on right," actual observation tells all of us that it didn't - and won't - happen.

It's not that they do an "imperfect" job. It's that masks DO NOT WORK AT ALL unless you buy the right kind and spend a lot of time and effort doing it right. Which was NEVER part of the "pro" argument.

And YES, infection through the eye is a significant source of infection with viruses, including COVID. Just like the flu. People don't wash their hands enough, and they touch their eyes and faces all of the time...

Sorry, but that's false.

For example, if you have a beard? Then a good tight seal is impossible.

And the vast majority of people aren't going to bother to do it right - you can tell that by the various silly ways we all saw people wearing masks in 2020.

So no.

This "defense" is pretty thin.

Yes, an N95 respirator, if correctly fitted, can reduce the incidence of certain viral diseases. But it's a partial solution in even the best of conditions (which were seldom seen in 2020-2021).

No, a cheap mask made out of N95 material doesn't do a damned thing versus many respiratory viruses. Since it's not fully fitted to the face, the viruses just float around the edges of the mask when you breathe in and out. Plain cloth? Might as well be wearing a sign saying "viruses keep out," for all the good it does.

For bacterial diseases carried on particles? Yeah, might be useful, but that's a whole different situation.

Here's a clue: If someone is wearing glasses and a mask, and their glasses are fogging up when they breathe, the mask is ineffective.

The one stupid assumption the authorities made at the start of COVID was that it was ONLY carried by larger liquid particles. The evidence for that was flimsy at best, and we found out fairly quickly that it wasn't true. Yes, a cloth or poorly-fitted N95 mask can stop some particles, but neither of them will stop a single virus - and no standard mask will stop a virus particle coming in contact with the eye. Yeah, it turned out that you can catch it that way, too, just like the flu.

The Scientific American article is just flailing around, trying to excuse the bad medical advice that so many bureaucrats gave during COVID. They're trying to justify cheap mask use by discrediting a bunch of actual studies, but fail to notice that there really wasn't any evidence FOR non-fitted non-N95 mask wearing in the first place.

Technically, it probably is being subjected to that temperature for a small fraction of a second.

The confusion here is "temperature vs heat." You can have incredibly high temperatures in things like plasma, but the moment a thin plasma touches a solid surface, it transfers that very small amount of heat to the metal, without any real damage.

If you wave your hand quickly through a candle flame, for a fraction of a second you're subjecting your skin to 2500 F or so - without harm. If you move a stick through that same flame at a slower speed, you'll coat the stick with a thin layer of soot - without catching the stick on fire.