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No. It was accelerated by the fact that Tumblr is burning money at an astonishing rate and has never turned a profit.When Yahoo bought Tumblr, Tumblr was losing $3,420,000 per month.Yes, you read that right. Tumblr was losing three and a half million dollars a month.And unlike companies like Amazon that also lost money for a long time, Tumblr was not selling a good or service. They lost money every time a new user signed up, but, I don’t know, hoped to make it up on volume or something?Tumblr is a cash loser. Tumblr has always been a cash loser. You can’t spend millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars giving away free stuff forever. Eventually you need to make money somehow.After Yahoo went from king of the hill to worthless scrap through a series of astonishingly bad decisions that will likely go down in history as the most wretched mismanagement of any company in any country in all of recorded human history elsewhere, like for example spending a billion dollars to buy a business that existed to give people free server space for stolen porn, Verizon decided it needed to make money from Tumblr.But how? Charge people for blogs? That ain’t gonna happen. Sell premium services à la Red Hat Or WordPress? Like that worked so well for LiveJournal. What possible premium services could they sell?The only way Verizon saw to make money was ads. But guess what? No major buyer will run ads next to porn. So the porn had to go.That still left a company burning millions of dollars a month. And Verizon couldn’t find the advertising revenue to make up for it.The thing about the Internet is everyone thinks it’s about users, users, users. It’s not. Every new user is a freeloader who costs you money. You need money to keep servers going. It’s not about users, users, users, it’s about money, money, money.Just like it’s always been. Anyone who says anything else is delusional.There’s no viable business model in running a business that gives away server space for stolen porn for free.As I write this answer, someone on Quora is creating phony profiles that look just like mine, and using them to send abusive/harassing messages to people. If you receive an abusive PM or comment, check the profile carefully. It probably isn’t me. Hashtag #ShouldBeObvious.

Interest in flying saucers has surged since the rather shocking admission by the United States Navy in late 2019 that a succession of leaked videos of UFOs - which the US military prefers now to call “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAPs - are real. Whatever the UAPs are, they show up on radar and can fly circles around US jets; attempting to disbelieve in them is fast becoming an exercise of willful ignorance.This doesn’t mean, by the way, that they are necessarily from other planets, although it’s not logical to deny the possibility. It does mean that they exist, many pilots and other military personnel have observed them, and we have no idea what they are.The airfoil/lifting plane technology of human flight is clearly the operative design principle behind the US Navy F/A-18. Video taken by Navy pilots during intercepts near bases or US supercarriers shows unknown aerial vehicles without wings but having far superior performance characteristics.The videos, dating from 2004, 2014, and 2015, are gun camera recordings shot by US Navy fighter pilots attempting to intercept what appear to be aerial vehicles performing far beyond the capabilities of human-built aircraft, and include the cockpit chatter of the astonished pilots. Anecdotally, the Navy videos are most likely only the tip of the iceberg, as personnel and intercepted radio have established that US bases and aircraft carrier strike groups are sometimes shadowed or observed by these UAPs.The Navy does not claim to know their origin (quite the contrary, as the UAP acronym indicates); but the fact that the government admits its services have been scrambling jets to intercept these objects, and no longer denies their existence, is a major validation of public interest and concern regarding these objects.Assuming for the sake of argument that extraterrestrials are in fact visiting Earth in such vehicles, we can say little about the shape from their perspective other than to guess that their designs probably obey the dictum that “form follows function.” That is, whatever advanced propulsion system they use is logically at its most efficient when the vehicle is shaped this way. There may be certain aerodynamic benefits (detailed below) for use in an atmosphere, but the primary consideration would almost certainly have to be the propulsion technology.Humans associate alien spacecraft with the saucer shape because some of the best-known reports of UFOs through the mid to late 20th Century described them with this form. There have been hundreds of UFO reports, including a large and widely observed number of sitings over Washington DC in 1952 and corroborated, again, by radar, although other shapes besides the saucer have been reported. No doubt once the saucer trope became established, then subsequent hoaxes and works of fiction (books, TV, movies, etc.) reinforced it.A saucer-shaped aircraft of the late 1950’s, the Avrocar was a prototype of what would have been a much larger flying saucer, the Avro Arrow. Many of the technologies explored and tested in this once-classified program have been incorporated in cutting-edge aircraft.The same thing has happened with the “little green men” style aliens with the big eyes, who resemble tiki carvings or dolls from Peru. Now, this look is media shorthand for “extraterrestrial.”Assuming, again, that downed saucers were in fact recovered and are being reverse engineered, there is little likelihood that aliens from the crews are assisting the program. The stories claim only that small bodies were recovered from the three crashed saucers, but no living people.The Harrier Jump Jet is capable of taking off and landing vertically thanks to clever use of the jet’s exhaust (visible beneath the aircraft in the photo), a system that underwent early work in Avro’s work on their unsuccessful Cold War-era flying saucer jet.We may be sure that flying saucers are not “aircraft” in the sense that human flying vehicles are. Our technology for flight is based on the use of lifting surfaces or airfoils (eg., wings, helicopter blades) driven through the air in general by internal combustion engines.And while it might be possible to make a jet-powered flying saucer-shaped aircraft today, it proved infeasible when Canadian and American engineers tried it during the Cold War.A Canadian company called Avro worked in the 1950’s and early 1960’s on a saucer-shaped aircraft for the United States Air Force. The hope was that this vehicle would be super-fast and efficient in order to intercept Soviet bombers.A flying saucer designed using human technology of the 1950’s, the Avro Arrow, proved unsuccessful because of aerodynamic instability. With computers, we could resolve the issue today; but not in the 1950’s using only mechanical solutions.The concept of the saucer shape was based on its surprising advantages in flight. For example, engineer John “Jack” Frost at Avro was inspired by an unusual property of airflow over certain surfaces.…airflow tends to stick to gently curved surfaces, a phenomenon called the Coandă effect. The results showed that engine exhaust could be routed across the fuselage to the area just beneath a saucer, where it would form a cushion of air on which the craft could hover.There are other reasons to give consideration to this geometry."The flying saucer configuration offers benefits," says Russell E. Lee, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. "It's totally symmetrical, so in theory it should be omnidirectional—if you can figure out how to redirect thrust in an instantaneous and efficient manner.”Additionally, there was interest in the performance and uses of the disc shape from the fledgling American space program, interest which eventually found expression in the shape of space capsules’ re-entry surfaces.….Engineers with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) were conducting tests of reentry space capsules. Vehicles that come from space to land on Earth must be designed to fly at a wide range of speeds and slow from hypersonic to a standstill. Avro's saucer, of course, was not intended to reach space, but it did have a flight profile similar to that of a reentry capsule.Frost and NACA came to this conclusion: Rounded shapes fared best. Robert Braun, a Georgia Tech professor of space technology who served as NASA's chief technologist from 2010 to 2011, says this configuration provides two main benefits to high-speed craft. "If you wanted to go at supersonic speeds, heat is something you're going to have to deal with," he says. "Bowl-like shapes dissipate heat. And this same shape provides predictable aerodynamics through all of those [speed] regimes." Braun cites the saucer shape on the rounded bottoms of space capsules. "From below," he says, "the Apollo capsule looks like a flying saucer." [Emphasis mine.]The test vehicles that were built at Avro’s Ontario facility, however, proved unsuccessful.Getting off the ground is easy. Then it happens, as it always does: When the saucer rises above its 3-foot cushion of exhaust, it starts to buck like a rodeo bull. The researchers are crestfallen; they've seen this instability before. They call it hubcapping, after the circular way a car hubcap oscillates on its rim when dropped on hard ground.The engineers tried everything they could think of to solve this problem, includingshaped nozzles, spoilers, skirts, bigger engine transition doors, vanes—even, at the suggestion of the Air Force, and to Frost's dismay, a tail. Nothing worked.And the Avro aircraft had another problem: despite having massive jet engines, it was underpowered. The engineers attempted to steer it by re-routing the air flow through the vehicle body but this led to energy-reducing turbulence."They didn't understand the fluid dynamics," says Jeff Underwood, historian of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. "The thing probably had plenty of power, it's just that all the thrust was being bled off in friction. As it was trying to push the air around, it was all being wasted."Although the Avro Arrow program was canceled in 1961 due to the instability and power issues, many principles explored in the program remain valid and are used in today's most advanced aircraft.Sophisticated stealth technology was made possible through the use of onboard computers that make constant minute adjustments; in this way, even a theoretically unstable aircraft design can stay airborne. Examples include the American stealth fighter and stealth bomber and recent high-performance fighter jets such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning.The B-2 Spirit, better known as the Stealth Bomber, incorporates a number of technologies that have been refined and made practical since the Avro Arrow program. The inherent instability in this plane, which is all but invisible to radar, is so great that it requires computers to remain airborne.The power issues that plagued the Avro Arrow program were eventually resolved as well. Instead of re-routing the jet flow, engineers found it was far more efficient to swivel the exhaust nozzle. This advance eventually led to one of the most successful military aircraft of the jet age, the Hawker-Siddeley Harrier Jump Jet and its successors, such as the “B” version of the F-35, which also has “Vertical/Short Takeoff and Landing” (VSTOL) capability, and the F-22, which uses ducted exhaust to achieve unprecedented manoeuverability.Before I close, let me note that a human-built flying saucer, whether built in the 1950’s or today, would still be subject to the limitations imposed by our technology - that is, despite their unconventional shape, they would still be conventional aircraft. As it happens, the more conventional “bird shape”, or the related delta shape, remains the best for our technology. This is why we don’t see prototype saucer aircraft - their technology is incorporated into more conventional shapes.When humans do resume building flying saucer-shaped vehicles, it will probably be because we have developed propulsion systems that are based not in mass reaction but in something like field manipulation that today counts as exotic physics.At this point, we can send our saucers to someone else’s planet and set them wondering!

‘How much of Freddie Mercury's voice was "studio magic"?’Depending on your definition of “studio magic” the answer is virtually zero.Queen did employ the use of effects on their vocals but at first this required great effort as almost everything had to be done by hand (there’s a quote from Brian May about how they had tape running around the studio and it was very hands on). When they used effects it is usually very apparent: the flange on “dynamite with a laser beam” from “Killer Queen”, the double-tracking and layered harmonies of almost any of their songs, and the use of pan (left/right in the stereo image - like Brian’s guitar during the fade out) and faders (how loud a sound is in the stereo image).Killer Queen (their first big hit):At first, Freddie would typically have been recorded through a compressor (this makes quiet sounds louder and loud sounds quieter, which was very important back when we recorded on tape. Conveniently, it sounds good too) and his vocals would have been sent to some primitive form of reverb, which could even be a literal echo chamber (a room with a speaker and a microphone to pick up the sound of the echoes in that room - this is what The Beatles used for reverb). The only time I’m aware of this being used to assist one of Freddie’s notes is in “Somebody To Love” on the line “ooh, somebody to love” at about 4:30 in the video below - if you listen carefully you can hear that Freddie is unbelievably slightly out of tune(!) [enjoy it because you’re not going to hear that very often]. In the mix they have drastically boosted the reverb component of his vocal track here which makes the whole thing sound cool. It smooths things out a little.Somebody To Love (no Brian in the backing vocals because he wasn’t well):I think Freddie’s normal solution for repairing flaws in the vocal part would be to just record it again. There’s a quote of him saying he’d stay up all night singing until his throat was as raw as a vulture’s crotch (or words to that effect) to get a song just right. Therefore he just liked how this sounded. Likewise with the a capella note “to” before the vocal run down on “lo-o-o-ove” which starts a microtone flat and resolves upwards - if it wasn’t what he wanted he’d have re-done it.Reverb isn’t really a trick.Later, when technology improved such that there were more options Freddie started using a short delay on his voice (à la John Lennon) instead sometimes. This is obvious on “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”.Crazy Little Thing Called Love (that’s Freddie playing the acoustic guitar, by the way):At the time they recorded this song there still weren’t really any digital effects. Not a great deal of trickery was possible.Every singer is normally recorded with compression and reverb/echo is also almost always used.You can hear Freddie’s voice completely naked, with only compression on it, on the line “let me back inside” (at 2:00) in “Mother Love” on the posthumous album. Reverbs/echo really just stop things sounding like they emanate from the middle of your head when you listen on headphones. They create the illusion of space.Mother Love (Freddie’s last recording):The other studio “trick” Queen employed was the practice of recording multiple takes and cherry-picking the best bits from each to create one perfect take. Almost everyone does that to some degree. Not really a trick - more of a time saver.Studios can also EQ the sounds more effectively than is possible in a live environment. Certain settings which work in a studio setting can cause feedback issues when playing live.The question is then, why does Freddie sound a little different live than in the studio?It’s the same person, same voice, same band, same keys. So why doesn’t it sound exactly the same.One answer is “monitors”. In the studio Freddie would have been in a vocal booth, wearing headphones, to record his vocals. With the compressor boosting quieter notes and limiting louder ones Freddie would receive excellent feedback through his headphones as to what his voice was doing regardless of the force he used.He used a fair amount of falsetto in the studio. He used virtually none live. Falsetto has a volume limit. Your full voice can produce incredible amounts of noise - falsetto tops out at a much quieter level. There is science behind that but I forget where I read about that - the upshot is that you can always go louder with your full voice voice but falsetto can only be pushed so hard.That’s a big part of the difference and is due to the dynamics he was singing with.In simple terms, he was singing at full volume for the live gigs and the studio stuff has delicate parts which can’t be sung as loud. He wouldn’t have been able to hear the note he was singing if he’d dropped down to falsetto levels of loudness. If in-ear monitors had been available he might have been able to do more delicate stuff live but do not underestimate falsetto - not always the easy option.His voice seemed to have a studio-mode setting and a live-mode setting.You’ll also notice that live he sometimes replaced notes above high Ab with alternate melodies to avoid the high note. That’s voice management - he knew his voice wouldn’t last three nights in a row if he included all those demanding notes so he worked out which ones to avoid (e.g. changing “We Are The Champions” to avoid that falsetto note on “fighting ’til the end…”).We Are The Champions (studio version - note the falsetto note at 0:48):We Are The Champions (live version - note the full-voice note at 0:50):Freddie went for more high notes at that Live Aid gig than any others because there was no second night. He could burn his voice out for us. He even went for the high Bb leading into the chorus. Next time round, at 2:01 Freddie drops to the alternative melody.Adele did the same sort of thing in her 2011 performance of “Someone Like You”.She doesn’t quite have as good intonation as Freddie obviously, but I’m talking about the high squeaky bit of the melody which she’s replaced at 1:34 with a section of melody from elsewhere in the song:More commonly you will see singers hide their voice management behind the trick of pointing the microphone at the audience for the high notes/tiring passages. I’m not sure Freddie ever actually did that? Could be wrong.There was not much in the way of studio trickery used on Freddie’s voice. He was just very good and his voice was very unique. Oh, and Queen knew how to arrange for vocals.