USB – Universal Serial Bus.

Why do they have the word “Universal” in there?

Because it most certainly isn’t. It’s perhaps better written nUSB and perhaps pronounced “new ess bea” rather than “yoo ess bea”… and we all know that n is short for “not”, as in, Not Universal Serial Bus.

Here’s the thing… for being “universal”, it has a bewildering combination of protocols, data delivery speeds, physical connector types, power usage and delivery. Thankfully (ha!) there are only two cable lengths.

How so?

Let’s see, there USB v1.0, v1.1, v2.0, v3.0, then v3.1

There’s low-speed, full-speed, hi-speed, SuperSpeed, and a version of SuperSpeed that’s available for v3.1.

You have USB-A connectors, which is reasonable, then there’s USB-B connectors along with mini-B and micro-B. Complicating things a bit further, you’ve 3.x B and 3.x micro-B. Let’s not forget USB-C

For power availability, thankfully, v1.0 and v1.1 didn’t provide any, but everything else can provide 500mA, 900mA, 1.5A, and even 3.0A (at 5V in all cases).

I know, I’m just being dramatic. It’s not really 875 different combinations. No, no, of course not. It has been narrowed-down — refined a bit.

But when you go out to buy a nUSB cable, choose carefully.

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EDIT: See? I was probably overreacting. I stand corrected.

But I’m still gonna refer to it as nUSB.

I’ve been listening to assorted videos on the Tubes of You, and this one came up: a review of the cosmic impact, biomass burning, climate change, and megafaunal extinctions 12,800 years ago.

That piqued my interest.

I started paying a bit more attention to the video rather than the audio.

And, of course, there’s the actual published paper that you might have a read over as well. It’s long, yes, And technical. But well worth it.

I’ll have to start doing a brain dump of the details that I’ve amassed on the matter as well. In fact, here are some of the very raw notes on the video topic itself:

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Significant primarily because it’s my back yard [I live in the area], clearly ties into the topic at hand, but this video also contains a wide aerial pan of Dry Falls [until recently, I used to fish those lakes quite regularly] (https://youtu.be/nPOlomFhehQ).

…[seeing the height of the coulee walls — about 600-800 ft — it’s] significant because it highlights the amount of rushing water needed to pulverize the basalt and granite bedrock.

The coulees themselves, I would speculate, were caused not from a series of “Missoula Floods” but from one, single, truly cataclysmic flood — The Flood of Floods — the passage of sufficient floodwater as would have been released in the primary impact event at the end of the YD epoch and that matches up with the meltwater pulses and catastrophic sea-level rise.

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Eh, it’s something I need to wordsmith a bit.