Nov 182023
 

The second Starship/Superheavy launched today. Vastly more successful than the first flight, but both stages were still destroyed.

This sort of thing would be unacceptable for a modern NASA launch system… but it was common in early launch vehicle development. Atlas and Titan kerploded with regularity. This sort of thing is not desirable, but it is a natural part of the learning process.

Scott Manley has done an analysis of the video and has some good suggestions about what happened with the booster. There would seem likely to be some serious issues with slosh and propellant hammer effects, caused by the sudden deceleration and flip maneuver. These are resolvable.

But beyond the technical issues and successes… this flight was simply *gorgeous.*

 

 

 

 Posted by at 4:24 pm
Aug 062023
 

There is a fox that seems to hang out in my back yard from time to time. It’s incredibly skittish; any noise and *bam* it sprints over the fence. So getting decent photos of it has been a challenge, but today i got these. In previous, kinda cruddier photos it looked mangy, but now I think that it just had dark patches.

 

 Posted by at 2:09 pm
Jul 282023
 

Starships first not-exactly-successful launch was filmed not only from the ground, but from the NASA WB-57 flying at altitude. Apparently at least five cameras were trained on the launcher; video from two have been released, while three remain classified. i would *assume* that the classified three display some combination of:

1) better tracking

2) Better image quality – better sensor and/or telescope

3) Different spectra… IR and the like

Even with the somewhat dodgy tracking and potato-quality images, these are interesting. You really get a sense of how Starship flopped around the sky at the end there. Which was both sad and incredibly impressive… no other rocket would have survived as long flying *sideways.*

 

 Posted by at 4:16 pm
Jul 242023
 

Of my four cats, two (Speedbump and Banshee) like catnip. Buttons has never cared for it; Billy shows no interest, though he’s still young (cats apparently don’t become interested in catnip until sexual maturity).

Speedbump’s interest is polite. He will sit silently and watch me carrying leaves and stems and will gently take a leaf and gnaw upon it. Banshee, in contrast, goes bugnuts.

 

 

 Posted by at 4:30 pm
Jul 132023
 

I have no idea if it has been apparent or not based on recent blog/Twitter postings that the last few days have been frazzling for me. But the short form is that Buttons has been quite sick… and terribly miserable. Several days of vet visits finally culminated today in the conclusion that he *probably* is suffering from another bout of pancreatitis, though the initial symptoms were quite different from the earlier bouts. This time it seemed as if he was plugged up somehow, but a X-ray showed that he’s clear. Blood work revealed the infection markers of pancreatitis, so he was treated for that today… and he has shown improvement.

A vocally miserable cat is not something I recommend. Especially one so miserable that he chooses to remain inert and just wail. AAAARRRRGH.

 

This was him yesterday, looking hopeless.

 

This was at the vet today prior to the doc coming in. You can see just how absolutely thrilled he was.

 

X-ray of his innards. It reportedly shows that his intestines are largely empty. To me is seems to indicate that his abdomen is infected with a space-squid of some kind.

 

And this critter is “Ziggy” the French bulldog who was in the vet clinic waiting room as I was checking out. Friendly little guy even if he looks like he aught to be gnawing the foot off of a selfless dark age princess of Urland.

 

Buttons seems to be on the mend. He does not appear to be in agony anymore; instead he simply seems to be wore out. He didn’t eat or drink for several days; he has recent eaten and drank *some,* though not a lot. Progress, anyway.

 

This has cost a *lot.* I need to put a ton of stuff on ebay, both to cover this and my other rather voluminous bills,  but if you’re of a mind to, feel free to hit the tip jar below…

 


Feline Tip Jar


 Posted by at 9:37 pm
Jun 262023
 

Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often these discarded shirts and shorts are boxed up and shipped to third world countries where the trainloads of discards can be used to eliminate the local indigenous clothing production industry; this is why you often see some illiterate tribesman wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some midwestern high school baseball team. At some point I suppose this global traffic in clothes might end, but likely not before many places lose the knowledge and ability to make their own clothes.

Anyway, it seems to me the obvious solution for this is so obvious that it’s obvious: FIRE. Clothes are largely made from plastic and cotton; these will happily burn. Sure, some unfortunate fumes will be generated, from the toxic to the CO2;  but if incinerated in a large and modern facility this can not only be done fairly cleanly it can also generate a lot of power. Use the combustion to boil water, run the steam past turbines, shazam, electricity. But for whatever reason we don’t much burn our garbage these days, preferring instead to burn rocks and goop we dug up out of the ground. So what happens to all these discarded garments?

If you’re Chile, you dump them in the desert. There it can be picked through by locals and by a company that is trying to separate out the various materials and make something of them.

High fashion! Mountain of discarded clothes in Chilean desert is visible from space (satellite photo)

A recent satellite photo shows the pile:

It’s a little difficult to judge scale from that. At lower left you can see an urban area; the pile is clearly a number of city blocks in expanse.

An article from 2021 shows the pile (from the ground) as it existed in 2021. It was *huge:*

Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers

Here’s the location on Google Maps, satellite view:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Giant+Pile+of+Unsold+Clothing/@-20.2353681,-70.0930992,836m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x91523e70293c5633:0x671ff739632f5660!2sAlto+Hospicio,+Tarapac%C3%A1,+Chile!3b1!8m2!3d-20.2686722!4d-70.1049169!16zL20vMGd4cjc3!3m5!1s0x915215426eb9ae75:0xbb5867ab02cd19a1!8m2!3d-20.2350799!4d-70.0911125!16s%2Fg%2F11styh04ds?entry=ttu

Interestingly, the Google Maps satellite photo, which seems to have been taken in July of 2022, shows just bare Earth. It seems that there was a huge pile in 2021, it was dealt with in 2022, and its huge again in 2023. So processing seems to be keeping up. Or… when the photo was taken in 2022, the pile had been buried in the dirt.

 Posted by at 8:36 pm
Jun 102023
 

Even with a specially made setup and at close range, it’s difficult. This should drive home the difficulty and impressiveness of hit-to-kill interceptors that take out incoming warheads or missile from tens of *miles* away at closing velocities far greater than those of mere bullets.

Also: bullets don’t as a rule fuse together; rather, they explode in a shower of flattened lead fragments.

 Posted by at 7:20 pm