Two stories that’ll make you question the sanity of any of a number of government officials:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/111594279.html
Short form: 17-year-old girl charged with child abuse after getting into a fight with a girl who’s 10 months older than her.
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Short form: a car gets stolen. The car thief gets in a wreck with the stolen car. Other car crash victim sue the owner of the stolen car. Court of appeals decides the case actually has merit.
To finish up…
The Martin Astroplane had a long slim shape perfect for low drag at high speed, but terrible for horizontal runway landings at sane speeds. So it was to use variable geometry wings for both takeoff and landings. The wings were unconventional in that they were composed of rigid ribs with a flexible membrane stretched betwee, like the wings of a bat. Aerodynamic properties of such wings are often less than spectacular, but they have the advantage of being relatively light-weight. I’m a little concerned about after takeoff, though… retracting the flexible wing into a small storage space while travelling at high speed seems tricky at best.
The US Navy just fired off a railgun witha muzzle energy of 33 megajoules, with a muzzle velocity of Mach 8. Still a long way to go before it’s an operation weapon capable of blowing the nads off of a giant alien robot clambering over the Great Pyramid of Giza, but it’s a heck of a step. And almost as impressive is the photographic technology that allowed for high-rez, high-speed filming of the round.
[youtube aWAySUnPjqk]
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/video-navys-mach-8-railgun-obliterates-record/
The US government has some messed-up priorities. We have anywhere from 11 million to 30 million illegal immigrants in this country; this is a massive problem and needs to be dealt with. But instead of doing what must be done to prosecute those who knowingly employ illegals and deporting the illegals themselves, what does the government do? It does this:
U.S. judge orders woman adopted as baby deported to Mexico
Short form: a 38-year old woman who was adopted by an American couple when she was an infant got in some legal trouble (she stole a purse) and is going to be deported to Mexico. One can argue whether this is a proper punishment; normally I’d be all in favor of a drug dealer, say, from Mexico getting booted out of the country. This is not exactly that case.
So why is she getting deported? The conspiratorial side of me comes up with a ready response: because the case easily sounds like a miscarriage of justice, and it’s easy to do. Thus, with minimal effort the government raises the ire of people *against* deportations of illegal immigrants, thus weakening any case other than “amnesty for all.”
The same tactics apply whenever a major city or county comes up against financial problems, and has to decide between tax hikes and budget cuts. Whenever someone tries budget cutting, what do they go after first? The cops, the fire fighters, the hospitals, the roads. The stuff that actually *needs* to get done, not the unnecessary stuff or the stuff that could be done by private enterprise. Thus by starting with the nonsense cases, the whole issue can be flushed away.
http://www1.nbc33tv.com/news/nbc33-see-it-shoot-it-share-it-crazy-hunting-pic
An NBC 33 viewer claims to have caught an “alien-looking thing” on a deer cam. He chooses to remain anonymous but says the pic was taken on a reserve in Berwick near Morgan City. The viewer says the cam itself was busted when it was found, but the SIM card was still in it and so was this image
This being Louisiana, three options come to mind:
1) Actual Swamp Monster
2) Hoax
3) Someone let James Carville out of his cage.
My bet would be on #2, with #3 not being far behind.
Still, it’s a reasonably creepy image. Maybe not quite Rubber Johnny, but still.
To continue…
The Martin Astroplane of 1961 was a long, slim vehicle (only scale reference for this particular design is a mention in an article in “Missiles and Rockets” that it would be the “size of a B-70”), with a squared-off nose. As shown in the artists renderings, the cockpit was small, perhaps with tandem seating (if it sat more than just the one pilot). It’s somewhat similar in general configuration to the much later X-30 National Aero Space Plane and the X-43, using the blunt planform nose and flat underside to direct airflow into the inlet. It is much slimmer than the X-30, however; this would have been due to the nuclear powerplant replacing much of the bulky hydrogen fuel.
I am not an atheist, but even so, I find it remarkable that whenever an atheist group hires out a billboard to advertise a message that basically boils down to “God doesn’t exist,” they are met with howls of hypocritical rage from people who spend lots of money to advertise the message “God exists.” Such atheist groups are often labeled as “militant atheists,” and the billboards/advertisements denounced as insulting or aggressive or “in your face” or just plain mean. And yet I’ve not seen any such messages that are really all that confrontational… do a minimal rewording of them so that instead of saying “God doesn’t exist” they now say “God exists,” and they’d be entirely bland, and would be essentially ignored.
But rather than just shrug and go on about their day (as the vast majority of non-believers in a particular religion do when they see an advertisement for a particular religion), some militant religionists have to go way out of their way to fight that message. Sometimes that’s in the form of public denouncements, sometime sin the form of competing ads (as if there weren’t already a whole bunch of ’em anyway), sometimes that’s in the form of vandalism or theft. And then there’s this:
Short form is, a group of atheists hired out ad space on the side of buses in Forth Worth, Texas, for ads that read “Millions of Americans are good without God.” This is an accurate, flat statement of non-controversial fact, but as pointed out in the vox populi in the video in the link above, some Christians think that it is insulting to point this out. So… they’ve hired panel trucks to follow the buses around like rapid paparazzi, with giant “I still love you – God” signs on them.
I doubt it’s illegal to intentionally tail someone around town all day, but it sure is creepy. Smacks of stalkers, psycho ex girlfriends and pedophiles looking for the next victim.
Ah, well.
A thought occurs:
“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray while standing in synagogues and on street corners so that people can see them. Truly I say to you, they have their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you”
Nah. That’s crazytalk, clearly dreamed up by someone who’s anti-Christian. Everyone knows that you’re supposed to wear your religion like an airplane towing a bannerad.
When trying to decide what the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard was, there are so many choices it becomes virtually impossible. Some sort of ranking system is required; a moderately dumb thing said by a smart person is therefore stupider than a really dumb thing said by a really dumb person. Because the smart person should know better, while the dumb person may not be able to proces the difference between a smart/correct comment and a dumb/wrong comment.
Real stupidity is when smart people say things that are not just dumb, but self-evidently dumb and factually wrong.
Today on the History Channel I heard something so mind-snappingly stupid, coming from someone clearly not *that* stupid, that it rocketed to the top of my list. The TV was on basically for background noise, and was playing some “documentary” about ancient aliens. There was some blather about some region in norther Mexico where things like radios and compasses don’t work right (but I noticed that the video cameras shooting the place seemed to function just fine), and how this is due to some magnetic field or other. And then came the moment: this idjit right here opened his trap and said something so dumb I felt my IQ drop several points.
Paraphrasing, his claim was that 10,000 years ago, the aliens that visited Earth did not have highways to follow, so they would use major magnetic anomalies to find their way from place to place across the surface of the Earth.
Really?
REALLY???
So… aliens that can traverse the lightyears use magnetic anomalies for navigation… but haven’t figured out how to look out a window and check the coastlines against a map?
The same “argument” has been used as an explanation for the lines and illustrations on the Nazca plateau…that these are navigational aids for ancient flying saucers. Now, assuming the space buddies somehow *didn’t* have their own shockingly advanced version of GPS in Earth orbit, how exactly are a couple of magnetic smudges or tracks in the dirt a better navigational system than mountains, coastlines, rivers and lakes?
The question I have is “are these people who are smart enough to dress themselves, get on TV and write books so stupid as to believe this rubbish, or are they simply smart enough to invent this rubbish and smarter still to know how to use this clearly stupid rubbish to get money out of large numbers of people who are in fact stupid enough to believe this rubbish?
My large suspicion is that most of the people you see actively and publicly pushing monumentally and self-evidently stupid ideas like “9/11 was an inside job” or “flying saucer navigators are morons with nothing more than a compass” or “evolution/capitalism are about to fail” don’t actually believe that nonsense. Instead, they’ve found a way to make money from the gullibility of others. Basically, if it wasn’t for their current “dumb idea” business plan, they’d be out trying to sell air conditioners to polar bears, or televangelists or politicians. But the disturbing thing is that there is a sufficiently large number of the trying ill-informed and/or non-thinking that these yahoos can make a pretty good living of of ’em.
A few guest strips on XKCD by Bill Amend of “FoxTrot” show why science + math + comic strips = humor.
Ruh-roh…
http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/
Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. “It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.
Angry biologist-fight! Woo!.
Or, as Fark would put it…
Raise your hand, everyone who’s found arsenic-based life. Not so fast, NASA
Now, I can’t say one way or the other whether the report was based on bad science or not. I’m not a biologist or biochemist… and somewhat more importantly, I haven’t read the paper. But if this is a case where sloppy science created a news story that doesn’t really exist… then that’s bad science on top of an already seriously annoying PR flop. NASA got us space-nuts all worked up over the hope of “bugs on Mars/Titan Europa,” and now it looks like theior seriously disappointing news might be even more disappointing.
Bah.
