With a post title like the one above, you might immediately think of something like someone drinking to much and wrapping their car around a telephone pole, or trying to act like a badass with a loaded gun and shooting themselves in the nads, or some political snark. BET you didn’t see THIS coming:
Gave up food to live on photons.
Good plan.
The truth finally comes out:
[youtube esS9XHmrimA]
The V-2 at the National Air and Space Museum. Note just who wrinkly the skin is… while nothing is ever built just perfect, the V-2 was basically a hunk of *crap.* What exactly would you expect from a hastily-built missile built in underground factories by slave labor?
I long ago abandoned the sitcom as a form of entertainment.While there are exceptions, a staple of the format is some main character makes a mistake at the beginning of the episode, and spends the rest of the episode telling increasingly difficult-to-support lies in order to cover it up. At the end, everything explodes, the lying character is exposed, and no lessons are learned (because the same crap happens the next week).
Sadly, this is how things tend to happen in real life, too. But every now and then, a mistake is made… and everybody involved fesses up and makes the best of it.
Short form: a former government official was invited to a dinner at the opening of an environmental conference. But the invitation mistakenly went to a whole different woman with the same name. End result: the mistake was figured out quickly, it was explained to the whole group and everybody had a good time (except, I suppose, for the woman who was actually supposed to be there).
From Abstruse Goose:
A few nights back, Orion sets over the hills west of Thatcher, Utah:
Two more photos posted on my photo blog.
An interesting discussion of international law and the rights of private enterprise:
Does Asteroid Mining Violate Space Law?
Opinions seem to be all over the place. A quick glance seems to suggest that American legal opinion is “sure, go for it,” while non-American opinion might trend towards “no yu can’t haz.”
But it’s a weird, untested legal area. My opinion: go for it. If anyone pitches a fit… well, the true power of law enforcement lies in *enforcement.* If the UN decides that private asteroid mining is illegal… what are they gonna do about it?
A secondary benefit to the future might come about if the US decides it’s legal and the UN decides otherwise: the risk of conflict in space would increase. While this might seem to be a *bad* thing, just consider the possibilities:
Alternate Reality A – it’s legal, nobody messes with the miners, and 500 space miners ply their trade, and add a few trillio0n to the US GDP annually.
Alternate Reality B – the UN declares it illegal and tries to mess with the miners. 500 miners ply their trade and add a few trillion to the us GDP annually. A hundred UN space pirates try to mess with the miners. A hundred US Colonial Marines are permanently stationed to fight off the space pirates.
The result would be an increase in space activity. Kinda rough in the beginning, ut the exploitation of space might go faster. Of course, this would require an American government that thought that it was right and proper for American companies to make buckets of money in and from space. Fortunately, unless Planetary Resources is much further along than they’ve revealed, it will be several Presidential election cycles before they start scraping platinum off of nearby asteroids.
BONUS: It might incentivize the UN to pull up stakes from NYC and relocate to Geneva or some such. I understand that this would be just fine with most New Yorkers.
They went public today… a company devoted specifically to asteroid mining. Woo!
http://www.planetaryresources.com
Yes, their website does have a place to turn in a resume. And yes, I’ve done so. Me, and probably 10,000 other space geeks.
Looking off to the north tonight:
The green glow on the northern horizon would seem to be due to the emissions of high altitude ionized oxygen. That didn’t last too long, though; the green glow faded and was replaced with a fainter pinkish glow due to nitrogen emissions.
Also: a small cloud passed over the quarry, and was lit up by the powerful lights. As it did so, it became surprisingly colorful. Also visible are a whole mess of satellites.
FYI: at the end of the session, the “current auroral oval” from Spaceweather.com looked like this:
In March, Pegasus Models released a 1/32 plastic model kit of Vermithrax Pejoritive, the dragon from the 1981 movie “Dragonslayer.” It’s not the pose I would’ve chosen, and it’s pretty pricey, but I’ve wanted a good model of this critter ever since I saw the movie… thirty years ago (holy crap… I’M OLD!!!)
One source is HERE.
It’s hardly news that a lot of spiffy model kits have been released in the past few years. A number of modestly awesome Star Trek kits, “War of the Worlds” kits (both 1950’s and 2005 movie versions), re-releases of “2001” models, all kinds of stuff that model builders have been dreaming about for years… decades, even. While that’s great, it may be the last gasp of greatness for a dying hobby. Plastic model kits, like model trains, are a dwindling part of the hobby industry. Hard to compete with Yon Computer Games.