SpaceX’s “Grasshopper” continues envelope-expansion.
[youtube B4PEXLODw9c]
Dec 262012
Dec 262012
Yow. A shredder you can stuff a car through.
[youtube tPDLX0koXFs]
Dec 252012
I’ve never been enamored of petitions. And especially of the White House electronic petitions; they always seemed to be of no practical value (see: the various “We Wanna Secede” petitions). Still, the petition asking to deport the hysterical hoplophobe Piers Morgan is fairly entertaining. The rule is, if the petition gets more than 25,000 signers, the White House will have to examine it and respond to it. When the “Deport Morgan” petition went online last week, I recall seeing some sneering that it only had 6,000 or 8,000 signers. But as of now, it’s over 67,000 signers. Will Morgan get deported? Not likely. But will Obama’s spokes-weasel have to go on record defending the indefensible? Most likely.
Deport British Citizen Piers Morgan for Attacking 2nd Amendment
UPDATE: And from the other direction…
UK Government: Stop Piers Morgan from being deported back to the UK from America
We got rid of him once and why should we have to suffer again. The Americans wanted him so they should put up with him. We washed our hands of him a long time ago.
Dec 252012
… In the Middle East.
This, I imagine, will come as a surprise to approximately nobody. When two religions face off and one of them is allowed to kill and forcibly convert members of the other, then the victim-religion is at a massive disadvantage.
In reality, when it comes to a conflict between civilized people and savages… bet on the savage, *especially* if they have access to roughly equivalent weaponry. When civilized people conflict, it is the ability to fight savagely that wins: Nazi Germany wasn’t defeated because the Allies had “right” on our side; we won because we had millions of pissed-off Russians on our side. We didn’t beat Japan because Democracy is inherently better than God-Emperors; we won because we firebombed and nuked their cities out of existence. Since WWII, the US has gone to great effort to *not* engage in any sort of warfare that would be seen as unnecessarily cruel… and as a result, in order to eke out even the barest victories against relatively weak opponents, we have to dump vast amounts of resources into the fight. The ancient Romans knew that sometimes you had to salt the enemies fields and poison their wells.
And so, to religion in the middle east: one religion in particular is perfectly comfortable with fighting dirty. In the marketplace of ideas, they are the ones who respond to debate by beheading children. *OF* *COURSE* they are going to dominate. This has long been the way of things. Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae from 785 was little different from many modern interpretations of sharia: it called for the murder of any Germanic pagan who did not convert to Christianity. While this and related efforts, like Charlemagne’s massacre of 4500 pagans at Verden, led to the rise of Vikings, as the Norse rose up to defend themselves and took the fight to the church that was attempting to exterminate their culture, it did, in the end, succeed in wiping out the Old Norse faith and replaced it with an alien faith from the Middle East. Here, of course, the Norse were a small population compared to the Christians, impoverished, with few allies, poorly provisioned and at the edge of the world. In the modern world, Christianity is a vastly populous religion with buckets of money. But there are few Christian theocracies of the type there once were, certainly nothing along the lines of the Islamic states. Many of the Middle Eastern Islamic states will soon enough expel the last of the non-Muslims from their lands, while Muslims in “Christian” nations will be allowed to thrive and expand. The only way for Christianity to stand up to the onslaught would seem to be to adopt Muslim policies: expel the Muslims, ban their practices. And this is not going to happen… it would be “uncivilized.” And it would be no improvement over the alternative.
The end of oil, of course, may greatly change things. When oil is no longer an issue, nobody will give a damn about the Middle East anymore. With no more oil, there will be no more money to fund global jihad. With no more oil, the local economies will collapse and devolve into horrific local warfare over scarce resources. This will not only take resources and effort away from conquering everyone else, it will also be just bad PR for the local religion. So while Christianity has, on the whole, become “civilized” over the last few centuries, it just might survive if it can hold on long enough for Islam to run out of cash.
So… Merry Christmas or whatever.
Dec 252012
Saturn Ib, Saturn V in Skylab launch configuration, Saturn V in Apollo launch configuration.
Dec 242012
In 1977, General Dynamics produced the “Sneaky Pete” design for a stealthy fighter or attack aircraft. The design was quite similar to that of the later McDonnell-Douglas A-12 Avenger II, a delta flying wing with underslung inlets and a straight trailing edge. There were notable differences: an additional inlet on the upper surface, the exhaust was on the upper surface and there was a single pilot. It also appears that the Sneaky Pete had vertical stabilizers on the upper surface that would fold flush during cruise. Performance, weights, dimensions are all sadly unavailable. Sneaky Pete was part of the design evolution leading to the ATF (eventually won by Lockheed and became the F-22), though it seems very unlikely that it would have been capable of supersonic flight, much less supercruise.
Dec 242012
Penn Jillette lays a series of rational smackdowns on some news-types who have nothing to offer but fact-free emotional yammering. Guns, Aspergers, video games, Shakespeare… he’s surrounded by some substantial unthinkery. How he managed to maintain composure in the face of such monumental (and high-volume) stupidity is beyond me, but he did.
[youtube 06Lw7xa6lHU]
Dec 242012
The S-IVb stage of the Saturn Ib was equipped with three solid “ullage motors.” These relatively small solid rockets provided only a minimal acceleration to the vehicle; but that was enough. The purpose was not propulsive, per se, but just to give enough of an acceleration so that the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants would settle into the aft portions of their tanks. If this was not done, it would be entirely possible that the turbopump for the J-2 main engine would swallow helium pressurant gas rather than propellant, causing, at the very least, the engine to fail to ignite and very likely severe structural damage.
The ullage motors were Thiokol TX-280-10’s developing an average thrust of 3,460 pounds for 3.9 seconds. A few seconds after burnout the ullage motors and their fairings were ejected to reduce weight.
Dec 242012
Poisonous gas sprayed in Homs leaves seven people dead and scores affected, activists say
It appears that the Assad regime has started using chemical weapons.
But just to make things more entertaining…
Russian military advisers are manning some of Syria’s more sophisticated air defences – something that would complicate any future US-led intervention
Dec 232012
Starting earlier this year I started to notice evidence of mice in the house (not uncommonly by catching sight of one of my cats – generally Raedthinn – dashing off with a captured mouse). But things apparently really took off after the cats and I left here for a few weeks. Upon return, it was obvious that the little rodenty monsters had decided to move in and take over the place. Since I’ve been back, cleanup operations and mouse combat have consumed way too much of my time – and may well have had a role in my recent, fortunately rather brief, illness.
So I’ve been contemplating the possibility that I have been failing Civilization 101… Step One, Get Rid Of The Mice. I’ve been here 8 years and never had anything remotely resembling this sort of problem before. So clearly I’ve been failing in *something,* right?
Well… maybe not. I’ve been asking around, and every neighbor I’ve talked to has noticed a *massive* increase in rodents in the last year, both inside and outside. One farmer now has to contend with large numbers of full-up *rats* which he’s never even seen before. So what’s up here?
This is farm country. As far as I can tell, the farmers have been doing what they’ve been doing for decades, without substantial change. Except for things relating to weather. Last winter was warm and dry… not as much snow as usual. Summer was hot and dry… almost no rain. One consequence of that is that a standard farm practice was greatly curtailed until very late in the season: the burning of the fields. It is my hypothesis that in normal years, the rodents live their furry, plague-bearing lives out in the fields… until all of a sudden a wall of fire comes along and roasts a fair number of them, and burns up the food for the rest, limiting the population. But this year… no fires. At least not near as many, and much later than usual (IIRC, they’re generally in July; this year, September). So, the rodent populations were able to expand without getting roasted, and had more to gnaw on for longer. Thus, there was a huge population of them when the fires did eventually come, driving them out of the burnt fields into other unburnt fields, barns, feed lots and houses.
Lesson:
