Lukla Airport in Nepal is small, and at 9300+ feet altitude. It’s also one of (if not the) most dangerous airports in the world.
[youtube OMiXZqEnSd0]
[youtube EvFo2VBTLck]
There’s no wasting time taxiing after touchdown…
[youtube F4fEblsidH0]
And while not as terrifying, this looks like fun too:
[youtube w_Pz94DIhvs]
Sigh. Man I miss flying…
Marvin’s doing ok. She’s grooming herself actively, a major improvement from her initial state. She’s *starting* to take an interest in play, though only an interest. She still completely ignores – or perhaps, cannot see – laser dots. From experience, though, cats that have recently had to survive by pouncing on *actual* bugs and varmints are generally uninterested in laser dots; they only become interested after a span of months away from *real* targets.
She *loves* being petted, scratched or just laying next to a human. Given what she has gone through, and continues to go through (getting poked, prodded and having nasty meds stuffed into her mouth), this continues to surprise me.
A collection of vids showing the moment the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion shockwave reached ground level.
[youtube tq02C_3FvFo]
Yikes.
A brief video describing recent work on graphene-based supercapacitors. The end result might be metal-free capacitors that can store as much energy as modern batteries, but would be able to charge up a hundred or a thousand times faster. A cell phone that charges in 2 seconds; an electric car that charges in a minute, rather than the multiple-hours currently required.
As well as getting rid of the toxic and expensive metals current batteries require, the graphene batteries could, it seems, be produced by virtually anyone: their prototypes were made by coating blank DVDs with graphite oxide and zapping it with the standard DVD-burner laser. If this can be made truly functional and distributable to the public, imagine the possibilities: anyone with a DVD burner could just crank out thin sheets of supercapacitor, and these could be use to built up capacitors or perhaps arbitrary size and storage capacity, and perhaps of arbitrary shape. Batteries of large storage and vast power that can be shaped to fit within – oh, let’s say a Gauss gun the design of which is simply downloaded off the web, and printed on your home 3D printer.
Heck: make long, thin graphene capacitors in the shape of RC helicopter blades, then mount them to RC helicopters. Given the strength of graphene, this would seem a good structural choice. Replace other structures with graphene-capacitor structures, and you might be able to produce an RC helicopter with, effectively, *no* weight penalty for the battery. Automobile skin panels. Aircraft skin panels. Aircraft spars. Flexible sheets that form portions of clothes; integrate them with some sort of piezo electric cloth that charges up the capacitor cloth from motions such as walking. Integrate the graphene capacitor directly with photovoltaic cells, then mount directly to your roof.
I am familiar with – hell, on intimate terms with – the concept that “no good deed goes unpunished.” But this here’s a story that *may* demonstrate the opposite:
In short: woman accidentally drops her engagement ring into the beggin’ cup of one Billy Ray Harris, homeless feller. Rather than pawning it, he decides that it was probably an accidental donation and holds onto it; a few days later the woman returns, asks if he has it, he gives it back, and she sets up a donation site to thank him, hoping to get him $1,000. As of this writing, there are over $117K in donations.
With a story like this, cynicism – built on experience – suggests that a followup “where are they now” news article from a year or three down the line will include phrases like “squandered” and “drug use” and “found murdered.” But one can always hope that Mr. Harris will be able to make good use of this windfall, turn his life around. If the story is as advertised (“if”), then he sounds like a decent enough guy. I think he made a very important observation here:
“What I actually feel like is, ‘what has the world come to when a person who returns something that doesn’t belong to him and all this happens?'”
————–
FOR COMPARATIVE PURPOSES: Last summer I posted about a bus monitor who was abused by some horrible little brats. Someone set up a donation site for her; in the end, it raised $703K. Discuss!
The Block II Apollo Command Module was jam-packed with stuff, and boxes in which to put stuff.
The Mk 3 bomb (“Fat Man”) was scaled incorrectly, so I fixed that and added some more, including the rarely illustrated Mk 2 plutonium gun bomb, casings for which were built and tested, but the bomb itself cancelled prior to construction since it wouldn’t have worked. The Mk 2 is somewhat provisional, based on some not-excellent photos.
A color version of the art previously shown HERE.
A 1962 NASA graphic showing the Saturn I, Saturn V and one or the more stereotypical of the Nova configurations to scale. Note that they all show direct-landing Apollo spacecraft… an extra stage, and no LEM. The Nova is similar to the “Saturn C-8” configuration. Note that the second stage of the Nova is larger in diameter and almost as long as the first stage of the Saturn C-5, and would have made the basis of a fairly substantial launch vehicle on it’s own.
Box fed, full-auto, high-capacity, high-powered assault crossbow. Out of Britain, no less.
[youtube BSjCY2kGyfI]
Note for those who might think this is more spectacular than it actually is: the flexing of the bow is converted into the kinetic energy of the bolt. The electrochemical energy in the battery is converted into the mechanical energy required to pull the bowstring back. With every step there are losses. But even at 100% efficiency, you still can’t get more total energy out of the bolts than you have in the battery to run the system. So while it’s cool – and I do indeed want one – a *gun* remains a more efficient energy storage and kinetic-energy-conversion system.