Cat Science

 blather, cats, Crazy, history, humor, science, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
Oct 262013
 

Ermmm…

kittenmittens

If you must know, this was a 1958 US Navy study on the effect of being upside down for extended periods, apparently in preparation for spaceflight. The actual applicability of this to spaceflight biology seems dubious, but whatever. More photos of this are HERE, and the Life magazine article on this is HERE.

kitten-mittens

The feller in the photo is Dr. Dietrich Beischer. He, as the name implies, appears to have been a German scientist, and what there is online about him indicates that he was brought to the US after WWII as part of Project Paperclip. Look him up on Google and you’ll find a lot of jibberjabber about conspiracy theories, but it does appear that another one of his fun little projects was exposing US Navy sailors to microwave radiation.

Damn, son, way to live up to those old mad scientist cliches…

 Posted by at 10:47 pm

Advanced Saturn V concepts

 drawings, projects, rockets, spacecraft  9 Responses »
Oct 262013
 

In 1968, Boeing (manufacturer of the S-IC stage of the Saturn V) put out an illustration of advanced derivatives of the Saturn V. Published in the XIXth International Astronautical Congress, these included the Saturn V-25(S)U, which was a stretched Saturn V with improved F-1 and J-2 engines, with four 156″ diameter solid rocket boosters; the Saturn V/4-260, which used the same improved Saturn V, but with four 260″ diameter solid rocket boosters, with additional first stage liquid propellant in tankage ahead of the solid boosters. Additionally, the payload shroud could be increased in diameter from ten meters to 78 feet,and up to 290 feet in length. Further included was the Saturn V-XU, which was four improved Saturn V’s clustered together (both first and second stages), with a payload shroud 86.5 feet in diameter and 240 feet long; and an all-new Post-Saturn concept with a 75-foot-diameter core vehicle with optional 260″ diameter solid rocket boosters (up to twelve) and a payload shroud up to 120 feet in diameter. A payload of up to 4.2 million pounds was envisioned.

Two length options were shown… 410 feet and 500 feet. The 410 foot-long vehicles could be assembled within the VAB; the 500 foot-long vehicles would require that the payload be stacked onto the vehicle outside the VAB using a new crane mounted to the VAB roof.

 Posted by at 10:09 pm

One Last Toast

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, news  2 Responses »
Oct 262013
 

Public activities part of Doolittle Raiders’ Final Toast weekend at National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

When the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders’ make a final toast to their fallen comrades on Nov. 9 at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, the world can witness the historical moment.

Although the final toast ceremony is not open to the public, a LIVE feed of the event will be broadcast on The Pentagon Channel at 6 p.m. EST. A link to the LIVE stream will also be available on the day of the event at www.nationalmuseum.af.mil and www.af.mil.

Just four of the raiders are left.

 Posted by at 8:05 pm

How to get from 1968 to 2001: Part 2

 blather, history, science fiction  4 Responses »
Oct 262013
 

One of the first major historical events to follow the April premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey was, on June 5, 1968, when Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Democrat Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. The assassination is one of those things that could have *easily* been avoided; it was only made possible due to a late decision to take RFK out of the Abassador Hotel after giving a speech by walking through the kitchen rather than the ballroom, supposedly a shortcut. Had the decision gone the other way, RFK very likely would have walked out of the hotel without incident. While he was then behind in the polls to Hubert Humphrey for the Democrat Presidential nomination, it is very possible that events following his non-assassination would have led to his nomination.

So, it would then have been a race between RFK and Richard Nixon. In Real History, the election of 1968 was marred by riots; these likely would have still happened had RFK been the Dem nominee rather than Humphrey. It’s hard to tell how an RFK/Nixon election would have gone, but it seems reasonable to assume that it would have gone much the same as the Humphrey/Nixon election that actually happened, with Nixon winning a narrow margin in the popular vote.

But remember, this is a Kennedy vs. Nixon election. History had seen one of those before, in 1960. That was another close election, one that JFK won, in part, due to his close wins in Illinois and Texas. But then as now, it was known that the Democrat Party Machine was in full swing in Illinois, and Illinois politics is some of the most corrupt in the nation. Additionally, JFK’s VP candidate, LB Johnson, was one of the most immoral men ever to achieve high office in the US, and may well have helped fraudulently skew results in his home state of Texas. See a discussion of all this HERE. Whether or not this *actually* happened, many, including Nixon, *believed* it had happened. Importantly, it is by no means an unlikely scenario, and the Kennedys have hardly proven themselves paragons of honest and ethical politicking.

So: by November, 1968, RFK is polling slightly behind Nixon. Nixon assumes that RFK is going to cheat. Nixon was, it seems, on good terms with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Hoover, however, was not on good terms with the Kennedy clan. There have been rumors over the years that the reason why JFK did not fire Hoover when he took office was because he knew than Hoover had the dirt on *him.* So… Nixon assumes that RFK will be involved in chicanery in the upcoming election. And Hoover assumes this as well. And so on November 5, 1968, the election is held…

To be continued

 Posted by at 1:04 pm

That was a bit odd

 blather, critters  7 Responses »
Oct 262013
 

A few minutes ago, a bit before 1 AM, I was on my front porch doing some nitrocellulose lacquer spray painting (as one tends to do at these hours). At this time of night the local environs tend to be pretty quiet, with nothing but the wind – if there is any. So imagine my surprise when there was a sudden noise from the cluster of trees across the road. How to describe the sound… hmm. You know in the monster movie when Our Heroes are in the forest either hunting the monster or being hunted *by* the monster, and the monster starts moving through the trees, making big *crunching* sounds as it shoves branches and such out of the way? Yeah. About like that. Don;t know what it was, but it sounded sizable. Of course, on a silent night it may well have been nothing more than a raccoon or three moving through low dry brush, but it *sounded* the size of a bear.

I think there’s something in our evolutionary background that makes us a little sensitive to the sound of a largish critter moving through foliage. A few hundred thousand generations of Home Erectus getting gnawed upon by lions and wolves and such might’ve ground that sensitivity into the human gene code.

 Posted by at 12:23 am

How to get from 1968 to 2001

 blather, history, science fiction, spacecraft  23 Responses »
Oct 252013
 

I’m still working away on the 2001: A Space Odyssey Space Station V project (yeah, yeah, just a little slower than expected). The general concept is something I’ve been thinking about since the mid-1990’s, when 2001: In Real Life was still in the future.

Any description of “the present” merits – and usually requires – discussion of what happened in “the past.” Thus the SSV project, which is being put together as a report on the “current status” of the Station as of late 1999 (when, in 2001:ASO, Dr. Heywood Floyd passes through SSV on his way to Clavius Base), makes mention of the history of the Space Station program, including the previous 4 Stations. The question is, How to get from Real History to Fictional History while remaining believable?

I established a few grounds rules:

1) The divergence point(s) must be after the debut of 2001:ASO… April 2, 968.

2) Divergences must be based on human decisions changing history, not physical events. No cometary impacts or Yellowstone supervolcano explosions, for example.

3) The divergences must make sense… more or less.

4) The 2001:ASO movie is canon; stuff from secondary sources such as the 2001:ASO novel, 2010 (novel & movie), earlier versions of the 2001:ASO script, unused concept art, etc. can be used as backup material, so long as it does not conflict with 2001:ASO The Movie.

There is a trend in “Alternate History” to make major changes in the timeline, yet still have things kinda work out the same. See 2009’s “Star Trek,” for example: an incredibly powerful and advanced Romulan starship, enhanced with Borg technology, appears 120 years earlier. This completely alters history… yet thirty years later, Jim Kirk still winds up Captain of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (which while being *twice* the size of the original, still looks generally similar), with much the same crew in the same roles. But the worlds of 2001:ASO and 2001: IRL are *very* different. A massive and successful space program, a still extant Soviet Union, and an arms race in space including the Chinese, West Germans (thus implying a still extant East Germany) and French *screams* a timeline that is massively different from the world of 2001:IRL. So there is no need to try to shoehorn actual events into the world of 2001:OSO. Bill Clinton need not be President in 1999, for example.

So… how to get from April, 1968, with known historical events and world situation, to the world of 1999:ASO? I’ve come up with two known historical events that could have greatly changed things so that the disappointing space program of Real Life could perhaps have transformed into the amazing world of A Space Odyssey. And both revolve around hotels: The Ambassador and the Watergate.

 

To be continued…

 

 Posted by at 1:03 pm

Patent troll legislation

 news, politics  3 Responses »
Oct 242013
 

Here’s a law that actually looks pretty good:

Stop patent trolls. Support the Innovation Act of 2013.

The text of the law is a bloated bulk at 51 pages, far too much for me to bother to try to slog through, so it may well be loaded with crap. But assuming this summary is correct, it has some good points:

  • Heightened Pleading: The bill requires patent holders to provide basic details (such as which patents and claims are at issue, as well as what products allegedly infringe and how) when it files a lawsuit.
  • Fee shifting: The bill allows for a court to require the loser in a patent case to pay the winning side’s fees and costs. This makes it harder for trolls to use the extraordinary expense of patent litigation to force a settlement.
  • Transparency: The bill includes strong language requiring patent trolls to reveal the parties that would actually benefit from the litigation (called the real party in interest). Also, if the plaintiff is a shell-company patent troll, the defendant could require the real party in interest to join the litigation, forcing them to pay up if the patent troll can’t or won’t pay.
  • Staying customer suits: The bill requires courts to stay patent litigation against customers (such as a café using an off-the-shelf router to provide Wi-Fi) when there is parallel litigation against the manufacturer.
 Posted by at 6:01 pm

Time as an emergent property

 Hmm..., news, science  7 Responses »
Oct 242013
 

There’s times when I read about a scientific advance and wish that my lack of clear understanding of just what’s going on is due to being drunk. (Since I don’t get drunk, that makes that particular delusion kinda hard to hold onto.) Here’s one of those times:

Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement

Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first experimental results to prove it

More directly:

Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration

In the last years several theoretical papers discussed if time can be an emergent propertiy deriving from quantum correlations. Here, to provide an insight into how this phenomenon can occur, we present an experiment that illustrates Page and Wootters’ mechanism of “static” time, and Gambini et al. subsequent refinements. A static, entangled state between a clock system and the rest of the universe is perceived as evolving by internal observers that test the correlations between the two subsystems. We implement this mechanism using an entangled state of the polarization of two photons, one of which is used as a clock to gauge the evolution of the second: an “internal” observer that becomes correlated with the clock photon sees the other system evolve, while an “external” observer that only observes global properties of the two photons can prove it is static.

Buh.

Maybe it’s cuz it’s late and I’m tired. Yeah, that must be it.

 Posted by at 1:08 am
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