Asteroid 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua) turns out to have been reddish – like a lot of outer solar system objects – and had a length-to-diameter ratio of about ten. Funky. Overall length of about 400 meters, no detectable gas or dust, indicating solid rock and/or metal. Tumble rate was once per 7.3 hours.
Irrational hypothesizing:
1: It’s Gungnir.
2: A starship, long dead.
3: A planet killer, badly targeted.
The headline is more than a little misleading. “Mad Mike” here isn’t a rocket scientist; in fact, this actual-Flat-Earther states quite clearly that he doesn’t believe in science. Still, he spent a whole lot of money building himself a “skycycle”- like rocket vehicle with which to lob himself into the air.
If you have time to kill and want to chuckle sadly, take a look at this winners Facebook page. He’s not just any Flat Earther, he’s one of those belligerent ones. He thinks that somehow lobbing himself a short distance into the sky will “prove” the Flat Earth delusion to be true… where somehow decades of high altitude balloons, sounding rockets, orbital flights and missions to the moon and beyond somehow all seemed to miss it.
And if there was any lasting doubt that the news media is just not very good, here’s a collection of headlines that will make aerospace engineers – including former rocket engineers like myself – want to pull their hair out:
Not only is there a whole lot of copying off each other – rather than, you know, actual journalismizing – there’s the repeated mis-use of the word “scientist.” Even disregarding the fact that he doesn’t believe in science, there’s the basic fact that he’s not actually *doing* any science.
About time. Taxpayers have been footing the bill to keep Manson fed and housed since 1970. Defenestration is a *lot* cheaper.
I’m beginning to become more and more of the opinion that it just might be a good idea to segregate boys from girls in public school, at least up until junior high or high school. That way there’d at least be the potential of teaching kids in ways that are actually appropriate to them, and, much as it’s become popular to believe otherwise, boys and girls *are* inherently different in may important ways.
Take the source (“Prager U”) for what it’s worth, but there re some interesting points raised here:
I’ve long held the view, and expressed it on this blog, that standardized education isn’t for everyone. I don’t believe that society is best off by forcing everyone to stay in the same classes all the way through 12th grade. Some students would simply be better off if they were allowed the leave school some years earlier and be sent into some sort of trade; if nothing else, the *other* students wouldn’t need to be subjected to their bullying, criminality and stupidery. But as the video points out, there are good cases to be made for separating male from female lesson plans. Years ago I wrote about how some of the books I was forced to read in school damn near turned me off reading forever, because they’re just the wrong damned kind of books for me. But I do recall that at the same time I was struggling to give the very slightest of damns about “Sense and Sensibility” and “Little Women” and “I remember Mama” and “Wuthering Heights,” a lot of the girls in the class seemingly couldn’t get enough of it. But did we read Heinlein? Wells? Verne? Sun Tzu? Rand? Lovecraft? Oh, hell no.
Some might argue that it’s important to cram the “classics” into kids in order to “expose them to a wide range of literature blah, blah, blah.” But if the stuff you expose them to is stuff that they’ll *hate,* stuff that they’ll get little to nothing out of, what good are you doing? Chances are good you’re doing *negative* work. Not only are those students getting nothing out of the assignment and thus wasting their time and the teachers, they are also probably so bored that they’re kicking up a fuss that’s ruining the experience for those students who *can* get something out of it. So if there is a simple way to at least get a *crude* semblance of optimization out of the process – like, say, segregating boys from girls and letting boys be aggressive energetic little shits while the girls are, well girls – then huzzah, everybody is better off.
One common refrain is that at some point in the edumacation process, boys become aggressive in class. Not in the beating the tar out of people sense, but in the “Oooh, oooh, call on me, teacher, I know the answer” sense that modern progressives liken to “mansplaining” and “manterrupting,” while girls are less aggressive in that way. Well… fine. Then wouldn’t it be better to separate them? Teach them in the ways that’s best for ’em?
On one hand, it’s always fun to watch the fascists on the far left tear each other apart over matters of ideology. On the other hand, it’s a little disturbing when you consider the unfortunate amount of political power they wield, and how their disdain for due process might well transform society.
So, in this case, we’ve got an actress I’ve never heard of accusing a writer I’ve never heard of of raping her some years ago. But unusually, the writer has a friend in the form of Z-grade actress and political idjit Lena Dunham. Apparently Lena knows the writer well enough to think that the accusations don’t sound right. Unfortunately for Lena, she had the unmitigated gall to actually mention that publicly. So… how’d that work out for her?
In today’s “some white feminists ain’t sh*t” news, Lena Dunham has proven once again that she’s a hot flaming garbage barge of trash, after defending a male writer on her defunct HBO series Girls, when it came to accusations that he raped a 17-year-old actress.
If history has taught anything, it’s that the most vehement hate is directed not at the “other,” but at the heretic. If this situation was clearly something that would stay internal within the members of the regressive left… hey, great, knock yourselves out, kids. But the problem is that it will (and in fact long has) bleed out into the rest of society. Someone makes an accusation? the accused is automatically guilty. Someone defends the accused? That defender is also guilty.
UPDATE: It gets even better. By expressing doubt based on experience, now Lena Dunham is a racist.
I don’t know who the hell most of these people are, but it’s all kinds of entertaining to see them tearing each other apart. They are trying to tear down western civilization, but they seem to be having some trouble keeping it together.
Resculpted the lower loop *again.* The middle loop was angled up a few degrees. Now the model has all the major chunks; now come the innumerable little fiddly detaily bits.
A recent acquisition from ebay was a pretty good B&W glossy showing a Martin Company illustration of the Titan IIIC launch vehicle, circa August, 1964. One of the better Titan IIIC illustrations I’ve seen, showing the innards to good effect.
I have uploaded the full 600-dpi scan to the 2017-11 APR Extras Dropbox available to all $4 and up APR Patreon patrons. It’s in two formats… the raw scan, and a cleaned-up version that looks better. Also included is the press release printed on the back of the glossy. If you are interested, take a look at the APR Patreon and consider signing up.
It’s just this easy:
Hmmm…
2 in 3 don’t think repeated unwanted invitations to drinks, dinner, or dates is sexual harassment
OK, so the lesson here apparently is… if you ask someone out and they say no, NEVER ASK THEM OUT EVER AGAIN.
You gotta wonder what the end result of the acceptance of this sort of rule would be. Since first invitations often fail, it seems that the only people who would persist, and thus stand a chance of success, would be the rule-breaking kind. The rule-following kind would thus be preferentially locked out of dating success. *Unless* they took a different approach, and instead of repeatedly asking out the one person they actually like, they just ask out a whole bunch of largely random people. So, this sort of rule would seem to tend towards driving dating success for the “alpha” types and the “hookup culture” types.
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll work out great.