I think I’m pretty close on most of the geometry here. Probably need to resculpt the middle engine bar.
Nov 062017
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Nov 052017
Nov 052017
Well, here we go again, another whacko shooting a place up. As always there is a dearth of good information so far about the motives of the shooter, one Devin Patrick Kelley. One interesting snippet is that he was discharged from the USAF in 2014. Reports are that he was discharged for bad conduct. Some reports have it that he was dishonorably discharged. If this in fact the case, then he was legally barred from possessing a firearm:
Dishonorable Discharge and NFA Firearms
The dishonorable discharge is based on a general court-martial conviction. This means the conviction is a felony, regardless of what the underlying offense may have been. The convicted felon is banned from possessing a firearm including Title II Firearms (a Silencer, SBR, SBS, AOW, or Machine Gun).
A person who is convicted of a crime that is punishable by imprisonment for more than one year ( including a dishonorable discharge) is prohibited from possessing a firearm. Under 18 U.S.C. 922(g), a felon who is found guilty of gun possession may serve up to 10 years in prison.
If you have been convicted of a felony or a dishonorable discharge, be careful of constructive possession. You could be guilty of being in possession of a firearm if your spouse or another family or household member has a firearm that you “could” access.
I don’t know if “bad conduct discharges” result in the same revocation of gun ownership rights as a “dishonorable discharge.”
His motives may or may not be discernible. However, it should be instructive to keep an eye on politicians in coming days and weeks to see who tries to use this incident to further their aims: to those politicians, guys like this are their heroes and footsoldiers.
Nov 052017
Currently being sold on ebay is a display model of a missile, a “Martin ASM.” ASM almost certainly means “Air to Surface Missile,” but otherwise there’s no further info. Seller seems to think it’s related to the Assault Breaker project, but it looks vaguely like a Skybolt-ish air-launched ballistic missile.
Nov 042017
For no quantifiable reason, “catch you on the flip, suckas!” gets me every time.
Nov 042017
I’m all in favor of people spending their money on essentially pointless high-end toys such as supercars; they get to have whatever enjoyment they get from driving them around or just possessing them, the people who build them get paid, the state of the art gets advanced. A win all-around. Added bonus when some drunk idiot takes a supercar out and promptly plows into a tree; so long as they don’t kill anyone else, society benefits by:
1: Being reduced one idiot (extra-super bonus points if said idiot hasn’t gotten around to breeding yet)
2: Inheritors get paid before said idiot could have blown even more money on truly frivolous things like cocaine, spirit mediums or donating to the next Hillary Clinton
3: Other owners of the type of supercar now being pried off of a tree now see their investments go up a notch through the magic of supply and demand
All that said: I do wonder about the mindset that says “Not only do I want one of these… here, I’ll pull out my checkbook and actually buy one.”
The world’s first 300MPH road car: Hennessey’s £1.2million Venom F5 is set to become the fastest production car of all time
Sure, it’s pretty. Sure, it’s a marvel of engineering. But where can you *really* go to let that thing loose? Top speed limit here in the US is 85 miles per hour,with 75 and 80 being common in the civilized part of the nation. Going 300 miles per hour would be quite a bit illegal and a whole lot dangerous, especially since the New Deal and Great Society programs that have become the bulk of the federal government haven’t exactly prioritized infrastructure maintenance. Having just driven across Nebraska, I would have *loved* to have been able to do so at 300 miles per hour… but I’m not sure the hardest accelerating, hardest-braking supercar in the world would have been able to attain 300 miles per hour for more than a few seconds between each work zone, never mind the slowly crawling truck that lurk side-by-side taking up all lanes.
So unless you love taking your multimillion dollar street car to race tracks or flying it on cargo planes to other lands… 300 miles per hour just seems like wasted, excess capability.
Nov 042017
Anyone who has hung around my blog log enough has seen me bitch, moan and whine about my lack of marketing skills, with the consequent dismal sales of… well, everything I try to sell. I can take a decent photo from time to time. I make some snazzy blueprints. Me write gud, on occasion. And with most products I count myself lucky if I make $50 in the first month.
So imagine my admiration/annoyance upon seeing this “commercial” a guy slapped together to help sell his girlfriends used car:
My first thought was “that’s pretty good.” My second thought was “I wonder how well it’ll work, let’s check the ebay listing for the car.” So, I did:
1996 Honda Accord EX 2-door coupe, green, automatic, leather seats
With over 4 days left on the auction, the high bid is currently over $100,000.
Granted, chances are *real* good that one or more of the highest bidders will turn out to be jokers, and the girlfriend won’t actually get a hundred grand for the car. But even so, it’s a safe bet that whatever she gets, it’ll be *far* higher than she would’ve gotten otherwise.
But here’s an even better used car commercial:
As one of the YouTube comments says… “This is the most epic thing in the entire history of people telling lies to sell stuff.”
Nov 032017
Memphis police put ankle monitor GPS devices on dozens of domestic assault victims
Yes, you read that right: they’re putting the GPS trackers on the *victims.*
Now, it’s not quite as bad as you might be thinking. In fact, on a certain level it’s a good idea: the system alerts the victim if the person who assaulted them, who is also wearing a GPS tracker, comes within a specified distance. But… there is a more obvious, less distressing way to go here: instead of tracking a monitor strapped to the ankle of the victim, just track their *phone.* These days it’s a reasonable assumption that just about everybody has a GPS-equipped phone of some type and keeps it near them. If the villain gets too close, the victims phone starts going buggo with warnings and text messages. Perhaps authorities would even call or Skype to speak to the victim and warn them and check on them. No answer, or a lack of the proper code response, and the cops are sent to apply a beatdown to the villain.
Nov 032017
Because.
Ahem:
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Nov 032017
Two years ago, Bruce the cat fell into my possession via the simple process of walking up to me at the post office and yelling at me… and then stretching up to me when I reached down to pick him up. As y’all may recall, one of the first things I did with him was take him to the vet and get him checked for Horrible Diseases… and he tested positive for Feline Leukemia. The vet said that this was a death sentence, with a lifespan to be measured in a handful of increasingly painful and unpleasant months, and suggested that the best thing would be to put him down promptly. Because I’m a sucker for a hard luck cat, I instead opted to give him his vaccinations anyway and to give him the best life I could for a few months until things got bad, and then make the hard decision.
This is him as of a week or two ago:
There is, it seems, a narrow window when a cat can show positive for a recently acquired case of leukemia, and yet the virus can be cleared out of the cats system via vaccination. I would imagine it’s something like rabies: an essentially 100% fatal virus that you can be virtually 100% “cured” of if you get vaccinated against soon enough after infection. Bruce, it seems, got *real* lucky. Kicked out of his apartment, living on the streets next to speeding cars, infected with a fatal virus, he yelled at just the right soft-hearted schmuck at just the right moment and now he’s living in the lap of luxury.