Irma continues to exhibit a remarkably impressive satellite presentation. The intensity was increased to 160 kt on the 1800 UTC intermediate public advisory based on a couple of SFMR winds of 160 kt measured in the northeastern eyewall by the Air Force aircraft just prior to that time. The minimum pressure measured by a dropsonde in the eye was 926 mb. Irma becomes only the fifth Atlantic basin hurricane with a peak wind speed of 160 kt or higher. The others are Allen (1980), the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, Gilbert (1988), and Wilma (2005).
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Irma is a potentially catastrophic category 5 hurricane and will bring life-threatening wind, storm surge, and rainfall hazards to portions of the northeastern Leeward Islands tonight and tomorrow. These hazards will spread into the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico tomorrow.
“The Orville” as shown in the trailers looked like a funny Star Trek parody, but it sounds like what they actually produced was a Star Trek-like *drama* with a few jokes. The reviews cover the first three episodes, and it really doesn’t sound very good. A lot of shows start off as stinkers and soon find their way, so maybe the rest of the season will be better. But then some series start off as stinkers and stay that way.
And on the other hand, this review gives it a 9 out of 10:
Since “race issues” are all the rage these days, it’s interesting to see how other cultures do it. Yes, yes, I know, only white people can be racist… or so say people who, based on the prejudiced race-based opinions they spout, you’d *swear* were racist. But it sure seems like something very like racism seems to exist pretty universally across all cultures and ethnicities.
Take, for example, the Japanese. They are so efficient at it they’re racist against *themselves.* If you watch this and come away pondering “say, that kinda reminds me of big city elitist white liberals and white rednecks,” then, well, I guess that’s on you.
President Barack Obama was the best salesman the AR-15 ever saw. Gun owners were justifiably afraid that he and his fellow travelers, the likes of Pelosi and Boxer and the rest of the civilian disarmament fetishists, would pass laws banning the purchase or even ownership of a perfectly good rifle. Fortunately, reason for once prevailed.
A few weeks ago I went to a gun show south of Salt Lake city. It has been a year or more since i went to the last one, and at the time the chances seemed fair that the Obama years would be followed by the Hillary years. The gun show *then* was busy, packed with both sellers and buyers. The one a few weeks ago? Much smaller, about 2/3 the number of sellers, far fewer buyers. The panic is over.
So it seems that for at least the next few years, AR-15s should be had for reasonable prices, calmly, and without any fuss.
But now there’s a new item of political relevance: anything with MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) printed on it. This Trump campaign motto has become a new boogeyman for the Left, with people losing their fargin; minds when they see someone daring to wear such a thing. Behold:
Pretty much what the title says. Rather astonishingly, though, the school administration has come down on the side of the *two* students that the math teacher freaked out at, and not only allowed the students to wear their shirts, but gave the teacher an undefined talkin’-to.
INSANE!!
High school teacher calls Trump shirt a "swastika" and makes him take it off in class!
Me, I was never all that impressed with MAGA. But it’s things like this that make me *want* to pick up a MAGA hat. The difficulty for that little fantasy of mine is that people around *here* are generally pretty reasonable, and even though many might not like Trump and may not have voted for him (as I didn’t), they’re unlikely to go all Antifa-crap on anyone wearing a MAGA hat or shirt.
Still, I have high hopes and actual expectations that when the teacher in this story returned to her classroom the next day, or tomorrow perhaps, that she’ll be met with a sea of MAGA shirts.
Such as here:
I don’t know the background here, but the teacher here gives *every* indication of being the actual source of the problem.
Neutronium is a common substance in science fiction. It is a real substance of incredible density, so a lot of authors have decided that it would make a neato structural element. The problem: it would explode.
Neutronium is, as the name suggests, a substance made out of pure neutrons. It exists in neutron stars… but really nowhere else. It *can’t* really exist anywhere else. Neutrons exists in close proximity in the nuclei of atoms, but there they are held in place with the strong nuclear force; eliminate the protons, and the neutrons will go flying apart. In neutron stars, the neutrons are held together solely by gravity. If you were to somehow teleport a chunk of neutronium off a neutron star, it would promptly explode.
Here’s an old video from Thunderf00t explaining another problem with neutronium: outside of the gravitational field of neutron stars and the strong force of nuclei, neutrons decay with a half life of about 10 minutes. And the results of that are pretty energetic.
So if you want to use neutronium in your sci-fi story, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.
North Korea set off their sixth nuclear explosion a little while ago. They *claim* that is was not only an H-bomb but also miniaturized for installation on an ICBM.
No information on the yield of the bomb, though a magnitude 6.3 quake was generated. The previous test, about 10 kilotons, created a 5.3 quake. Which might mean this blast would be on the order of 100 kilotons, safely in the H-bomb range.
