… in Oregon, if you don’t have the permission of the government.
After Challenging Red Light Cameras, Oregon Man Fined $500 for Practicing Engineering Without a License
Apr 262017
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Apr 262017
Had a thought for a sci-fi scene: a spaceship has taken a shellacking and needs internal bracing in a hurry. Our Hero leaps to the rescue with a can of Titanium Spray Foam: operates like a can of modern day foam insulation in a can, but the end result is foamed titanium rather than foamed hydrocarbon polymer. Something like this would be pretty obviously handy; with it you could turn a tent into a bomb shelter or, if you are kinda upset with someone, a dandy way to glue your hostage to a chair or bind their hands with something much more sturdy than handcuffs. But there’s a problem: how could this possibly work?
One obvious approach: your can sprays actual liquid hot molten titanium, foamed via the introduction of a high temperature inert gas such as argon. If the temperature is very precisely controlled and the foam comes out *just* above the melting point, as the argon outgasses the bulk temperature should drop just below “freezing” and the foam should solidify. The problems here are pretty obvious, not least of which is laying down foam that’s white hot.
Second obvious approach: it’s not actually titanium but some handwavy futuristic and extremely strong polymer, perhaps infused with carbon fibers or bits of graphene or some such. This is likely workable, but it has a host of potential problems. It might be dissolved with simple chemicals like alcohol, acetone or even water. It might have poor temperature issues… it melts at 100 celcius and bursts into flames at 140 degrees. And, again, it’s not actually titanium.
The goal would be a roughly room-temperature process that lays down titanium foam. Now, if there was some chemical that dissolved titanium like acetone dissolves polystyrene, and when the chemical evaporates the titanium – like the polystyrene – returns to its solid state, then the process would seem simple. A two-part sprayer, one that has solvent-dissolved titanium in some sort of liquid polymer in one can, and another can with the curative for the polymer. Mix the two together, spray out as a foam; the polymers mix and form the bubbly matrix, viscous enough to hold the liquid titanium in place. The polymer foam sets, the titanium spreads into a thin film covering all the polymer bubbles; the solvent evaporates and leaves the titanium foam behind. Ta-da.
Sounds great, but again there are problems. First up: is there even in a theory an acetone/styrene equivalent solvent for titanium? Sure, there are acids that will dissolve metals, but when the acid evaporates what’s left behind is a sludge of goop that reduces to metal powder, not a solid mass of structural metal.
Secondly: let’s say you’ve got a titanium solvent. What are the chances that it would be a good idea to breathe that stuff in while it evaporates from your work area? If it melts titanium, chances are real good that it’ll glue all the rest of your spaceships metallic moving surfaces together. And, I dunno, reduce your DNA into a pile of constituent atoms.
So… any ideas?
Apr 252017
Took these shots in early March while leaving a grocery store parking lot in Tremonton. I’ve heard multiple times that it’s illegal to run these little things up and down the streets, but maybe they mean the smaller ATVs. But in either case they’re all used with considerable regularity for gettin’-around purposes out here in the sticks.
Apr 242017
Wherein Salon decries Bernie Sanders for not being “progressive’ enough:
Bye bye, Bernie: He’s not fit to captain the Democratic ship if he can’t stop chasing the great white male
Snerk:
Being pro-choice is not an optional part of being a progressive. Full stop. There is no justice for women, there is no economic justice for women, without the right to control their reproductive lives. The right to have an abortion is not a “social issue.” It is an issue of fundamental rights; it is a matter of economic rights.
Because, obviously, if a woman doesn’t have the right to abort her baby, she has no reproductive rights. Because obviously she cant go on the pill or get Norplant or an IUD or have her cis-male partnertron wear a condom or, y’know, not have sex. Impossible. Can’t happen.
Apr 242017
Boy, the SJW’s get in a snit over “manspreading,” when a guy just happens to sit on, say, a subway with his legs a little bit apart (note for those unaware of male anatomy: sitting like this isn’t so much a “choice” as it is “that’s how dudes are built.”). The problem with this “manspreading” apparently is that it takes up extra space, space that an SJW could use to park her therapy teacup chy-hooah-hooah or a bunch of protest signs or bags of terribly important merchandise.
And so, behold these glorious ads from the early 1970s, where Lee attempted to sell pants that few men today would be caught dead in, never mind alive. Seems odd to have so many different ads with different models and different clothes, all in the exact same pose. Still, I’d pay real money to see male models *today* dress up in these fashion disasters, find some SJWs and intentionally pose like this across from them. Heck, maybe it’d be better not to have male models, per se… a bunch of schlubby dudes might be even better.
Apr 232017
The video is slightly out of date, especially now that Le Pen came in second in the first round of voting, but the videos of street scenes in France are certainly interesting.
Apr 232017
Some more of what you don’t want to see your rocket doing.
Soviet N-1:
Titan IV:
Delta II:
Soyuz:
Ariane V:
Years ago I worked for a self-important egotistical jackass who thought that the way to create progress in the field of aerospace engineering was to hide from failures, to disappear all evidence of such, to pretend they didn’t happen. When you have ten-pound chunks of twisted aluminum zipping past your head at a reasonable fraction of the speed of sound, it makes you sit up and take notice, and it makes you want to make that not happen again. And the *best* way to prevent future disasters is to learn from past disasters. And you don’t learn from them by trying to pretend they didn’t happen.
With rockets, failures are often quite spectacular. And few things make PR people more unhappy than spectacular failures. But PR people do not fix problems with the design or manufacture of rockets; that’s for the scientists, engineers and technicians. And they need to see the fails, and be reminded of the fails. And in areas of engineering that are leading edge… they kinda need to *revel* in the fails. Failure is where you learn.
Apr 222017
If there was ever a demonstration of the combination of “technical genius” with “wartime desperation,” it was the Bachem Natter from late in World War II. This German design was a point defense interceptor, from a time when B-17’s, B-24’s and Lancasters freely roamed the sky, laying waste to the German infrastructure. The Natter was a rocket-powered, vertical takeoff, partially reusable manned surface-to-air missile. It was to be armed with a multitude of unguided explosive-tipped rockets in the nose, probably to be launched as a single salvo. Reportedly, someone had the bright idea that the pilot would then aim his plane at another bomber for a ramming attack, bailing out at the last second. But since bailing out meant separating the nose from just forward of the cockpit aft bulkhead, the likelihood is vanishingly low that either the pilot would survive or that the Natter would continue forward in a predictable path. The more reasonable approach would still be for the pilot to bail out, but for both the pilot and the aircraft to pop chute and land safe enough to be recovered and reused.
The Natter was launched unmanned a few times and manned once, killing the pilot. It was *kind* of a neat idea, but the execution was not so good. The Germans would have been better advised to have worked on unmanned surface to air missiles than the Natter. But for all the claims of vaunted German efficiency, the Nazi regime was astonishingly inefficient, with many redundant and non-communicative programs.
Just as well, in retrospect.
There are many photos and illustrations of the Natter out there, but I figured these diagrams might be of interest.
Apr 202017
Now this right here is funny.
We’ve all encountered this type of smug progressive, either online, in other forms of media or, if we lived sinfully in a previous life and are now being forced to pay off karma at a vastly accelerated rate, in real life. And while the real ones are nothing if not monumentally frustrating – they are either wholly deluded, or they’re lying to you – they are readily mockable.
Apr 202017
Leftist violence seems to be all the rage these days (get it? get it? bah. I’m dropping comedy gold here, people). The fascists in the antifa movement, the nuts in the anarchist movement, the whackos in the “social justice” cult… they’ve been using screaming, shouting, screwing with people just trying to get to work and a whole lot of poorly focused violence. On the whole this seems stupid. heck, i’ve pointed out before “this is why Trump won.”
Well, guess what. Now there’s science.
Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements
Prior work shows that extreme protest tactics – actions that are highly counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful to others, including inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property – are effective for gaining publicity. However, we find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement.
In short: most people are just regular folk. Most protesters in the US, however, are not regular folk; they tend towards the excitable and highly irrational. So, when Regular Folk watch Excitable Idjits acting the fool, the Regular Folk unconsciously apply a simple test: Would I do that? And, well… no. And the result is that while “extreme protest tactics” gets more press, it turns people *away* from the goal of the movement, even if people might be otherwise sympathetic.
The study tested the reactions of test subjects to edited reports about animal rights protesters, Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-Trump protesters. Small changes in the reports – such as one version has the BLM protesters chanting anti-racist slogans, another has them chanting for violence against cops – led to noticeable differences in the stances of the participants. And those participants exposed to anti-Trump extremists wound up increasing their support *for* Trump.
So, go on, kids. Scream in the streets. Block the roads. Burn stuff what ain’t yours. Act like crazed lunatics. Your irrational hatred only strengthens the other side.
And thus we come to the Modest Proposal phase of the post: let’s use this. Can we come up with a way to infiltrate, say, Greenpeace, and influence them to use these whacko “extreme protest tactics” against something like, say, nuclear rockets? Can we get them to be *so* over the top that the end result is a Congressional mandate for SpaceX to build and fly a plasma-core nuclear rocket within five years? Can we so tweak the “Sanctuary City” and other pro-immigration-law-violation groups that the end result is that the US winds up not dissolving it’s borders, but instead colonizes and claims the Moon?