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Yay! A new explosive

 awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, nukes, science, weapons  6 Responses »
Apr 132017
 

Explosives are, in a way, like rocket engines: they reached a certain plateau in performance decades ago and haven’t really gotten much better. This is not due to relevant people and organizations not caring to develop new ones; the problem is that there are just so many ways you can stick unstable molecules together in a cost effective manner. Some years ago while working ordnance systems (shaped charges for stage separation, rocket motor initiators, etc.) news came down that a new explosive (Octanitrocubane) was being studied. A *more* powerful explosive. Yay! Then the details came out: it was a *few* percent more powerful than HMX (the current gold standard in high explosive, and it has been since the ’40’s) and was expected to cost more than gold even after the manufacturing processes were worked out. Bah.

But there’s hope of new explodey-sauce:

Ground state structure of high-energy-density polymeric carbon monoxide

Links only to an abstract. But there’s a description HERE. Short form: at least theoretically, if you compress carbon monoxide, and compress it a lot, it seems it’ll form a polymer. It’ll turn into a  solid. A solid that should remain a solid when the pressure lets off. But also… a solid with a whole lot of pent-up anger issues:

the team’s search found that the most stable cabon monoxide structure at ambient pressure and temperature would be a polymer, a repeating molecule with a backbone of carbon and oxygen rings called Pna21. But this stuff couldn’t form spontaneously—it needs to be made at high pressures, maybe around ten thousand times higher than sea level pressure. And unlike other carbon monoxide polymers discovered previously, Pna21 would be absolutely explosive, five to ten times more so than the same amount of TNT, thanks to the huge amount of energy it stores.

Five to ten times as explosive as TNT would be damned handy in an explosive. TNT is the standard; HMX has a “relative effectiveness factor” of 1.7. Octanitrocubane is the best at 2.38. But if polymerized carbon monoxide has an R.E. factor of five… that’s about three times better than HMX. Since HMX is what’s used to squeeze plutonium pits to make go “bang,” doing three times better would lead to the potential for smaller, lighter nukes.

Of course, this all depends on whether carbon monoxide really does form a metastable solid explosive at high pressure, and is stable enough to be safe. An explosive that goes off if it rises above, say, fifteen degrees kelvin is less than entirely practical.

 Posted by at 2:36 am

Good to see that “governmental crazy’ ain’t exclusively American

 blather, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  6 Responses »
Apr 132017
 

Hamilton couple refuse to tell foster kids Easter Bunny is real, CAS shuts down home: court docs

A foster family up Canada way is devoutly Christian, so they don’t buy into all that “Easter Bunny” and “Santa Claus” hooha. And a Canuck court has decided that while apparently it’s ok to be devoutly religious and be a foster family, refusing to tell toddlers about the gospel of Ostara’s fertility rabbit actually being *real* just ain’t gonna fly.

Let that sink in for a bit.

A government agency has decided that refusing to tell children that fables are fact is legally actionable. One wonders where that might lead.

…the organization expects foster parents to respect common customs and the traditions of the biological family.

“From an organizational perspective, we need to be cognizant and respectful, both of the beliefs of the foster parents and also the needs and customs of children in our care,” he said. “We consider children coming into our care to be on a temporary basis … and there should be a … very smooth transition back to their home from a foster placement.”

This would seem to imply that a foster family will be expected to play along with and affirm every single set of beliefs that the bio-family had. This would seem to imply that having multiple children from multiple backgrounds simultaneously would be problematic at best. Imagine a foster family that has an Asatru girl and a Muslim boy at the same time… the girl might demand to *not* be dominated, and by the gods she will *not* be denied bacon for breakfast and a ham sammich for lunch, and she’ll point the soles of her feet anywhere she damn well pleases… and the family will have to affirm that at the same time they need to affirm pretty much the opposite for the boy.

 

 Posted by at 12:47 am

Almost there…

 aircraft, blather, drawings, news, projects, US Research & Recon Projects, US Transport Projects  3 Responses »
Apr 122017
 

So very, very close on the next two US Aerospace Projects issues. I’m only lacking cover “art”and have to deal with a bit of “dead air” in the middle of US Transport Projects #7. Usually I can shuffle things around well enough to not have this sort of thing, but this time it just hasn’t worked out. I suppose it doesn’t really matter all that much, but it does look kinda lazy like that.

It’s been about a year since I released the last USxP issue. That last issue was the first time where I used vector diagrams embedded within the issue, rather than raster images; getting the diagrams from AutoCAD into Word was a bit of a chore back then. And in the intervening months… I forgot how I did it. So I had to figure it out again, and the process is different. I have to walk the AutoCAD diagram through Rhino 3D and save as a WMF and blah, blah, blah; end result is it works just fine. I’ve done some further refinement… the main outlines are set at 0.25 mm width and the ends of the lines have been reset to rounded and mitered, so sharp corners now look more like sharp corners.

Hoping to have these two out in a day or two. The other three will be rather longer.

 

 Posted by at 6:59 pm

“Charging Bull” vs “Fearless girl”

 art, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Apr 122017
 

‘Charging Bull’ sculptor says ‘Fearless Girl’ distorts his art. He’s fighting back.

Short form: in 1987 an artist created the now-famous “Charging Bull” bronze statue as a statement on the resilience of Americans following a Wall Street crash. Then last month, another statue, “Fearless Girl,” was plopped down in front of it. The second statue fundamentally changed the apparent message of the first, and the first artist is understandably annoyed.

But beyond the art-squabble, I remain befuddled by “Fearless Girl.” A lot of people seem to love it… a little girl happily staring down a charging gigantic bull. A statement on Grrrrl Power, or something. Something something bravery. Empowerment blah blah. But what is it *really?* It’s one scene of a snuff film. Don’t care how “fearless” she is, about half a second later in that movie a multi-ton bull straight out of Greek myth is going to gore her and stomp her shattered remains into the dirt. The girls parents are clearly guilty of an insane level of child endangerment for letting her get into that situation, and for not teaching her any damn sense. The “Fearless Girl” statue has a plaque that yammers something about “Women in leadership.” But the only “woman” on display is a small child who seemingly doesn’t understand the situation and is about to die. Are we, instead, supposed to assume that the woman is actually the child’s mother, who put the girl into the arena with the bull? Is the leadership being discussed the leadership it takes to sacrifice your child to the Old Gods? Or the leadership it takes to not be there when your child needs you? The leadership needed to badly raise a child so that she thinks it’s a hoot to go taunt the dynamite bull, without so much as a 12 gauge… or even a light saber?

 

Now, I happen to approve of the idea of celebrating defiance in the face of immanent death. But “defiance” looks kinda ridiculous when clearly the situation is the result of “massive levels of stupid.”

 Posted by at 9:03 am

The United PR nightmare: the lighter side

 Uncategorized  8 Responses »
Apr 112017
 

Some people are pretty good at funnymaking:


and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxPSn4PnDmA

It turns out that the passenger in question is an immigrant gay Asian convicted criminal. So we’ve got *four* check marks on the Social Justice Outrage Cheat Sheet. If a major airline monopoly is capable of being harmed by public outrage, this should do it.

 Posted by at 8:28 pm

So, who here is excited to see a B-36 to take to the skies again?

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, history, news, science fiction  14 Responses »
Apr 112017
 

Well, calm yourself and resign yourself to a lifetime of disappointment, because it ain’t gonna happen. But here’s the next best thing: the old Jimmie Stewart movie “Strategic Air Command” is now available on Blu Ray. The image quality is surprisingly good, as is the audio. Absolutely nothing in the way of extras, sadly, but the ability to see some great footage of the B-36 in glorious Technicolor is worth it on its own.

 

Because the world is an unjust place, I don’t have the ability to take screenshots from Blu Rays. So… here are some craptacular cel phone photos of my TV screen showing, if not the resolution, at least the formatting of “SAC.” The frame fills the screen top to bottom, but *not* *quite* from side to side. I *assume* that this was the original aspect ratio of the film… nothing looked out of place or cropped.

 

—

Also newly available on Blu Ray is another Stewart aviation classic, “No Highway in The Sky.” A surprisingly prescient 1951 tale of metal fatigue taking down brand-new four-turbine-engine airliners, this one features Stewart as an aeronautical engineer studying the failure of the type of airliner he happens to actually be on. Stewart used to play a lot of eccentric or downright screwy characters; this one must have been one of his oddest back in the day. But today his character – and that of his characters daughter – would probably be readily recognized as being pretty deeply steeped in Aspergers. “No Highway” is pretty distinctive not only in having a seemingly autistic engineer as the hero (of course, at the time the character would not have been seen as being “on the spectrum,” but rather just “absent minded” or “weird”), but also in spending a fair amount of both effort and money on building a filming model and a full-scale-modified-real-aircraft. Sure, the “Rutland Reindeer” doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the claim that the metal fatigue is due to *atomic* issues is pretty silly, but ya gotta give ’em props (get it?) for making an extra effort in an era when major motion pictures were happy with stock footage. “No Highway” was based on a novel written by Nevil Shute, author of the fun-filled, laugh-packed, sunshine, puppies and bunnies-filled “On The Beach.” It was also made into a radio play starring Jimmie Stewart and Marlene Deitrich, and since this is the internet and all, it’s available for downloading as an MP3.

 

 Posted by at 6:16 pm

Antidote for Nostalgia: Yeah, real subtle, guys

 AARRRGH, Antidote For Nostalgia, Crazy, Gah., history, Meh., ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
Apr 112017
 

This one’s a bit different. Instead of shockingly awful mens fashions, this here is an ad for some form of cologne. Now, I have no idea if this particular brand of stink-pretty was good or bad… but the package it came in is, ah…. ummm….

Dude, naw. Naw, dude.

See this packaging travesty after the break.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:07 am

You want PR nightmare? Cuz this is how you get PR nightmare.

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  24 Responses »
Apr 102017
 

So, a United Airlines flight was overbooked, and they needed to stuff four more UA employees on the flight so they could be where they needed to be. This is an irritating and unavoidable fact of the current system. One could obviously argue that overbooking should be banned, but for now, it’s still a thing. Anyway, United offered the passengers bribes to take a later flight, but they weren’t able to get enough volunteers. So, they boarded the plane anyway and *then* decided to randomly select some poor saps to yank off the plane. Well, one guy didn’t want to go. So what did United do? They called the cops. Which, strictly speaking, is the legal course… once they told the passenger that he was no longer on that flight, and he refused to leave, he was technically trespassing. But what did the cops do? They beat him so bad he was yakking up blood and they had to take *everyone* off the plane in order to clean up the mess.

Yeah. I’m thinking what we have here is an insta-millionaire in the making. The situation is, one one level, entirely of United’s making…. *they* are the ones who overbooked the flight. And anyone who has flown in the last, oh, sixteen or so years knows it’s an excruciating nightmare; you just want to get it over with, so it’s understandable that the passenger didn’t want to get pulled off a flight he was already seated on. But we’re in an era when every other passenger will be filming anything unusual on  plane… and a passenger beaten so badly he’s literally begging for death while spewing blood all over? Yeah, that’s what’s called “bad optics.” Crack open that checkbook and start scribbling zeros.

One is left to wonder just what would have happened if other passengers had leaped to this guys defense. Now, *maybe* he was being a jackass, and initiated physical combat with the government employees who gave him a pounding. *Maybe* he had this coming. But you know… *maybe* you shouldn’t have violent thugs as minor functionaries for the Feds, and *maybe* airlines shouldn’t overbook. If it comes to a lawsuit and goes to court, and if it turns out that this was just a guy who wanted to go home (he apparently claimed he was a doctor who had patients to see), then I’d recommend this settlement: find out how much United Airlines saves annually by overbooking rather than underbooking. Then double it, and demand that. And then demand an equal amount from the law enforcement agency that did the actual thrashing.

So not only is *this* guy turned off United Airlines, so is probably everyone who was on that plane. I know I sure s hell wouldn’t want to pay money to a company who could at the drop of a hat make me a trespasser, then set goons upon me. Hell, this is why I don’t fly anymore. I’d much rather drive 1500 miles than fly it.

All that said, imagine another competing airline sees this story, and they decide to reverse course on the last couple decades in aviation trends. Instead of less legroom, they reduce the number of seats and give you more. Instead of overbooking, they intentionally underbook, then make the last empty seats available at a discount in the last few minutes. And then they run a series of TV ads showing this incident in glorious technicolor, saying “Don’t fly United, cuz this might happen. Fly with us! We’re more comfortable and hardly ever beat paying customers into bloody pulps in front of small children going on vacation.” Seems like that’d be a winning ad campaign.

 Posted by at 4:29 pm

The man can belt out a tune

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., youtube  4 Responses »
Apr 092017
 

Remember Dee Snider? He was famous for approximately fifteen minutes, more than thirty years ago… first as the lead singer of Twisted Sister, then, more importantly, for smacking Al Gore around on the floor of the Senate. Together with Frank Zappa and – it’s still hard to believe – John Denver – Snider stood up to Tipper Gore’s prudish “Parents Music Resource Council” inspired Senate hearing and argued in favor of freedom of speech. Since then… well, time has not been kind to the vast majority of the metal and hair bands of the 1980’s. The early 90’s came along, grunge and Nirvana came along, and what had seemed so dominant just a few years before vanished in a puff of occult and overly made-up smoke.

So imagine my surprise when I listened to Snider’s relatively recent remake of his most famous song, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” He’s in his sixties now… and he sounds better now than Way Back Then. Sure, he looks like hell, but he did back then, too.

 Posted by at 2:04 am
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