Well, here’s something I’d just as soon avoid… smog rolling into Beijing like a freakin’ haboob. I can feel my lungs curling up and dying just watching this.
Time lapse video of latest smogstorm rolling into beijing pic.twitter.com/GzmtW5iK5w
— Bill Bishop (@niubi) January 2, 2017
This sort of thing is either going to kill off the Chinese, ending the overpopulation , energy and AGW problems… or it will result in the evolution of a Chinese super-race that can survive *anything.*
A meeting of giants at Edwards Air Force Base in the late 1960’s. It’s interesting to compare the size of the “fighter” with the “bomber…” the bomber, as anyone who has ever stood underneath the sole example in Dayton, is Really Big, but the YF-12 is just not that much smaller. Sustained Mach 3 flight is not for the faint hearted… or the small-engined or those with dainty fuel tanks.
I have made the full-rez version of this photo available for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up in the 2017-01 folder of the APR Extras Dropbox site. If interested in getting this and the previous years worth of Extras, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
It’s NSFW, so it’s behind the break…
SpaceX has published their findings regarding the “anomaly” that caused their last launch attempt to go kerblooey. Simply put… carbon fiber and really cold liquid oxygen do not make the best of friends.
Each stage of Falcon 9 uses COPVs to store cold helium which is used to maintain tank pressure, and each COPV consists of an aluminum inner liner with a carbon overwrap. The recovered COPVs showed buckles in their liners. Although buckles were not shown to burst a COPV on their own, investigators concluded that super chilled LOX can pool in these buckles under the overwrap. When pressurized, oxygen pooled in this buckle can become trapped; in turn, breaking fibers or friction can ignite the oxygen in the overwrap, causing the COPV to fail. In addition, investigators determined that the loading temperature of the helium was cold enough to create solid oxygen (SOX), which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen becoming trapped as well as the likelihood of friction ignition.
SpaceX is targeting a January 8 launch of an Falcon 9 with an Iridium payload from Vandieland. Consider this hypothetical: “Hello, this is NASA. Remember that launcher of ours that went foom four months ago? We figured out the problem, we fixed it, and we’re launching next week.” Kinda boggles the mind.
A minimally animated and heavily NSFW rant about “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and the irrational demands made by the political correctness fascists.
One of the reasons why Trump got the support he did was that he spoke out against political correctness. If he had done it with *this* level of passion, I might’ve actually voted for him
Here’s an interesting – if a little sad – video showing a cat after the owner leaves.
It’s usually inappropriate and very likely highly inaccurate to anthropomorphize the critters in out lives. What seems like an expression of sadness or joy might very well mean something entirely different… for example, my cat Fingers occasionally makes this horrifyingly mournful sound, as if she was grievously wounded. And it’s always associated with her carrying around a toy (or, on occasion, an actual mouse). What sounds like “woe is me” is apparently more like “look what I caught.”
With dogs, their emotions are likely more readily understood for the simple reason that we have spent the last 15,000 or so years hammering them into creatures that conform to our worldview. What appears to be a happy dog is almost certainly a happy dog. But a cat? Their reactions are not ours. And like any good higher animal, the reactions of one cat are not necessarily the same as another cat… they are individuals. So I can state with reasonable confidence that while my cats are likely satisfied cats, only Buttons would I rate as a usually “happy” cat. That feller really does enjoy life on a level most humans would envy.
But the fact that I cannot necessarily promptly read a cat doesn’t mean that their happiness is irrelevant. There are times I come home and find them waiting for me… and they are *not* out of food. So perhaps cats do miss their humans. Cats are more social than a lot of people give them credit for being. That’s why I will probably always have two or more cats if I have any cats. If there’s even the slightest chance that the cats in the videos are as lonely as they seem to human eyes and ears, it would be cruel to force that loneliness upon them.
This display model was sold on EBay some months back:
Without a display stand it’s difficult to determine exactly who made this, but all indications are that it was an “official” model, made by Boeing, Lockheed or NASA. The design was given some small amount of study around 1973, though the available documentation on it is lean.
Lockheed studied the same idea with the C-5 Galaxy. Of course the C-5 would have been easier to modify since it already had shoulder-mounted wings.
I’d posted this YouTube video a few years ago, but I’ve found that not only was the video yanked, the whole account associated with it was nuked. Hmmmph.
A film about NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications), 1968.
Provides a basic description of nuclear rockets, plus some art, animation and diagrams of nuclear propelled space vehicles along with footage of test firings.
Carrie Fisher’s mom, if you were unaware…
Note banjo enthusiast and white-hair-haver tweeted his sadness at the death of Carrie Fisher. Unfortunately, his tweet was in horrible, horrible bad taste:
How outrageous! How terrible! How thoughtless! How sexist! How…. how is this anything bad? Well, leave it to the SJWs to SJW-splain it:
What made the tweet sexist? Steve Martin noted that an actress famous for being beautiful was, in fact, beautiful.
Sigh.
Carrie Fisher WAS quite the beauty back in the day. Far from being deniable, this was an Important Fact. She was an actress, and her appearance was vital to her getting the role of Princess Leia. Now, there’s no reason in the world why Princess Leia needed to be a great beauty in order to be a strong character. She could have been played by a woman who looked like a young Rosie O’Donnell with bad acne, unfortunate facial hair, lopsided eyes, hairy warts, a hook nose, excessive piercings and burn scars. Hell Leia could have been a non-human… not just a kinda-human, but something pretty “bleah.” Why not a Mon Cal? Because a Beautiful Woman is a better draw than a Bipedal Fish-Man. Because a Beautiful Woman is more appealing than a Non Beautiful Woman. Because Beauty is its own reward.
When Star Wars came out 1977, Carrie Fisher could have been *anything.* She could have been sharp as a tack or dumb as a post. As happy as a clam or as gloomy as a, well, a gloomy clam. She could have been the funniest person on the planet or as humorless as a Social Justice Warrior. Coulda been, but there was no way to tell, because all the evidence there was was what was on screen. And what did we see on screen? A beautiful woman. What kind of monster refuses to recognize this fact? A Social Justice Warrior, that’s what kind.
Yes, yes, there was more to Fisher than her youthful beauty. But Twitter is not renowned as the platform for long dissertations… and in any event, saying that Carrie Fisher was beautiful does *not* say that she wasn’t witty or smart or talented or any other such thing.