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Jan 032017
 

This YouTube channel is not a producer of content, but an aggregator of vintage documentaries. Additionally, the videos have improved audio and stabilized video – i.e., they’re better to watch and listen to than the originals. The videos are *all* over the place… you’re as likely to see one on nuclear bomb testing as you are on household cleansers. But there are a *lot* of videos that should be of considerable interest to readers of this blog. Lots of military and NASA vids.

Jeff Quitney

Here the page is broken down into convenient playlists.

Some recent videos of interest:

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 9:44 am
Jan 032017
 

Which is the human talent/feature/bug for seeing faces (or other recognizable concepts) in things where faces objectively aren’t… clouds and tortillas and such. It’s a function of the need to see patterns, handy as a survival skill in a world full of bears and wolves and snakes and enemies all trying to kill you. These days it’s mostly just entertainment. Witness the Twitter page for:

Faces In Things

Examples:

And some where you have to look at it just right, but when you see it, you can’t unsee it:

 

 

 

 Posted by at 9:29 am
Jan 022017
 

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.

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.*

 

 Posted by at 9:49 pm
Jan 022017
 

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.

b-70_yf-12_c-141

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.

 Posted by at 7:57 pm
Jan 022017
 

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.

Anomaly Updates

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.

Ha. Nailed it.

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.

 Posted by at 3:42 pm
Jan 012017
 

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

 Posted by at 3:03 pm
Dec 312016
 

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.

 Posted by at 6:59 pm
Dec 312016
 

This display model was sold on EBay some months back:

twin-747-sca-9 twin-747-sca-8 twin-747-sca-7 twin-747-sca-6 twin-747-sca-5 twin-747-sca-4 twin-747-sca-3 twin-747-sca-2 twin-747-sca-1

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.

 Posted by at 2:55 pm
Dec 292016
 

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.

 

 

 Posted by at 2:24 am