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Well, *duh*

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, ಠ_ಠ  10 Responses »
Aug 022016
 

Dutchman flies to China to see online girlfriend, lives in airport for 10 days waiting for her to show

Well, that was dumb. The title pretty much says it: he flew to China to surprise his internet girlfriend, and she never showed up. The obvious conclusion to draw is that she doesn’t actually exist (“catfishing”) and was just someone’s joke or scam to string the guy along for some reason, but apparently she’s at least *kinda* for real. The story goes that they’d agreed to meet up after a year of online dating, but he couldn’t wait; he sent her a photo of his flight information, but she didn’t know what it meant. And even better:

She says that she was unable to meet Cirk when he arrived in Changsha because she was out of town, undergoing cosmetic surgery in Zhengzhou, Henan province

Good plan, dude. It seems like these Surprise Romantic Gestures only work in the movies.

Heck, he might have lucked out here. “Cosmetic surgery” covers a *lot* of ground. Maye she was getting a boob job. Maybe “she” was getting bits lopped off (you know what I mean). Who friggen’ knows.

And here’s the one bit of wisdom I can really impart. The guy in the story is not photographed at his best, but he looks *awful.* He looks like a cross between a modern-day meth head, a 1980’s AIDS sufferer and a 1940’s death camp survivor. I doubt he got there in just 10 days. Now, I’m certainly no expert on what women want, but in general it seems like “scrawny tweaker” is not high on the list. The photo of the Chinese woman in the article has her face blurred, but she otherwise appears to be Standard Hot Asian Chick. And here’s my wisdom: unless you’ve got buckets of cash on open display, if you are not a good looking guy, that chick on the other end of the internet Does Not Exist.

At this point I’m willing to entertain the idea that there are *no* women on the internet. Anyone who claims to be a women, especially if “she” seems to be interested in you, is actually a 40-year old fat guy living in his mom’s basement.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:35 pm

Enterprise Restoration

 art, awesomeness, history, models, science fiction, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Aug 012016
 

This video shows the effort the National Air & Space Museum went to to restore the original USS Enterprise model. Damn if that doesn’t look like one hell of a job!

 

Tucked away inside the video were brief glimpses of some CAD diagrams of the Enterprise used for determining the paint scheme. I’d *love* to see these in full!

ncc1701color

 Posted by at 5:09 pm

Turkey

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, nukes, politics, ಠ_ಠ  9 Responses »
Aug 012016
 

I’m sure Putin is rubbing his hand in giddy expectation over this…

Reports Turkish troops have sealed off Incirlik US/NATO nuclear air base

It’s sad that a NATO nation is falling into outright dictatorship. But as we’re on the one century mark from World War One, *perhaps* opportunities are arising to fix some of the geopolitical mistakes of that war. At the end of WWI, the victorious European allies chopped up the former Ottoman Empire (and other areas of the Middle East) into a ridiculous hodge-podge of borders that cut existing political/religious/ethnic groups apart and stuck the chunks together with other groups that hated each other. Perhaps weh  all is said and done, Turkish Kurdistan can be set free to join up with Iraqi Kurdistan. And Constantinople can finally revert to Greece. That’ll be fun.

 Posted by at 12:05 am

Wire Recorders

 art, awesomeness, history, science, youtube  4 Responses »
Jul 312016
 

If you read enough sci-fi from the late 40’s/early 50’s, you’ll come across references to technologies then in use but which have since vanished. One such technology is the “Wire Recorder,” a way of recording sound magnetically. The basics of the technology are roughly the same as used on tape recorders, but instead of a tape of plastic film covered in iron oxide, the wire recorders used actual stainless steel wire.

The video below describes the technology and history of wire recorders and shows one in operation. The wire recorders actually worked pretty well, but they fell before the might of tape recorders. Why? Two basic reasons. First, magnetic tape recorders were capable of producing far better sound. Second, an hour of wire was nearly a mile and a half of wire. There is a sequence in the video showing  the results of something going wrong during rewinding and, man, you do *not* want to have to try to straighten out that mess.

 Posted by at 11:29 am

Robotic wall builders

 awesomeness, Hmm..., science, youtube  6 Responses »
Jul 302016
 

Not only does this Australian robot negate the need for a lot of illegal immigrant laborers, it also supplies a new, cheaper way to build that southern wall Trump is always yapping about:

This robot apparently does in one hour what a standard bricklayer does in about four. Does it cost more than four bricklayers? Well… probably. But it should be possible to run this thing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of weather conditions (except for severe storms, of course). And the next prototype is supposed to do what two bricklayers can do in a day… in one hour.

I note, though, a distinct lack of mortar.

 

 

 Posted by at 11:17 pm

Coming soon

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  6 Responses »
Jul 292016
 

Wait till the authoritarians get a load of this. It’ll be a favorite to emerge as a Presidential Executive Order…

Venezuela has a new ‘forced labor’ law that can require people to work in fields

Apparently, President Maduro signed a decree allowing the labor ministry to order  “all workers from the public and private sector with enough physical capabilities and technical know-how” into the fields for 60 days, with a possible extension of 60 days beyond that.

This sort of thing is pretty much the natural end result of dogged determination among a collectivist government in the face of reality. A pragmatic Venezuelan government would toss Madura out on his ass and change the constitution to make it a treasonous offense for the government to nationalize businesses or try to control prices.

Note: not a whole lot of data available on this one. Search for it online and all the links so far come back to this news.vice.com story. So… who knows, maybe it’s a hoax. But it sure sounds like the sort of genius policy a Socialist would dream up. And Amnesty International seems to think it’s for real, and they don’t seem to be fans of the idea.

 Posted by at 9:23 pm

Northrop Low Altitude Penetrator

 aircraft, art, drawings, history, projects, US Bomber Projects  23 Responses »
Jul 292016
 

An artist used my diagrams of the Northrop Low Altitude Penetrator (a concept that competed against the design that became the B-2) to create a full-color layout. I wish I could work in color half as well…

The CAD vector-PDF, released in May:

And US Bomber Projects #2:

Which resulted in this:

The artist (Kurt Beswick) bounced an earlier version of the art off me and we discussed it for a bit. It was my opinion that a stealth bomber like this specifically designed to fly at near-treetop level (200 feet) would either be in green camouflage, or F-117 Nighthawk black. What do you think?

 Posted by at 4:42 pm
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