Iran has just kidnapped 10 US sailors:
Claims are that they will be released “promptly.” Sure. I have no doubt that the Iranians are fully trustworthy. The sailors were nabbed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, not the Iranian Navy. The Revolutionary Guards are the whackjobs of the Iranian military, so there’s that.
UPDATE: Huh. The Iranians have actually let the captives go. This is a bit of a surprise. One wonders what the Iranians got in exchange.
During New Years celebrations in Germany, a whole bunch of migrants from the middle east decided to do some cultural outreach and shared some of their culture with the native German women by raping a few hundred of them. In the past day or so, Germans, grateful for the opportunity to share in such a diverse bonanza of civilizations, shared some of their culture with the migrants by beating the tar out of a number of them.
Awesome. Nothing about this can possibly go wrong.
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And then there’s this:
Bullet points (data may not be accurate, who knows):
Awesome. AWESOME.
Europe had better figure this out, and soon. My suggestion: ship the male refugees back to Syria (screw trying to figure out where they were *originally* from, just ship ’em all to Syria) until the ratio of male/female refugees in Europe are 1:1. There’s precisely zero reason why these brave males should have left their womenfolk behind.
An ad from a 1966 issue of Aviation Week illustrates a number of F-4 variants…
Died of cancer overnight.
Not a particular favorite of mine, but I suppose there’ll be some interest here. He was of course responsible for “Space Oddity,” one of a string of popular songs that makes spaceflight sound sad and depressing; he was also responsible for creating his son Zowie. Zowie, fortunately, was well-adjusted enough to prefer to be called something less obviously “crazed idiot celebrity,” and is now known as Duncan Jones. Jones directed the science fiction movie “Moon” a few years ago, which, while yet again being a “spaceflight is sad” pop culture artifact, was at least a reasonably intelligent flick.
Years ago I bought a Saturn V blueprint off ebay. I then scanned it and sold it on my site. One buyer was Randall Munroe of XKCD,who used it as a basis for his “Up Goer Five.” I suggested to him that he should sell large prints of the UG5, which he did (I imagine I was hardly the only one to suggest this to him). Someone bought one of these prints and stuck it up in a restoration facility at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, where it was photographed in the background during the restoration of the original starship Enterprise filming model. See here:
So, yeah, it’s a stretch to lay claim to any value here… but whatever there may be I’ll take.
A Mil 24 Hind with a difference:
What we have here is a highly modified Hind that will serve as a technology testbed. In particular new rotors meant to increase cruise speed to 194 knots, and top speed to an impressive 216 knots.
Seems to me to be somewhat akin to the Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk, an advanced (for the time, 1970) high speed helicopter made by using components from the Sikorsky S-61.
More info and photos here:
I don’t play Lotto. This is aided by the fact that the Lottery doesn’t exist in Utah, and I ain’t gonna drive hours out of my way to go throw money away on something I won’t win. But, dayum, this is getting wacky enough that I’m sorely tempted to throw reason to the wind, peddle my butt to Wyoming and throw money I ain’t got at a cash register in a gas station.
If you took the winnings as a lump sum, the $1,300,000,000 would turn into roughly $650,000,000, and after taxes, probably something like $455,000,000. That’s…a pretty good chunk of change. Step One would be to take a third of that and make my very own Star Wars movie. And then I’d be a billionaire. After that? Who knows. Maybe buy the Boeing Historical Archive, and spend my nights rolling around in the 8X10 glossies of aerospacecraft concept art.
A photo of a Rockwell “mockup” of the B-1 bomber. Taken sometime in probably the early/mid 1970’s, this mockup is composed of two 2D images… an inboard profile showing the innards of the craft, and a plan view “shadow.” This is an effective way to get across the scale of the craft without having to build a terribly expensive 3D mockup.
Two newsworthy events occurred in Germany at the turn of the new year: the copyright expired on noted socialist thought leader Adolph Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf,” and a number of sexual assaults were reported, half by immigrants/refugees from the middle east. The two events are of course not related, but one might be tempted to suspect that a secondary result of the first event might be somewhat related to the second event:
The edition in question is a 59-euro TWO THOUSAND page “critical edition” (presumably with just a whole lot of new footnotes and commentary and such) that was limited to a print run of 4,000… but 15,000+ orders were made for it before publication.
