This is worth looking at… a Hubble photo of jets being shot out of the poles of an accreting protostar, Herbig-Haro 24 (HH 24), about 1300 lightyears away in the Orion B molecular cloud. The star itself is hidden behind dust clouds. The jet is disrupted here and there due to hitting the gas and dust in the region, setting up turbulence and shock waves.
Once again… science is awesome.
Short version: Approved. Would watch again.
Longer version: infinitely better than the prequels. Very entertaining, definitely a good Star Wars Movie. But I’m unsure if it’s quite as good as the original trilogy… didn’t come out of the theater as thrilled and exited as I was by the original. But then… I was seven when “Star Wars” originally came out, so that might have something to do with it. Also: by far the most applause I’ve seen in a movie. Not just at the beginning and end, but several times during.
There is a lot of spoilery stuff that I won’t spoil, but rumors of someone important dying were accurate. Now, this being space fantasy, maybe death ain’t death… Spock came back, after all. But the death here seems every bit as final as the Emperor’s in “Jedi.”
And this being space fantasy, you’re better off not trying to analyze the science. Because it’s pretty outlandish here. Such as a Very Big Gun on Planet A that is many lightyears away from some observers on Planet B shoots a hyperlight weapon at Planet C, which is many lightyears from both A and B. I can buy that the weapon gets from A to C lickety-split, what with the hyperdrive and all… but the observers on B *watched* the weapon cross the sky – from lightyears away – in real time. Buh?
Oh well. No Jar Jar, and no characters nearly as irritating, so it gets a pass. There are some CGI characters that still look pretty CGI, especially “Supreme Leader Snoke,” the replacement for the Emperor. You only see the character via hologram (a technology that has apparently greatly improved since the Empire went down), but he’s still pretty fake looking. Shoulda been done as a muppet or makeup, IMO.
Some good humor as well. The main bad guy, one Kylo Ren, is essentially a Darth Vader fanboy. Collects Vader memorabilia, wants to follow in his footsteps and be as powerful as him. Like Vader, he has anger issues. But where Vader would get mad and be a contained scary guy who’d just stand there and make everybody uncomfortable, Ren whips out his lightsaber from time to time and just whacks the crap out of anything nearby in a tantrum. This leads to one of the best laughs in the movie when a couple stormtroopers who were walking down the hallway see this and turn around and decide to walk somewhere else.
This has its moments. Especially Darth.
Less than a month ago I posted about a gravitationally lensed galaxy many billions of lightyears away that had displayed a supernova in most, but not all, of the separate images, and that astronomers would be looking for the supernova to appear in one of the remaining images. The expectation was that it would appear in 2016… but the Hubble Space Telescope has just seen it:
After word that there are people willing to spend millions to build museums and planetariums specifically to teach that the world is best explained via magic, there’s really only one thing to say:
Seems Ricky here bought the two AR-15’s used in the attack. That’s not illegal. But he bought them for Syed because Syed didn’t want them listed in his name (even though he would have been legally allowed to buy them). This is a “straw purchase,” which is illegal. He also planned a terror attack with Syed in 2012, but they chickened out. This may or may not have been illegal, based on how far they got in planning. Shockingly, Ricky was a convert to Syeds religion. Purely coincidental, surely.
Yup, that’s him.
Feel free to caption. Possibilities include:
“Oh Boy! I get to further the political ambitions of Diane Feinstein!”
“Oh Boy! I’m gonna be *real* popular in prison!”
Oy. The same cranks and crackpots that brought the world the “Institute for Creation Research” now want to build a dubiously named “Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History” that will teach that the Earth is a grand total of 6,000 years old. Even better, they’re proposing to build a 3D planetarium, also to promote the 6,000-year nonsense, in direct contradiction to everything astronomy has discovered.
Kinda like making a laser light show to prove that coherent beams of monochromatic light are a myth.
Behold the bullshit (yes, I generally prefer to avoid such colorful metaphors in posts… but there’s really no other world for the idiot lunacy spouted here). And before you hit “play,” ask yourself this: “Are they going to ask for money? ARE THEY?!?”
Seems that a couple decades of dishonest fearmongering on the part of the hoplophobes isn’t working:
The vet was surprised when I brought Bruce back into be re-tested for feline leukemia, since he didn’t seem to think there was much point. So imagine his surpris4e when, less than an hour later, he came out to speak to me and told me that the re-test shows that Bruce is FLV negative.
This was a pleasant surprise for me, and I guess a bit of a shock for the vet. He’s never had an FLV-positive cat turn into a FLV-negative cat. But he did some research and printed out some stuff from the database showing that in Stage Three of the infection, when it sorta busts out and spreads throughout the system, the immune system and sometimes rally and defeat the virus. Stage Three lasts just a few weeks. The database suggests that 2% or so of cats beat the virus. So… Bruce is a two-in-a-hundred cat.
So, he now has the run of the house. It’s a tentative thing… he’ll probably go back downstairs tonight. But overall it has gone well; no fighting. The process of keeping the critters separate but within sight of each other with a screen door seems to have largely worked… they’re used to each other and don’t feel the need to tussle. They’ve spent the past several hours playing, more or less.
Except for Raedthinn. He *hates* Bruce with a growling, hissing passion.
Note: my respect for Bruce went up a notch at the vet. He fought them so hard when it came time to draw blood that they had to gas him to calm him down. You go, Bruce!
So, the lesson here: when someone tells you that the best option is to pt down a cat… they might not be right.
I was reminded of the AGM-129 Advance Cruise Missile today, which reminded me of the small heavily illustrated booklet on the AGM-129 I put together a few years ago. It’s probably not too late to buy a couple hundred of these as Christmas presents for your friends and family. Here’s a retread of the original post from Back Then:
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Literally years in the making, I’ve put together two versions of a photo essay of several surviving examples of the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile. Available free for the downloading is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Abridged Edition as a 13 page PDF booklet. This contains photos of the AGM-129s on display at Hill Aerospace Museum in Utah, the USAF Museum in Dayton and the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska, ready to print.
Also available is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Full Edition. This 34-page edition includes more photos of these missiles, along with the missile at the San Diego Aerospace Museum restoration facility, a rare General Dynamics display model, official USAF photos of the AGM-129 in test and in service and drawings of the missile, including 1/32 scale layout diagrams. This is available through MagCloud, either as a downloadable PDF ($5.75) or as a professionally printed and bound edition ($11.80).
Don’t forget to check out my other MagCloud publications, including Justo Miranda’s Reichdreams Dossiers, Aerospace Projects Review, Historical Documents, and Photographing Stuff.
And don’t forget to check out Stagger Around #1, F-104A Starfighter, and Stagger Around #2, Starship Enterprise.
If you liked this and want to see more like it… feel free to toss fifty cents, a buck, a hundred bucks, whatever, my way. Think of it as a donation to a worthy cause. Or a bribe. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.
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When I originally put this out in 2012, the PDF version was orderable through MagCloud. If anyone wants to order it straight from here like most of my other stuff, let me know.
In a couple hours Bruce goes to the vet to get the third feline leukemia virus test. To recap, in late October he tested positive; last week he tested negative. There are good reasons to suspect a false positive, fewer good reasons to suspect a false negative. But before he is allowed to freely mingle with the others, I need to have some certainty. So… later today he may be allowed to roam the whole house, which will lead to lots of fun fights, I’m sure.
If he tests positive again… well, that’ll be a problem. And a bit of a head-scratcher.
PS: Here’s Raedthinn showing off his choppers. Getting a good look in his mouth is virtually impossible, but this shows what’s left.
