Unsurprisingly, the smoke from the fires out west is visible from the ISS and weather satellites. Behold:

In Photos: The 2018 California Wildfires as Seen from Space

This one is quite enlightening;

It would not surprise me if that much smoke has had a noticeable effect on the local climate. I know that my air conditioner usage has dropped precipitously in the last several days… the temperature outside might not have dropped much, but the sun beats down less horrendously.

A second thought occurs looking at that photo. The news lately has been filled with dire warnings of environmental DOOOOM, that we are at or perhaps beyond the tipping point for “Hothouse Earth,” that the environmentalists long con to deprive mankind of nuclear power has succeeded, and the four extra decades of reliance upon carbon emitting fossil fuels has doomed mankind to extinction: the environmentalist goals all along, seemingly. If this is in fact the case, that the planet is going to see substantial temperature increases and climatological nightmares, then it’s time to start geoengineering in earnest. With new projections of up to two hundred feet in sea level rise, Doing Something About That would seem to become just about National Priority Number One. OK, so what to do? Look at that photo above again. The California fire smoke covers a good fraction of the western US, and it’s a bit brighter than the ground below. The smoke almost certainly reflects more sunlight back out into space than the ground below would have with clear skies. So at least in the short term, the smoke is working to reverse global warming. Of course the emitted CO2 isn’t helping. But it need not be smoke from burning forests. Imagine if, instead, that was *water* being injected into the atmosphere. Massive nuclear reactors attached to massive pumps along the coast. Bring in solar power: use huge banks of solar reflectors to boil vast quantities of water to steam, and shoot that steam far into the sky from atop mountain peaks and the like. Create large banks of artificial clouds to reflect sunlight out into space. As a bonus, the clouds will probably not stay airborne too long and will come back down as rain. Look at that photo again: the region covered by those smoke clouds could *really* benefit from increased rainfall.

Bernie Sanders wants to spend $36 trillion over ten years to provide free medicaid to people who should be providing for their own healthcare. Imagine what $36 trillion could do to really aid “the common welfare” if spent on massive civil engineering projects. Heck, marry the two together: projects like this, along with projects to build vast water transfer systems to take floodwaters from the Mississippi River to drought zones like Montana and the Ogalala Aquifer region, would require a *lot* of workers over a generation or two. So if you want free Medicare… sign up for the Project. Provides good pay, good food, decent housing and free health care to all those who drive bulldozers, swing pickaxes, perform calculations, design pipelines and pumps.

The Falcon Heavy is an absurdly low-cost heavy lift rocket

F9H in reusable configuration (payload seems to be about 40 tones to LEO) costs $90 million. Fully expendable (64 tons to orbit), it’s $150 million. That sounds like a lot. It’s certainly more than I can afford. But compare it to the competition. The Delta IV Heavy (29 tons to orbit) costs between $400 and $600 million… but you have to tack on the current annual $1 billion “launch capability contract” which ends in 2019. Given that the Delta IV Medium ends in 2020, all of the fixed Delta IV costs will be on the Heavy, meaning it’ll likely cost substantially more than $600 million each. And then there’s the SLS (70 to 130 tons), which since 2011 has cost about $2.6 billion per year to develop and is rather optimistically assumed to cost $500 million per launch. There’s been a recent 3-year delay, adding $7.8 billion to the development before it has even flown. Which means that that three-year delay costs as much as 52 flights of the expendable Falcon 9 heavy, or 87 flights of the reusable version.

Then there are the foreign launchers such as the Proton-M (24 tons to LEO) at $65 million, Ariane V (16 tons to LEO) at ~$200 million, and Long March 5 (24 tons to LEO) for Who Knows How Much.

So:

Reusable F9H: $2.2 million/ton

Expendable F9H: $2.3 million/ton

Delta IVH: $20.7 million/ton

SLS: $6.7 million/ton, not counting development costs

Proton-M: $2.7 million/ton

Ariane V: $12.5 million/ton

The only heavy lifter that can compete with the expendable Falcon 9 Heavy is the Proton-M, which has an unfortunate 10% failure rate, and of course is not something the DoD is going to want to launch their payloads on, and not something that westerners would want to launch manned payloads on. Delta IV Heavy just looks *awful,* and SLS looks bad even when you don’t count the incredible sums that have been spent just developing it (something like $20 billion so far, and it hasn’t launched a gnat).

And then there’s BFR. The numbers claimed for that strain credulity… $7 million dollars to launch 150 tons to orbit… 47 grand per ton in the reusable configuration. I would not be the least bit surprised if reality drives that number way up. But even if the price goes up by a factor of a hundred, it’ll still be pretty much the cheapest ride in town.

Some people are pretty good at funnymaking:

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxPSn4PnDmA

It turns out that the passenger in question is an immigrant gay Asian convicted criminal. So we’ve got *four* check marks on the Social Justice Outrage Cheat Sheet. If a major airline monopoly is capable of being harmed by public outrage, this should do it.

So, a few days ago news broke that a famous, and beloved, male lion in Zimbabwe had been killed by a trophy hunter. At first the hunter was reported to be a mysterious Spanish hunter, but now it has been claimed to be a rich dentist from Minnesota. A guy who plunked down $55 large for the utter joy of hunting a lion that, reportedly, was reasonably friendly with people.

Full disclosure: in general I’m fine with hunting and fishing and such. I eat as much meat as I can. But trophy hunting fills me with a distinct uncomfortableness. You want to hang a deer head on your wall? Well, OK, we’ve got lots of deer. But a *lion?* The world isn’t exactly overloaded with those. Plus… lions are a lot higher up the ladder than deer and gazelle and the like.

Well, beyond the “dude, why?” aspect of hunting a lion, it turns out that the hunt itself was apparently carried out illegally in several ways:

1) It was done at night, which was illegal

2) It was illegal to hunt the lion on the park the lion was in… so they tied a dead animal to a car and lured it out of the park, then shot it with a bow and arrow (or crossbow).

3) The lion had a GPS collar, which they removed and attempted to destroy

Well, the internet has discovered the guy and has begun the inevitable.

Here’s the Yelp review page for his dental practice ( currently… 60 5-star ratings, 7 4-stars, 14 3 stars, 17 2-stars and 1,664 1-star ratings). Their Facebook page has vanished. The practice’s webpage seems to be *sorta* functional, though it’s even lamer than mine and much of it seems to be broken. The dental practice was closed rather abruptly, and inquiries are being directed to a PR firm.

Its unclear that this guy broke any US laws. But it’s also clear that he’ll be taking a little break from making money as a dentist.

A while back One-Eye’s last kid, ingeniously nicknamed “Junior,” developed a limp. Such things typically go away on their own, but after about two weeks this one did not and he was basically a tripod making zero use of his right front leg. So I managed to corral him and take him to the vet. That… was an entertaining experience.

First, the trip to the vet involved a very angry cat in a box:

When I finally got to see the vet in the examination room… man, I *really* wish I’d had my camera running on video. Remember, this was a cat who had decided that one-half of its front paws was not worth using. Suddenly, this was SuperCat, jumping all over the room. First he tried to climb the blinds in the window. The windows ran from a foot or so above the floor to well over my head. To keep him from destroying the blinds, the vet and I rolled them up… at which point Junior vertical-leaped from the ledge below straight up to the the rolled-up blinds at the top of the window. Which he grabbed on to with both sets for front claws and dangled. After a bit he dropped down to the floor, jumped up to the examining table, then leaped *over* the vet to grab onto the door jamb over the main entry door, which he hung from for a while. It was… a thing of glory. That cat was the very embodiment of the concept of “oh HELL no.” I hadn’t laughed that hard in I don’t know how long.

The vet asked me to leave the room. Which I did, and stood outside listening to the sitcom sounds of things being knocked over and destroyed. This went on for a while before the vet could put Junior back in the box. At that point the vet came out with him, took him in the back and gave him a shot, a mix of pain killers and antibiotics. Vet decided that the most likely cause of the limp was one of those infected cysts that cats seem to get all the time. Giving Junior his shot was another exercise in amazing feline anger and required some  tools I’ve only ever seen used on rabid pit bulls and the like.

The end result was that Junior was *EXTREMELY* unhappy on the ride home:

I debated whether to let him cool off in the box or just let him go; in the end I just released him. He became a small black blur, heavily redshifted, headed for the horizon. The vet assured me that the chances were good that that would be the last time I’d see him, that he’d go find somewhere else to live without the scary giant monsters who tortured him.

A few days later he was back, sans limp. Since then I’ve seen him regularly… but he is not friendly towards me. I don’t think he likes me anymore. Though I do note that he still eats the food I give him.