You know, NATO MEMBER Poland. Two Polish civilians killed.
Strikes put Ukraine in darkness; missiles cross into Poland
Everybody got their bombs shelters ready?
Nov 152022
Nov 122022
The B-17 “Texas Raider” was hit by a bell P-63 Kingcobra today at the Wings Over Dallas airshow. Both planes broke apart in midair and crashed.Hard to imagine that anyone on either plane survived. It *almost* looked as if the P-63 aimed at the B-17 (I doubt it could have hit the bomber any worse if the goal was destruction), but that seems really unlikely.
Nov 122022
Any discussion of this denotes conspiracy theorizing.
Nov 112022
The LOFTID inflatable aeroshell was apparently a complete success, inflating in space, entering, popping a chute, splashing down and being recovered at sea.
I wonder if this could be conveniently applied to the Falcon 9 second stage.
Nov 102022
Atlas launch to test inflatable heat shield
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 4:25 a.m. Eastern Nov. 10. The primary payload of the rocket is the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 weather satellite …
A secondary payload on the launch of JPSS-2 is Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), a NASA technology demonstration. While JPSS-2 will be deployed nearly a half-hour after liftoff, LOFTID will remain attached to the Centaur until 75 minutes after liftoff, following a deorbit burn of the Centaur.
Shortly before deployment, LOFTID will inflate a reentry shield six meters in diameter. That heat shield will slow down the vehicle from orbital velocity to Mach 0.7 as instruments on board collect data on the performance of the shield. LOFTID will then deploy parachutes to slow it down for the rest of its descent, splashing down in the Pacific east of Hawaii to be recovered by a ship.
Inflatable heat shields have been studied since before humans flew into space. Normal heat shields need to withstand insanely high temperatures, requiring materials that are either insanely expensive and complex, or that involve complex, fragile and heavy active cooling systems (such as water cooling through transpiration), or which are ablative. The latter variety is technologically fairly simple, but ablatives tend to be heavy and they are labor intensive to apply and make reusability difficult.
With temperatures reaching several thousand degrees, inflatable materials would seem inappropriate for heat shields. But those high temperatures are not a mandatory feature of re-entry. To a first hand-wave approximation, the maximum temperature is proportional to the mass-per-surface-area of the re-entry vehicle. A one-ton vehicle is going to have to shed all of its orbital velocity, converting all that kinetic energy into thermal, regardless of the size or shape or cross-sectional area. The way that is done is by compressing the air the vehicle slams into; the heating isn’t due to friction, but to the compression of the gas. If you can spread that heating energy out wider… the gas doesn’t heat up as much per unit surface area. Heating can be reduced from the sort of thing that will melt tungsten to the sort of thing that can be survived by advanced polymer fibers. As a bonus, the inflatable shield, being far larger than the solid shield on the vehicle, provides drag all the way down. In principle it would be possible to dispense with parachutes, wings, retro-rockets, and simply drift down using the shield as an inverted parachute. This was the case for the Douglas “PARACONE” concept from the mid-1960s, designed for, among other uses, as an emergency “life boat” for astronauts in space. It would provide for a safe entry, deceleration and touchdown on either land or water.
Nov 092022
A guy who was known as a anti-gun-violence activist attacked a woman in public in broad daylight and got shot by the police for his troubles. That’s straightforward enough… but this headline is a little grammatically *off*.
Man Killed by Officer Known for Anti-Gun Violence Campaign
See, it wasn’t the police officer known for “anti-gun violence campaign,” but the actual criminal. He had previously spent time in prison for murder, so this particular end to his story isn’t exactly shocking. but at least he didn’t die a hypocrite: he attacked a woman with a knife, not a gun. Gotta have standards, I suppose.
A better headline:
Knife-wielding man fatally shot by police was activist who created ‘no-shoot zones’
Something else to note here: the police officer shot him *14* times and he was still somewhat functional. He did an complete mag dump and reloaded. So anyone saying that “you don’t need more than ten rounds” is silly. Not only because “professionals” often use well over that number, but use that just on one guy. Imagine being set upon by three or four antagonists in a chaotic situation
Nov 092022
Disgraced former Senator Al Franken worrying that if the Republicans take over the House and/or Senate, not only will the Democrats plans not be allowed to pass, but there might actually be investigations of the many valid criminal accusations that have been made against his side of the aisle.
While that outcome would be great, there are two things that argue against it coming to pass:
1: Republicans have been noodle-spined weenies for *years,* more interested in “bipartisanship” than in actually doing their jobs.
2: Uncle Fester seems to be winning in Pennsylvania. If someone *that* clearly wrong for the job can even come close, never mind win, that says that something is really, REALLY wrong… either with election integrity or with the electorate. And thus the Dems ever losing their grip on power again seems less and less likely.
Nov 072022
So the latest news freakout over Elon Musk buying twitter is that he is banning people impersonating him:
Furious Elon Musk Pledges to Ban Anyone Who Changes Their Display Name to “Elon Musk”
Twitter bans comedian Kathy Griffin for impersonating Elon Musk
And so on. Lots of lefties are screeching that this means Musk is opposed to free speech.
Here’s the thing, though. The accounts getting banned are “Blue Checks.” You will see a little blue check mark next to some Twitter accounts; these accounts have been verified through some process to be actually who they say they are. This might be a corporate account like Ford or Lockheed; this might be the President of the United States; this might be a journalist or an actor. For most people it doesn’t really matter. But if you’re making Big Money on Twitter and you want to make sure that people know that they can trust that You are in fact You, I guess that little blue check mark is important.
Great, whatever.
But the moment you take your blue check account and change the name to someone else’s – like, say, “Elon Musk” – and then start making posts impersonating that other person, you are committing fraud. The blue check is supposed to say that You are You, not You are Some Other Person.
So, it’s simple. If you want to have a parody account, great, go right ahead. Just don’t use your already established “blue check” to try to fool people into thinking you are someone else. I’m not sure how this was even supposed to be controversial.
Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022
Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022
And there is another issue with the “blue check verification.” It is supposed to be proof that you are who you say you are, and it is supposed to be an impartial procedure. But there are accusations that the verification was refused sometimes unless you paid someone a bribe. And the bribes were reportedly not small. For a celebrity, fifteen grand might be chump change; but for journalists or “lesser” notables, it was a lot of money. But it would have been worth the price for that little blue check mark. It might even have been *necessary* in some fields, like journalism. In some respects, it’s like a drivers license… needed to do your job, open and available to everyone on a supposedly even playing field. So finding that *anyone* can be verified for a mere eight buck after you blew fifteen large? Yeah, that’s gotta grate.
Yup
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2022
Nov 052022
Huh.
But then…
There are a lot of weird aspects to this story, a lot of apparent contradictions and inconsistencies. Most news stories that initially seem like a conspiracy theorists wet dream fall apart once the facts come out (witness virtually *every* story related to “racial justice” over the past five or more years); I can easily imagine that this story could just as easily turn into exactly what the official narrative is if the evidence which *should* be available was released. The police body cams, the security camera footage, the identity of the mystery third person. These are not difficult things, like the results of some complicated chemical analysis; these are just “push a few buttons and upload” issues. And yet… that hasn’t happened. Why?
Nov 042022
Somehow Biden seems to think that Americans don’t settle their differences with riots, but at the Battle Box.
A Google Image Search for “Battle Box” turns up a weird assortment of Mall Ninja garbage and role playing game accessories.