And the gullible… and the charlatans.
It’s a worldwide race to the bottom of the dumbucket:
Mar 132020
Mar 132020
Political tattoos are always going to be questionable, as anyone who got a Mondale, Dukakis, Perot or Palin tattoo can attest. And then there’s *this* which has the dual feature of not only being of temporary relevance, but also *immediately* recognizable as being in astonishingly poor taste:
What we have here is a Comrade Warren staffer who got a tattoo reading “#B7E4CF,” the hex color code for the color used by the Warren campaign.
And… yeah. Took about a millisecond for people with more awareness than her to realize what it actually looked like:
Smart to memorialize a decision they'll regret for the rest of their lives with a decision they'll regret for the rest of their lives.
— Jake Sperling (@Jake_Sperling) March 10, 2020
Former Warren Staffers Criticized For Getting Ink That Looks A Lot Like Holocaust Tattoos
Mar 132020
NASA’s SLS Moon rocket is 2 years behind and billions over budget, internal report finds
Rocket surgery is hard. But for frak’s sake, it’s not *that* hard. NASA oversaw the development of the rough equivalent of the SLS in the form of the Saturn V fifty-five friggen’ years ago, on a shorter timescale and I believe at lower cost… and that was starting with prit near *nothing.* SpaceX has spent far less and achieved far more, and despite a lot of setbacks lately, I still wouldn’t put it past SpaceX to get an SLS-beater into the air before SLS.
I wonder what SpaceX could do with two billion dollars and two years. Hell, I wonder what *I* could do with that.
Hmm.
Who would I talk to about getting estimates for a mild steel circular plate twenty meters or so in diameter?
Mar 122020
Been a lot of rather doom- and’dumbassery-filled posts of late. Because, let’s face it, there’s been a whole lot of doom and dumbassery in the news.
So, here’s something a bit different… a few crappy photos of Speedbump discovering chicken jerky dog treats.
Mar 122020
Snerk.
NYT Editorial Board Member Nailed Again By Critics After Blaming Bloomberg Math Mistake Backlash On ‘Racist Twitter Mob’
A racist Twitter mob came for me over a trivial math mistake. I'm not going anywhere. https://t.co/McxAT8P7OI
— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) March 11, 2020
“Trivial math mistake.” She did the math that said that Mike Bloomberg could have given every American a buck and a half, and came away thinking that he could have given every American a million dollars. That’s not trivial by *any* estimation. That is phenomenally bad math. It’s like looking at a small child and estimating that it weigh twenty seven thousand tons. This is, I suppose, part of the left-wing war on math, science and reason, trading western notions of mathematics for “other ways of knowing” where assuming that two times two equals four and not twenty-eight quadrillion is a result of cis-hetero patriarchal whiteness.
Mar 122020
Sadly, not “Mike Bloomberg is using that million dollars he has for every American to buy us all the just-developed cure/vaccine.” But if this comes about, it’ll still be a good if modest step:
‘Buy American’ — White House Confirms Executive Order That Will End Medical Supply Chain Reliance On China
One would have hoped that American reliance upon Chinese suppliers for *anything* would have long since been nipped in the bud, but better late than never.
I’m pretty libertarian in my economic views, but not *entirely*. There is a role for the government and for regulations. Mandating that industries vital to the functioning of the nation not be controlled by foreign nations, *especially* adversarial nations, would seem to be pretty high up there. If the US comes out of this crises with its economy intact – or at least not in tatters – and able to manufacture not just medical supplies but also medicines (many of which are cheaply and often badly made in India and China) and perhaps ever industrial tools and weapons and computer components made here in the US of A… so much the better.
Mar 122020
The song “Blinding Lights” by “The Weeknd” has recently been popular. Which is a little strange, since it sound like it came straight out of the 80’s. Which is especially strange given that the singer/songwriter, one Abel Tesfae, was born in February 1990.
I feel, once again, old.
Mar 122020
If you’ve been waiting your whole life to see high-speed, high-def footage taken from a racing drone as if flies under, above, alongside and sometimes *through* the flames from a flamethrower… well, here ya go.
Yow.
And, yes, flamethrowers are legal in the US. Some states have laws against them, but, perhaps oddly, the federal government does not. Sure, the ATF will squat on your head if you have a machinegun or a grenade launcher, but a flame thrower? Pfff. Don’t worry about it.
Mar 122020
Sea Dragon was, as is doubtless news to few around here, an early 1960’s idea at Aerojet for an extremely large, very simply two-stage pressure-fed space booster. It was meant to be as cheap to build and operate as possible with 1960’s tech, relying on scale to make it all work. Would it have worked? Maybe. Physics supports it. Would it have been cheap to operate? Hard to tell. “Simple as possible” does not equate to “simple,” and anything the size of Sea Dragon, especially screaming out of the sky to smack into the ocean while blisteringly hot… well, there are always risks.
In 1963 the idea of a pinpoint vertical landing a la the Falcon 9 would have been ridiculous, so splashdown was really the only way to go for a booster designed for simplicity. But as NASA and Thiokol found with dropping Shuttle boosters into the drink, recovery and refurbishment after salt water immersion can be a bit of a headache. The way to make a Sea Dragon truly economically competitive would be, as with Falcon 9, flight after flight after flight, often enough that it ceases to be an Amazing News Story and becomes, like the Falcon 9, seemingly dull and monotonous. But given the million-pound payload of the Sea Dragon it’s difficult to envision a space program following on the footsteps of Apollo that would have required a Sea Dragon every few weeks. It would certainly have been *nice* to have had such a program (and if the current pandemic takes down western civ it will turn out that the lack of such a program was criminally negligent) but the existence of a timeline with such a program seems a little difficult to envision.
The article, written by sea Dragon advocate Robert Truax, that the above illustration came from has been scanned and made available to above-$10 APR subscribers and Patrons.
Mar 122020
Suuuuuuuuuuure it does.
Newsom: Disneyland, Theaters, Casinos Exempted From Coronavirus Ban On Large Gatherings
Reason given: the “complexity of their unique circumstances.”
Riiiiiiiiiight.
UPDATE: Disney packs it in.
— Disney Parks News (@DisneyParksNews) March 13, 2020