Hard to tell the difference these days, especially with public education.
As we ponder the decline and fall of western civilization driven by the dumbing down of education, here is another video, a cautionary tale of a cat driven mad by Soviet popular music. Even though the Soviets are gone, the effects they have had – from aiding the left in the long-con of convincing westerners that science and math are racist to fomenting the anti-nuclear industry in order to trash the entire planets via carbon dioxide – continue almost unabated. Perhaps the fact that Communism, Socialism, Fascism and similar and related collectivist kleptocratic systems have been utterly discredited has only made them more powerful: too many people refuse to even consider that their PC notions aren’t really theirs, but are the result of some KGB dirty tricks division project from fifty years ago.
He’s made quite a number of these cardboard guns. *Some* of them seem like they might be turned into kits that could be produced from simple flat sheets, but even the simple ones would require a substantial degree of skill and determination.
In 1985 Rockwell considered the business case for a small unmanned research vehicle to be released from the Orbiter payload bay. It would be *something* akin to the X-37, though of an utterly different lifting body configuration.
Also note: this vehicle re-appears later in the report, including a nice three-view of an “operational” version.
One of the formerly great things about National Geographic magazine was the map that would be included in every other issue or so. Some years ago they began tapering off, now the maps are a thing of the past.
I have a collection of Nat Geo maps somewhat more than 2 linear feet thick. Anybody want ’em? Gimme an offer, either email me or post in the comments. Postage might be pricey, I don’t think they can go via media mail since they are not bound.
As time goes by, I find more and more unhappy customers… not because I’m turning out a crappy product or not filling orders, but because the emails i send out are directed into spam buckets. I *assume* that this is because the emails have one or more, sometimes many, HTML links in them, and the spam filters read them as, well, spam. But an email exchange usually fixes that right up.
One problem that I can’t seem to fix, however, is orders from the “free.fr” email system. Multiple machines, multiple email systems, all messages sent to “free.fr” addresses bounce back as undeliverable because the system has, through presumably the same process as he spam filters, decided that these messages are spam, and has successfully blocked me out. So if you have a free.fr email address and don;t get a reply from me, *ever,* contact me via a *different* email.
It should surprise nobody that time passes, but it somehow still seems remarkable that the 9-11 attacks were eighteen years ago today. I was on the other side of the continent in California, working at an ICBM factory south of San Jose; and even though there were no attacks our way, that didn’t stop the rumor machine from *inventing* attacks. A truck bomb in town? Turned out to be a vehicle backfiring. A tanker detonating in Discovery Bay? Nope. A truck bomb on one of the major bridges? A truck that had legitimately broken down. The bobcat that was looking down on me from three feet above in an outdoor boneyard as I dug through ten-year-old bits and pieces looking for usable parts of cruise missile booster motors so we could get production back up and running again ASAP? That was real enough, but that was less of an “attack” and more of a “curious kitty.”
And now people who were born on that, and even several years prior, who have no recollection of a world *without* 9-11 and the resulting cultural, political military and legal changes, are adults. This just weirds me out.
… And now I can’t log into the APR Blog to make new posts or edit the existing ones. Gaaaahhhhhhrrrrrr.
UPDATE, the next day: aerospaceprojectsreview.com and the blog all *seem* to be working just fine again. If you have any trouble… sigh, let me know in the comments…
The Greeks had a lot of gods, many of which are pretty obscure today, especially given the dire state of the modern under-educational system. This may prove helpful:
CNN might have taken the top spot, but when their paid talking head started shrieking that Trump should resign, be impeached, arrested and imprisoned, I was busy not pointing my face at the TV and only heard it. So the below video where the narrator lists all the ways that SpaceX is going to destroy the planet with rocket launches – including dumping carbon black (?), chlorine (?!?) and aluminum oxide (?!!??!) into the upper atmosphere – takes the prize for today.
As part of the argument, the video includes a graphic showing that a single Falcon 9 flight consumes 147 metric tons of kerosene, meaning it dumps 150 times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a single transatlantic flight. But… does it? The range of such a flight is about 4,800 km. Modern jetliners consume around 3 liters of jet fuel – essentially kerosene – per 100 km per seat, or about 144 liters per seat per flight. 144 liters is about 115 kilograms. The 777 can carry about 350 passengers, so 350*115kg = 40.25 metric tons of fuel. Without running the terribly complex calculations, it seems to me that 147 metric tons is not 150 times greater than 40 metric tons. Granted, not doing the math on that means I fall into the Other Ways Of Knowing category of addlepated imbecile who thinks that math is a tool of the cisheteronormative whiteness patriarchy, but it’s late and I’m tired, and my spirit animal assures me that the planets are aligned just right in the zodiac so that I can make a guess about which number is bigger so long as I avoid integer shaming.
This dismal piece of gormless chickenshittery terminates with a plea to end space exploration and, in the words of three generations of absolutely genetically defective morons, focus our attention instead on the Earth.
The “Major Matt Mason” line of “space toys” was somewhat before my time, but I gather that for a lot of people who were kids in the heady days of the 1960’s – at least for those for whom the sixties held more than hippies and assassinations and the decline of western civilization – those toy astronauts and spaceships hold a special spot in their memories.
It now seems that “MMM” toys might make a comeback, since it’s rare for a live action major science fiction movie to not have merchandizing, and it hardly seems likely that the associated cash grab for a movie based on a toy line won’t feature toys. And as memory serves, another set of movies that featured Tom Hanks and a toy astronaut have flooded the aisles of WalMart with mountains of toys. I suspect, though, that the next generation of “MMM” toys will be a tad different than the originals.
