Aug 272019
 

I asked this before. trying again.

So let’s say you find something planet-sized in deep space, but magically it’s not spherical. Let’s say… it’s a pretzel. It’s a pretzel 10,000 kilometers wide made out of solid tungsten, kept from collapsing into a sphere due to Magic Structural Materials. Just go with it, folks. Something that big and that massive would have a terribly complex gravity field nearby. And I want to try to model it. Does anyone know of a program that would do this? It seems to me that what it’d need to be is a basic 3D CAD modeler that you build the object in, then the computer chops the model up into a thousand or ten thousand or however many individual chunks and calculates the force and vector of gravity from each chunk to each point in space and does the vector analysis. The concept is simple enough, but the coding is beyond me.

Might be possible to integrate a CAD model into Excel in some way to work out the 3D coordinates for all the chunks, I dunno. But it also seems like an obvious enough idea that it seems like it aught to already be a subroutine in some extant CAD program.

Who can hook a brother up?

 

 Posted by at 12:49 am
Aug 262019
 

Continuing…

In 1985 Rockwell suggested stretching the Orbiter to create a 75-foot-long cargo bay in order to carry longer – though clearly not heavier – payloads. Exactly what those payloads might be was not given, but they would presumably be sizable yet relatively light structures… deployable structures such as solar arrays and radar arrays seem not unlikely. Interestingly, the main landing gear were to be moved slightly forward, the nose gear well aft.

Up next: the “hump-backed” Orbiter, with the most amazing shuttle diagram EVAR.

Hey. Hey.

Tips


 

 

 Posted by at 10:05 pm
Aug 262019
 

Most of Monday, the up-ship.com website was either very reluctant to come up or didn’t come up at all; the blog surprisingly was a bit more resilient, but from time to time it, too, failed to load. The web host says this was due to “server issues.” Meh. Things *seem* to be back up and running now.

I received a few “WTF?” emails. Obviously if the blog is down I can’t post “hey, the blog is down” on the blog. But I do wonder if it might perhaps be time to finally hold my nose and sign up for Twitter or some such? Use it *solely* as sort of a mirror for the blog, posting links to the latest blog posts… and updates about the blog when it goes down, which it seems to do with irritating regularity.

I do have the APR Facebook page but holy carp I hate using Facebook.

Not sure if it would be worth the soul crushing horror that comes with using Twitter to create such a Twitter account, especially considering that I will undoubtedly wind up getting deplatformed from Twitter eventually. Thoughts?

NOTE: A few times the blog has gone down I’ve gotten emails asking if I was dead or something. For future reference, I have no immediate plans to shuffle off this mortal coil, so if I die, the way it will be reflected on the blog is that it will stop being updated, and will remain up until the web host gets annoyed at the lack of payment.

 Posted by at 9:52 pm
Aug 262019
 

Test

EDIT: Purpose of test… you might or might not have trouble accessing the main webpage, up-ship.com right now and for the past few hours. I certainly do. Turns out, according to tech support, there’s some sort of server issue. But the *blog* seems to be coming through ok. And the main page comes through on my *phone* just fine.

Sigh. I don’t friggen’ know anymore…

 Posted by at 4:05 pm
Aug 262019
 

It may be after the garbage fires that “Last Jedi” and “Solo” were, Disney has just stopped giving a damn about Star Wars. Heck, they don’t even have Star Wars toys at WalMart, a sure sign of franchise malaise.

But they’re still going through the motions, and recently released the first official poster for “Rise of Skywalker.” Behold the lameness:

Judgement: Meh.

But it gets even better: See that Emperor Palpatine there int he background? It seems that they didn’t paint Palpatine from the actual actor in makeup, but from a frakin’ toy.

Star Wars 9’s Palpatine Is A TOY, Not From The Movie

 

Sigh.

 

 

 Posted by at 12:39 am
Aug 252019
 

Here’s what we know: the mother and father in law of a 15-year-old girl find a strange 17-year-old male in the daughters bedroom closet at 2:30 AM; the trespasser then strikes the mother. The parents then the beat the tar out of him, tie him up, call the bio-father and eventually the cops. These parents – who I suspect *most* parents of teenage girls would agree did basically the right thing, are now facing *LIFETIME* prison sentences for – according to the actual criminal in this story – saying naughty words to him.

Note that in the video in the link below, the government authority refers to the violent trespasser as the “victim” and the homeowners as the “suspects.” Ye gods does California suck.

https://news.yahoo.com/parents-charged-hate-crime-allegedly-235755474.html

 Posted by at 9:42 pm
Aug 252019
 

Oy.

Stanford pushes separate physics course for minority students

From a brief reading, this appears to be less “minorities need to be taught F=MA in a separate space from white people because F=MA varies from race to race” and more “due to quota requirements and affirmative action, we’re bringing in minority students who are simply not prepared for Stanford-level physics and need to be trained up on the rudiments that other students already have.”

This should hardly be surprising. Affirmative action has long been demonstrated to generally be harmful to those it purports to help. Consider:

Option A: you’re from a  financially well-off family, race unimportant. Your grade/middle/high school education was top-notch, possibly private. When it comes time for college, you are prepared educationally and financially. You can basically pick your school (or, as recently shown, your limousine liberal parents can simply buy your way in, even if you, the student, don’t care about said school, or even schooling at all). If you find that you are scholastically in trouble, you can buy mentors and tutors and whatnot and plow your way through.

Option B: You’re from a financially middlin’ family, and you are not from a politically favored ethnicity. Consequently, you know well in advance that your college options are to either earn those scholarships (scholastic or athletic) or to set your college goals realistically. The South Houston Institute of Technology rather than Stanford, say. You thus enter a college that you can (more or less) afford, with students who, like you, are not the cream of the crop academically. You are with your academic peers.

Option C: Your family finances suck, but you’re ethnically popular. Since you come from poor finances, you likely went to a financially dubious set of primary schools, and possibly got an education that’s not worth the paper the diploma was photocopied onto. But you win the political lottery and through the magic of Affirmative Action not only get into college, you get into a *high* *end* college. Huzzah! But… a high end college means high end students and a high end grading curve. You are not prepared for Stanford. You are at the bottom of the class and failing hard. You drop out. You are depressed and demoralized and turned off the higher education system. History has shown that rather than licking your wounds and taking your failure at Stanford as an important lesson and then setting your sights more realistically and applying at the South Houston Institute of Technology, you say “screw it” to college and never go back But… huzzah! Your family took out a bankload of loans to get you into Stanford. You were only there for a year or two, but it was long enough to put them into debt for the rest of their lives, and since you have no college degree… suck to be you.

 

Yeah, life ain’t fair. But it does few people any favors to drop them into an environment that they are unprepared for. It may well be that it’s not their fault that they are unprepared. They may not have had the opportunity to become prepared. They may have even been held back from becoming prepared. But the fact remains… they’re not prepared.

Me, I managed to get an aerospace engineering degree. It was more difficult than it should have been, for two simple reasons: Calculus 1 and Calculus 3. I was a *disaster* with those. Calculus 2 and Differential Equations? Blew right through them, no sweat. But 1 and 3? Kicked my ass, *hard.* But… I still manged to get through it.

Now… instead of college-age me going for that Aero E degree, assume I had somehow obtained entry in, say, the ninth grade, several years earlier. It still would have been me… but it would have been a me substantially less prepared. The chances of success would have been probably nonexistent.

So what Stanford is doing makes a certain amount of sense. But it would make more sense for Stanford to do this *away* from Stanford. If these students are found to have the natural talent for the education they’ve signed up for but not yet the skills, rather than putting them into Stanford and giving them separate training alongside the other students, give them a year of “Year Five Of High School” somewhere *then* bring them to Stanford. I’m sure there are more than enough community colleges around the country that can do this.

And then put all the students into the same classrooms without discrimination, shame or the taint of forced diversity.

But not all of what Stanford is doing is aimed at the betterment of their students. Behold:

A similar course, titled “Physics 93SI: Beyond the Laboratory: Physics, Identity and Society,” is led by students, rather than professors. In this course, physics majors can earn academic credit by generally exploring “issues of diversity and culture in physics,” by applying concepts such as “critical race theory.”

Anyone who pushes “critical race theory” is working to ruin students as productive members of society.

 Posted by at 1:48 pm