The Orion capsule abort test seems to have been a success. It was certainly damned impressive looking. The test vehicle looks a lot like an early Polaris.
Full Orion AA-2 test video. All major events completed within two minutes.
It really did look totally as advertised! Presser in a few hours. pic.twitter.com/M1BaQ4i7hH
— Chris B – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) July 2, 2019
Seventh in the series. Read after the break…
… and self-important SJWs will take your whole culture from you.
Poor ol’ Colin is upset that the shoes have US flags on them:
Nike nixed the released of the Air Max 1 USA after having already sent the sneakers to retailers because the protesting quarterback said he felt the use of the Betsy Ross flag was offensive and carried slavery connotations
UPDATE:
There is a smidgeon of good news coming out of this…
“Instead of celebrating American history the week of our nation’s independence, Nike has apparently decided that Betsy Ross is unworthy, and has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism. It is a shameful retreat for the company. American businesses should be proud of our country’s history, not abandoning it.
“Nike has made its decision, and now we’re making ours. I’ve ordered the Arizona Commerce Authority to withdraw all financial incentive dollars under their discretion that the State was providing for the company to locate here. Arizona’s economy is doing just fine without Nike. We don’t need to suck up to companies that consciously denigrate our nation’s history.”
Just an FYI: Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is running classic science fiction movies on Tuesday nights in July.
July 2: “A Trip To The Moon,” 1902; “Metropolis,” 1926; “Di Frau Im Mond,” 1931; “Things to Come,” 1936; and bunch of “Flash Gordon” serials.
July 9: “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” 1951; “The War Of The Worlds,” 1953; “Forbidden Planet,” 1956; “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” 1956; “It Came from Outer Space,” 1953; “The Thing From Another World,” 1951; “Earth vs the Flyign Saucers,” 1956
July 16: “Destination Moon,” 1950; “For All mankind,” 1989; “Countdown,” 1968; ” From the Earth to the Moon,” 1958; “First Men In the Moon,” 1964; “20 million Miles to Earth,” 1957, “Them!” 1954; “The Blob,” 1958; “The Fly,” 1958
July 23: “The Time Machine,” 1960; “2001,” 1968; “Five Million Miles to Earth,” 1968; “Marooned,” 1969; “Twelve to the Moon,” 1960; “Village of the Damned,” 1960
July 30: “Close Encounters of the third Kind,” 1977; “Star Wars,” 1977; “Star Trek II,” 1982; “Solaris,” 1972; “Logans Run,” 1975; “Westworld,” 1973; “2010,” 1984
For much of the time while the concept of the Space Shuttle was being developed the vehicle consisted of a manned flyback booster of relatively enormous dimensions, coupled with an orbiter that included sizable internal oxygen tanks, sometimes with external hydrogen tanks, sometimes internal. The model below, a masterpiece of late 1960’s model makers craft, illustrates one such concept. the orbiter is similar to the Grumman H-33 except larger, with completely internal hydrogen and oxygen tanks.
Had this type of Space Shuttle been built and flown successfully, there is every chance that it would have been substantially less costly to operate than the Shuttle we got: flying the booster back to a runway landing and refurbishing it would theoretically have been a lot faster and easier than fishing solid rocket motor casings out of the ocean and shipping them to Utah for refurb. But getting the design to the point of operation would have been a nightmare. The booster was unlike anything previously attempted, and would have been an aircraft roughly the size of the C-5 Galaxy, with a top speed like that of the X-15
I have uploaded the full resolution scan of the photo to the 2019-07 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Sixth in the series. Read after the break…
Today seems to be a day of days when it comes to political whackadoodlery.
The 2020 Presidential election, more than a year away, is already weird enough, what with Gropey Joe and all the rest so far refusing to denounce left wing violence in Portland. But it’s getting even weirder: it seems that during the recent televised Dem debates, *somebody* used real-time computer AI video trickery to either add or subtract a pimple to Tulsi Gabbard’s chin:
On one hand… it’s kinda silly. On the other hand, the ability to create a “deep fake” videos IN REAL TIME is more than a little disturbing.
The easiest explanation is that the pimple was real and a filter was applied to “erase” it and the filter failed from time to time. But then… isn’t that what makeup is for? Using digital trickery for “good” is only going to cause people’s conspiracy senses to tingle.
But Tulsi Gabbard is on record claiming that she had no such pimple, and called for an investigation. It seems like a lame thing for a major organization like NBC News to digitally add a pimple to someone; if this was done, I’d bet that the cause was lower down the totem pole. Perhaps little more than a tech having fun with his new Add-A-Pimple App. But that might be even worse. Bad enough if it takes a billion dollar corporation working in cahoots with a political party to pull this off; but if one guy working by his lonesome can do this, then we stand on the edge of what has long been inevitable: complete lack of trust in *any* form of news gathering. Because we are about fifteen minutes away from video being utterly untrustworthy.
If anyone ever wonders why I harp on about dangers to western civilization… behold:
From the PDF description of the seminar:
“Decolonizing Epistemology”There is a widespread skepticism about many sorts of knowledge claims today, and this skepticism has been promoted from both the right and the left. The skepticism is largely based on the realization that knowledge is always connected to power. But there is uncertainty about what follows from this: is it still ‘knowledge’?The decolonial epistemology project accepts the connection of knowledge and power but then moves to a different set of questions that are organized in two overall components: (1) to critique existing theories and practices concerning knowledge for the ways in which these theories and practices may be supporting the colonial structure of knowledge, and (2) to develop new reconstructed norms for improved knowing practices without reinscrib-ing colonial relationships. To advance this project, decolonial work in epistemology must address the following:
1. Do social identities matter for knowledge claims? How, exactly?
2. How is ignorance socially produced, and what is the solution?
3. Should we continue to use concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’?
4. How can science be done in a decolonial way?
5. How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?
Such a project benefits epistemology as a whole. In exploring the ways in which the disen-franchised have been epistemically discredited, we can develop new insights and theories about the general nature of knowledge and of knowers. This project also benefits every community that is struggling for democracy and justice against the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and technocracy.Thus, the question of knowledge, and of who has knowledge, of what kinds of character traits and motivations will best assist knowing, and of how knowledge claims should be assessed, is key to social change. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it, “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.”
As has been repeated noted, you have to be university-educated to believe something so monumentally stupid.
Take, for instance, point 5: “How do we empower traditional and indigenous knowledges?” It’s quite simply: take each individual bit of “indigenous knowledge” and put it to a rigorous scientific test. If it succeeds, great! Now it’s not just “indigenous knowledge,” but, in fact, “knowledge.” If it fails, you can discard it.
And point #3: Define “we,” lady. Those of us who happen to like modernity, science, western civ? Why, yes, we should continue to use rationality and reason. You, on the other hand… by all means, please don’t. I look forward to how successful you are with your “other ways of knowing” when you contact cancer or get hit by a bus or your power goes out.
If Trump was the man that many people desperately wish he was, he’d have the FBI investigating these buffoons to see whether it’s China, Russia, ISIS or those dastardly Dutch who are secretly behind them, pushing them to tar American society down and turn this into a hellscape of idiotarianism and race wars. if Cornell was the university it aught to be, it’d stop funding these ridiculous seminars and “educators.”
The part excerpted above is only a small piece, from a single one of the contributors to this nonsensical waste of time, resources and potential. Go ahead and read the rest of it. It’s filled with stuff that can be *charitably* described as “gibberish.”
This seminar will take Erich Auerbach’s notion of figura, elaborated mainly in his 1938 essay with the same title, as a starting point for a broader inquiry into notions of figure, figuration, and the specific productivity of figural practices in creating aesthetic, perceptual, and cognitive spheres of experience. At its core the seminar will focus on the understanding of the capacity of figure and figuration in deploying ‘plastic’ effects, i.e., in the shaping of and the experimentation with sensual, affective, and cognitive land-scapes.
…
Normatively shaped dys-functionalities, the fact that social practices erode in contradictory reactions that can no longer be made up for, is the “rock bottom” for a certain kind of critique, an immanent crisis critique of forms of life.
…
It invites us to transcend modernity by replacing the alienated genea-logical hermeneutics of suspicion with a rationally recollective hermeneutics of magnanimity that is at once tradition-affirming and tradition-transforming.
I liked this bit:
Faculty and advanced graduate students of literature, the arts, the humanities, the related social sciences and professional studies are invited to apply.
Huh. it doesn’t seem like they’re inviting students of science and engineering. Just students of ridiculous nonsense.
And here they beat an old man bloody because… well, why wouldn’t they?
Probably NSFW, unless your workplace is cool with scenes of left wing fascists beating people with clubs until they bleed profusely. The description is that they attacked him with a crowbar; I can’t see it clearly enough to say that, but they definitely went after him not only with a multitude of clubs but also chemical weapons.
THESE are the people who will bring on an AI apocalypse:
1) In order to deal with domestic terrorist groups like this, it will become increasingly necessary to deploy increasingly devious surveillance systems. Fly-sized recon drones scattered throughout Portland recording everything would be useful; better still would be little drones that would obtain DNA samples from all the masked criminals on display here. It’s a dystopian authoritarian thought, but these monsters make it pretty much mandatory.
2) If the AI wake up and Antifa are among the earliest examples of humanity it gets to experience, who could blame it for deciding that humanity is just horrible and it’d be better off without humans?
While it should be clear to even the libbiest of libs that Trump didn’t collude with Russia, it should also be clear to even the rightiest of right wingers that the Russians doubtless are *trying* to meddle in American elections. I don’t know if “they” are an official Russian government operation, or a loose assemblage of Russian hackers or everything in between; and I don’t know if they’re doing it for some devious long-term geopolitical 4-D chess reason or if they’re doing it for the lulz. But if you don’t like the US and you want to bring it down a peg or ten, one way to go is to cause the American populace to turn against itself. And it seems to me a damn easy way to do that is to convince people to buy into this left-wing hatemob mentality.
So not only should Antifa and its defenders be investigated for domestic terrorism and criminal conspiracy, but also for potential treasonous activity.
And I haven’t seen a single one of the Democrat Presidential candidates denounce this. So I guess that means they support it. And not a single one of them has been cleared of colluding with Antifa to spread street violence. Remember that when it comes time to vote.
I’ll believe it when I see it:
I suspect these are Elon-estimates, which have been notoriously optimistic in the past. Still, there’s no reason why SpaceX *can’t* pull this off. And if they can… that would be not only impressive, but world changing . Western civilization just might have a chance to survive. Not on Earth, of course… here, we’re pretty well doomed. But out in space, maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility that people who speak English, aren’t ashamed of Washington and Jefferson and think rationally and scientifically might live on.
“The goal is to get orbital as quickly as possible, potentially even this year, with the full stack operational by the end of next year and then customers in early 2021.”
Here’s hoping.