The local news here in Utah *seems* to have been especially full of stories about avalanches and rock slides this last winter. This may be due to me simply taking note of a perfectly normal series of events; this may be due to the media paying more attention to these perfectly normal events;or it might be just barely possible that there have been more such events than usual. I dunno.
Winter right *here* has been pretty tame this year. But Colorado has been sort of at the edge of the polar vortex, and I believe it’s caught a goodly supply of actual winter weather. Couple that with the ready availability of digital video cameras, and you get some pretty impressive events recorded, such as these avalanches yesterday that buried part of I-70:
I have customers from all over the world. But some locations are troublesome. In the last year or so I’ve had a lot of issues when communicating with French email addresses… in particular, those from “free.fr.” An order comes in through PayPal, I send a reply with the download link and password, and then, from a few minutes to a few hours later a bot-generated response comes in telling me that the message is undeliverable. And then days or weeks later emails come in from the buyer wanting to know where the stuff they paid for is; and when I reply… it bounces. I have two different email accounts and they *both* bounce like this. I currently have a customer who has repeatedly asked for an update, and every update I send explaining the situation bounces. Which doubtless looks to the customer like I’ve taken his money and am refusing to communicate. Efforts to communicate through PayPal have been fruitless.
So if this is *you*, send me an email from *another* address… one not from free.fr.
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
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some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message
remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up,
and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.
The SpaceX Demo crew Dragon has docked with the ISS. This is the first flight of the capsule that SpaceX and NASA plan to use later this year (hopefully July) to send actual living human astronauts to the ISS, returning to the US the ability to launch our own people. This capability was lost for at least eight years when the Shuttle last flew in July 2011; in comparison, the loss of human launch capability that existed between Apollo (last flight: July 1975) and Shuttle (first flight; April 1981) was less than six years.
The video below shows the unmanned demo capsule approaching and docking with the ISS. It just *looks* like a spaceship. Some interesting shots of it rapidly firing it’s thrusters, showing what those plumes look like in a vacuum.
After the capsule is done at ISS (should be there for five days), it will separate and re-enter. All goes well, it will land back at the Cape using a combo of rocket thrusters and parachutes. It was originally planned for the Crew Dragon to use just the thrusters, a capability SpaceX has demonstrated with their boosters, but for safety reason chutes were added. Assuming it is successful, this very same capsule will be refurbished and, in June, used for an In Flight Abort test, which should be interesting.
The launch and successful booster landing were conducted at night, so the relevant videos are less impressive than they might otherwise have been.
Note: people get attacked for wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, and sometimes they are asked to explain just when America was great. Well, I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but America was certainly greatER when we had AN ACTUAL GOT-DAMNED MANNED SPACE PROGRAM. One that can launch and recover our own people.
The fuel in question is ammonia. Which is fine, I guess (quite a number of conventional vehicles have been modified to run on it), except it has a few problems:
1: It is toxic.
2: Its boiling point is low… lower than most Polar Vortex nights. So it will either need to be stored under pressure or at soft cryogen temperatures. Either way, it will have to be a spherical or cylindrical tank.
3: Internal combustion engines aren’t 100% efficient at combustion. So the fumes will reek of toxic ammonia.
4: Additionally, nitrogen oxides – N2O and NO2 – will be produced. NO2 is not only toxic, it’s a major component of smog.
5: The energy density of liquid ammonia is poor, something like 1/3 that of hydrocarbons. So for that 85 cents, you’ll go a third as far. Given that the ammonia tank isn’t the same shape as your modified cars original gas tank, you’re likely carrying a notably smaller fuel load. You might need to fuel up four or five times as often.
6: And then the government starts adding on taxes to the ammonia….
A video exploring the potential of using the very slight vibration of objects to create a *visual* record of sound, recordable on commercial cameras and interpreted via software. The results aren’t spectacular, but they are interesting. It should be noted that intelligence services have been assumed to have used something like this for decades to record sounds at a distance: bounce a laser beam off of a window and into a finely tuned photoreceptor. Voices within a room will cause the window to vibrate slightly; the reflected laser beam will jitter and that can be used to record the sounds. The system in the video below uses ambient light rather than laser beams, and cameras rather than photoreceptors, to approximate the same thing.
Advance the technology few hundred years down the line, and the USS Whateverprise could sidle up to a wrecked ship and *listen* to it. Obviously it could do so by bouncing lasers off of it, but also just by using reflected starlight. Even with the most advanced processors, though, a fully functional operating ship would seem to be entirely too noisy for an eavesdropper to pick up individual conversations. But… maybe. Interesting to consider the outside possibility of a sufficiently advanced science vessel being able to evade a Klingon attack because they can “hear” the enemy commander screaming orders at the bridge crew.
The ChiComs are leading, the SJWs are gleefully following.
What will be the end result here? Not only will there have to be two “separate but equal” social media systems (Subscribestar vs Patreon, Gab vs Twitter), but it’s starting to looks like separate *banking* systems as well. This sort of thing will create disunity to the point where civil war becomes quite feasible. Who would benefit from the US/West tearing itself apart?
“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants.”
On one hand, it’s a no-brainer. If there’s any place that should support free speech, it’s a college.
On the other hand, colleges will now be put between either losing federal funds or being burned to the ground by leftists outraged that the college allows its students to publicly support conventional political positions.
I imagine a lot of college campii are becoming miniature surveillance states. it should thus become relatively straightforward, by watching numerous camera feeds, to figure out who the masked Antifa thugs are and to expel them. it would be better in the long run to simply get rid of the violent whackaloons than to lose federal funding. This will likely mean that a lot of libart identity studies courses will dry up and blow away, but that, in the final analysis, is better for society anyway.
The latest notion for the offendatarians to ulcerate and hyperventilate over is “black stunt people lightening or darkening their skin to more closely approximate the appearance of the black actor they are standing in for.” Because if a light-skinned black stunt man darkens his skin to look like a dark-skinned black actor, that’s “black face,” and people lose their careers over that sort of thing.
So, there is an obvious solution: when the actor is a “person of color” and a stunt is called for, replace the stunt people with stunt robots. Nobody, at least so far, has complained of a painting, photograph, wax statue, action figure, etc. of a black person being “black face.” I’m sure it’s coming, of course, but at least not quite yet.
Let’s face it, robots are getting real close to being able to do that sort of thing.
This could be one thing to say in favor of Social Justice Warriors: by raising a stink over stupid stuff, they spur innovation. Robots to replace POC stunt performers, robots and kiosks to replace no-skill burger flippers demanding excessively high minimum wages, etc. And there are already the fembots. Soon there will be true mechanical NPCs taking the place of protestors, marching around, holding signs, repetitively shouting ill-conceived and barely relevant chants, etc.
Soon everyone whose cause is championed by the SJW’s will find themselves to be permanently unemployable.
I put a few hundred miles on the ol’ odometer today for one specific purpose: to see “Apollo 11” on an Imax screen.
Short review: if it opens on a good Imax screen near-ish you… run, don’t walk. More likely, drive, don’t run. I recommend it on about the same level I recommended “2001” on Imax.
There is no narration. The story of Apollo 11 is allowed to play out using film footage and audio recorded at the time, with some modern animation inserted to explain trajectories and whatnot. The animation, perhaps surprisingly, is not whiz-bang CGI, but simple line schematics showing simplified Apollo CSM and LM “icons” doing their thing.
Most of the movies features film which is really well short of Imax quality… it’s not like they had a 70mm camera in the capsule. But the first two minutes of the movie are worth the price of admission: it starts out with the crawler slooooowly making it’s way to the pad. It’s FREAKIN’ AWESOME.
I don’t have a 4K TV, nor a 4K player, but when this comes out on home media I’m getting the 4K version in the hopes that someday I’ll upgrade. It will sit on a small shelf along with my “2001” 4K set and gather dust until that day comes.