A neighbor came by today, with a trio of hyperactive puppies in tow. The farmcats were *not* impressed…
Here’s the one I was able to catch:
Here’s the staredown, which the puppy lost:
Here’s Mommacat, defender of the backyard:
Portrait of a defiant farmcat:
Photography of the result of a steel bolt meeting a grinding wheel. I will likely take some more photos tonight when it’s dark to see if there are any differences of note. Some interesting things can be seen, including burning specks of iron exploding and what appear to be helical paths of some of the sparks.
Huh.
Cologne brothel offers tattoo discount
About 40 men have agreed to a Cologne brothel owner’s offer of lifelong free entry in exchange for getting tattoos of the establishment logo on their arms, daily Express reported on Friday.
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And here’s the bit that makes this comedy gold:
One die-hard customer, 46-year-old Herbert Manske, told the paper he didn’t hesitate long to get the six large blue letters tattooed on his arm. “My wife doesn’t mind. I save five euros entry, plus the thirty euro cost of a lap dance,” he said.
Germans. Always with the tattoo hijinks.
As a followup to this post, I’ve done some further experimenting with images.
First up: a further refinement of the “hawk” shot. Shown here is the original on the left, and the modified version on the right. Rather than black and white, the background has been blurred, and the hue saturation turned down, but the hawk itself is left clear and bright. To me this seems to give it a “3-D” effect.
Next, I modified the Lake Marie shot. The upper image is brightened somewhat from the original; the lower image is a sepia-toned version of the B&W version.
And this is a similar treatment of the “mesa” shot. Same color and B&W versions above, but at the bottom is a sepia-toned version of the B&W. Here, it looks good:
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On screen, these images look pretty good. But yesterday I had the Lake Marie and Mesa images printed off (at considerable expense, I might add) in color, B&W and sepia: while there was general consensus that the sepia was somewhat better than the color for Lake Maria, there was no question for the Mesa: the sepia version looks freakin’ AWESOME.
From the BBC:
The UN has no more food to distribute in the Gaza Strip, the head of relief efforts in the area has warned.John Ging said handouts for 750,000 Gazans would have to be suspended until Saturday at the earliest, and called Gaza’s economic situation “a disaster”.
Yes, truly tragic. If only the Gazans had some way of growing plants on their own. Oh, I dunno… maybe greenhouses or something.
Looters strip Gaza greenhouses
Sept. 13, 2005
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip – Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.
American Jewish donors had bought more than 3,000 greenhouses from Israeli settlers in Gaza for $14 million last month and transferred them to the Palestinian Authority.
It appears that I am reasonably talented at taking the occasional decent photo. However, good though many of them may be, they tend to be kinda “vanilla.” Odd camera angles, catching unusal things in frame, visually attractive details in frame are good ways to make ’em more interesting. But right now in Utah it’s a time of “blah” in the landscape… all the plants are dead, brown and chopped down; but there’s not yet snowfall to make good winter scenes. So a good friend suggested that I tinker a bit with some of my existing photos. Two options were presented:
1) Black-and-white versions of the scenic views
2) Black-and-white with specific areas of color to draw the eye.
I have done this with a few test shots. While I admit to having the ability to make some good art, I also admit the inability to really tell what’s good art and what’s pretty but just kinda boring. So I’d appreciate feedback. Do these altered views turn what might be nice online snapshots into something that someone would want to spend money on and hang on their wall? The top-and-bottom comparisons have the B&W modified versions; the side-by-side comparisons have areas of color.
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All honest comments appreciated.
Another Kartveli design for Republic circa 1960: the AP-100. Capable of 1,500 miles per hour, this plane featured six turbojets both for forward propulsion and to serve as gas generators, powering three centrally located lift fans. This strike fighter was single-seat and could pack a nuclear bomb in the bay near the extreme tail. Note that just aft of the bomb there is a fourth smaller lift fan; this would have been a definite requirement. The bomb bay located so far from the CG would mean that considerable pitching moment thrust would be needed to offset it.
A modern update of this design could be interesting. Get rid of the vertical tail and do something about the inlets, and it seems like it could be quite stealthy. Modern turbojet engines would be smaller and lighter for the same performance; perhaps four or even two could do the job. And put thrust vectoring nozzles at the trailing edge, as on the F-22. With modern materials, the wings themselves might become surperfluous (lift being generated by the body), or nearly so, reducing them to small, low-radar-cross-section stubs. Perhaps replace the wings andvertical tail with two small V-tails.
You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this….
Secret Rocket Balls Target WMD Bunkers
The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them “kinetic fireball incendiaries.” The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about them, but published documents show that the fireballs have undergone tests on underground bunkers.
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Each fireball is a hollow spherical shell with a hole in it; when the inside is ignited, the hole acts as a rocket nozzle. The kinetic fireballs eject an extremely high-temperature exhaust which will heat up the surrounding volume to over 1,000 F within seconds. Their random ricocheting around ensures that they will fill any space they occupy, and they are capable of diffusing throughout a multiroom structure.
My opinion: meh. I liked it the way it originally was. They could have updated the NCC-1701 without essentially completely altering it. But they went for the “let’s completely alter it” approach.
http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2008/11/star-trek-first.html
In the late 50’s/early 60’s, the American aerospace industry gave serious consideration to SSTO airbreathers. The AeroSpacePlane program (ASP, not to be confused with the 30-years-later NASP program) sought to develop such a vehicle for military purposes; the USAF eventually gave up on ASP as being too technologically challenging.
One Republic Aviation concept from 1960 that would have fit in with ASP (it’s unclear if it was an actual ASP contender) is shown below. Presented by famed aircraft designer Alexander Kartveli, it featured a lifting body hydrogen fueled spaceplane with inward-turning inlets for four scramjet engines… all design features that would fit in with a modern attempt to design an airbreathing SSTO spaceplane. In fact, it very easily could come off a modern designers drawing board today with minimal modification.
While it’s true that the technology wasn’t there in 1960 to support such a craft – and it’s arguable whether the technology to pull off a vehicle like this exists today – the US governments scattershot approach to developing this sort of thing has not been helpful. Over the past 50 years (ye gods it really has been that long), numerous airbreather SSTO programs have come along, spent billions of taxpayer dollars, and then been cancelled when things started getting difficult. A determined but slow and methodical single effort very likely could have successfully resolved the problems decades ago. But sadly the US government is not interested in methodical and long-term, unless it’s an entitlement program that will never, ever get curtailed. Anything that lasts past a Presidential administration stands a good chance of getting the axe.
The Republic concept was to be a multi-purpose vehicle, capable of carrying space paylaods, bombs/missiles, even a parasite fighter-bomber. The latter of course sounds the most interesting of the possible payloads… and it of course has not been shown in anything that I have yet found. If you’ve come across information (especially drawings) of the fighter, don’t hesitate to let me know.
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