Screenshots from an Air Force “Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion” film from ’55. The description is vague, but seems to indicate that this is based on Convair work. Given the cartoony nature, though, these could easily show nothing more than, well, a cartoon.
If nuclear powered aircraft are of interest to you, detailed drawings of several Convair nuclear seaplane concepts are available HERE.
Is there anything global warming can’t do? Now it seems that snowcapped mountains will be popping up in Florida.
As a followup to this posting: while I’m still uncertain as to whether the “Pocket Obama” Little Blue Book is the real deal, I can confirm that THIS little blue book is for real. Saw a stack of ’em for sale at the Ogden Costco today. And even though Costco had marked the price down to $6.59 from Penguin Books price of $15.00, it seems I still wasn’t quite able to afford it. It was either that, or the five dollar used DVD of the old serial “Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.” I bought the one that I knew was more important and which had the best thinking and ideas behind it.
Penguin Books certainly seemed to stamp this book out in one hell of a hurry. And to fluff up the pagecount, they added filler, Lincoln’s two innaugural addresses, the Gettysburg address and Ralph Emmersons “Self Reliance.” I’m guessing that “Das Capital” wasn’t available.
<>I’ve gotten a few one-page aerospace history articles published in the AIAA-Houston sections “Horizon” online magazine:
http://www.aiaa-houston.org/horizons“Horizons”is, like APR, a downloadable PDF-file magazine. Unlike APR, though, it’s free. So go forth and download!
June 2008: A review of APR
Oct 2008: Saturn S-ID stage
Dec 2008: X-38 predecessor designs
Next up (Feb 2009 issue, article turned in a few days back): General Dynamics NEXUS
The “APR Corner” is a one-page format, so the articles are necessarily brief.
It also looks like I may write a few articles for the British publication “Aviation News” in the near future.
Below are some teasers to show what the articles look like. Snazzier layout than APR, I suppose…
Even though Raedthin massively outweighs and outguns Tak (he has all his claws, while she’s been disarmed up front), she nevertheless seems to think it’s great sport to start fights with him. Largely, I expect, because Raedthinn doesn’t launch into total war. As political history (or any schoolyard bully) has shown, if you are faced with aggression, the best response – if you are physically capable of it – is often an all-out retaliatory strike of nightmarish proportions. If you fail to do that, if you only fight back just hard enough, you will often be seen as weak, and a good target to be struck again and again. Sadly for Raedthinn , when Tak attacks him, he generally only fights just hard enough to drive her off… and half the time he winds up running away. Thus… Dar Al Cat Harb remains, and Tak’s Jihad against Raedthinn continues.
Tak looking innocent, but what comes next is inevitable.
The fight is on…
Do you want kung fu?
Another time, another battlefield…
Tak is a touchy cat. Not only will she purposely walk right up to Raedthinn and bite him (often removing a chunk of his fur, which she then proceeds to loudly and determinedly chew and swallow), she will often decide that violence is the proper course of action while laying in my lap. She has a single spot on her body that, when touched, makes her *real* mad. Unfortunately, that one spot covers most of her… legs, belly, sides, tail. Leaves the spine and head for petting. But if you stray, she goes for blood.
She’s about to go nuts….
And there it is.
And this is what she looks like immediately after. Or should I say, immediately after I whack her upside the head.
From a 1965 Boeing report to the FAA. Boeing took the general aircraft configuration produced by NASA as the “SCAT-15F-220” and fleshed it out as a proper aircraft design. The SCAT-15F-B2 was the same design as the SCAT-15F-220 except that the fuselage was stretched to permit 215 passengers (the original seated 198). Gross weight was 430,000 pounds. The SCAT-15F-B7 was the final iteration, adding retractable canards for low speed control – the same thing was done with the Soviet Tu-144 SST, but in the Boeing design, the canard was a single-pivot wing. Cruise speed would be Mach 2.7, typical misison range 3476 nautical miles, and gross weight bumped up to 500,000 pounds, of which 226,500 pounds was fuel and 43,000 pounds was payload.
Fianlly made it up to Bear Lake today. Took a few panoramas on the way up:
And a few non-panoramas:
There was an incredible display of iridescent clouds, which were as impossible to get decent photos of as they usually are.
Beak Lake from the scenic overview:
It was not the best day for photography of Bear Lake. The sky was a bit hazy, and the lake is fairly well iced over; the result is a bland lake. Bear Lake, on clear, ice-free days, is a most astonishing blue. Anyway, apart from a stop in Logan to get the earlier panoramas, I pretty much drove straight to Bear Lake, passing up many photo-worthy stops on the way. I lef tthe Bear Lake region around noon, meaning I still had several good hours for photography left. My plan was to drive back slowly, and take a buttload of pics on the way.
Yeah….
And then this happened:
Seems this car spun out on the slick road and slammed straight into the car just beyond it, head-on. I got on the scene within a minute or two of it happening. There were no truly serious injuries… but the driver of the brown car was in a *lot* of pain. Once I saw that her foot was attached to her ankle at a truly unique angle (roll axis +60 degrees), I could see why. I started clearing out room in my econobox to pack her and her kid into it to drive ’em down the road to Logan, but those of us chuckleheads on the scene decided that since the injury was not immediately obvious to be life threatening, best thing would be to leave her to the pros. Took a fair while for the authorities to get on scene… we were well up in the mountains with no cell phone service, so a few early responders took off down the road to contact 911 before I got there. I spent half an hour or so freezing my harbls off a few hundred yards down the road, by a blind bend, trying to slow down oncoming traffic (with variable success).
When the authorities did eventually show up, they arrived in force: a forest ranger (first one on scene) , two state troopermobiles, a paramedic truck, a fire truck, an ambulance and a second very large paramedicmobile.
By the time I left the scene, the daylight was fading fast, so I didn’t get much done in the way of photography.
Snowmobiles are exceedingly popular in some places, and they leave faint trails. They are subtle, but if you know where and how to look for them, you can find them…
And just as I pulled into Logan proper, the two State Troopermobiles caught up with me…. and they were escorting the towtruck which was hauling the car that got mashed:
So, all in all a bit of a bust of a day. But at least it was better than it was for others.
From the website of unindicted co-conspirator Islamist organization “Council on American-Islamic Relations:”
Muzzammil Hassan receives award from CAIR-PA Chairman Iftekhar Hussain and CAIR National Chairman Parvez Ahmed
This was at the CAIR-PA First Annual Banquet in 2007. Expect the website to be slightly altered in the near future. The website does not seem to give an indication as to just what the award was, or was for. Perhaps “2007 Award for Greatest Advances in the Art of Takeyya.” Perhaps for a 12-part documentary series on “Honor Killings: Should You Use an Axe,a Sword or a Carving Knife? We Examine The Options.”
This is pretty slick. From the Evening Standard:
The tattoo contains tiny particles of “nano ink” that change colour depending on whether they come into contact with glucose molecules.
If levels are high, the ink appears yellow. If levels of the sugar are low, it turns purple. A healthy level shows up as orange.
That might just inspire me to get a tattoo.
