Just about the only time Tak is on her back is when she’s fighting. So this was an oddly calm period a few nights back…
May 122009
May 122009
One of the great things about the internet is that it makes available a vast mountain of facts that previously would have been difficult to find… assuming that you even knew the fact was there to be found. But one of the bad things about the internet is that every lie is also easily available. And sadly, facts and falsehoods are all too often mistaken for one another… often unthinkingly. And thus we have mass emailings that blather on about the latest outrage that didn’t actually occur, or quaint little fairy tales transmogrifying into accepted historical events. An upside of that is that we can get some quality entertainment out of it, like Myth Busters and Snopes.com. But it’s sad that sources like that have to be created.As a result of this easy blending of fact and fiction, the professional media machine – newspapers, CNN, that sort of thing – looks down on internet sources, blogs, etc. And from a certain point of view… it’s well that they should. Let’s say that tomorrow I post a blog entry about some Amazingly Astounding Historically Important Event Here In Rural Utah. Why should I be believed? Who’s to say I’m not lying? And journalists… why, they have editors and fact checkers and are only after the truth, and not pursuing a political agenda, unlike lone cranky bloggers.
Except…
Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote
When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
In short… the kid posted a phony quote on Wikipedia, and it was rapidly picked up by those fact-checking journalists… even though Wikipedia itself quickly got rid of the quote due to the fact that it did not have proper attribution.
Keep this incident in mind the next time you read or hear something remarkable. If people would only practice a little bit more rational skepticism, we wouldn’t have to deal witheasily-debunked, yet somehow immortal conspiracy theories about the World Trade Center or Nazi flying saucers.
May 122009
And yet, Joe Wong makes it work.
Freakin’ hi-larious.
May 112009
The “Secret Projects Forum” has been dead for about a day now; cause unknown. Hopefully it’s just a glitch that’ll be fixed and the forum put back up and running.
In the meantime… please to enjoy the “MOLEM,” a 1966 Grumman/Bendix study for a ground-mobile Lunar Module Truck. The MOLEM would be landed on the lunar surface atop a LM descent/lander stage, and would replace the ascent stage. If you think it’s odd looking, the MOCOM, with a mobile Command Module, is even odder (yeah, I’ll probably post it before too long).
May 112009
In other words… what the hell is this???
May 112009
At the top of the basement stairwell. All five kittens are still doing fine, probably about time to start adopting ’em out.
May 112009
Described in a 1988 NASA-Langley technical memorandum, this was a design for a STOL (Short Take Off and Landing) fighter with supercruise ability. Clearly radar stealth was not a major concern; those slab-sided tailbooms and sharp 90-degree corner reflectors would have made a mockery of that idea. Details are lean… it’s unclear whether this is a NASA-Langley concept or an industry concept tested by NASA. The report references an earlier report describing the same aircraft in 1985.
It has two engines exhausting through a single two-dimensional (i.e. rectangular) vectoring nozzle. The wind tunnel model was built at one-tenth scale; dimensions are in inches.
May 112009
Stumbled across this website, which describes a form of load-bearing column I’d not seen before.
Like Goodyear’s Airmat, the “Captive Column” looks like it’d be a very lightweight way to build a load bearing structure. Unlike Airmat, the CC looks like something average schmoes could build, using balsa wood, dowel rods and fiberglass (or carbon fiber).
May 112009
For Odin’s sake, you numbnuts… is this what you members of the Republican party really need to be spending your fricken’ time on?H. Con. Res. 121: Encouraging the President to designate 2010 as “The National Year of the Bible”
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That the President is encouraged–
(2) to issue a proclamation calling upon citizens of all faiths to rediscover and apply the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Scripture which has profoundly influenced and shaped the United States and its great democratic form of Government, as well as its rich spiritual heritage, and which has unified, healed, and strengthened its people for over 200 years.
Here we are, economy in the toilet, basic Constitutional liberties standing on the knifedge, an incompetant boob for a commander in chief, well on the way to national socializing all industries of any value… and Republicans are pulling this nonsense out of their asses?
Really?
These jackholes have nothing better to do with their time?
May 102009
Nothing terribly exciting, but I thought these might be of interest to some…
