Sep 172009
Sep 162009
Still futzing around with my new camera. Tonight I took some more sky-shots of various exposure durations. At the end I decided to take a few shots of my house with 30 second durations, just to see how bright it would be. Below are two shots I took in sequence, with 38 seconds separating them. I managed to catch what at first glance looks like one meteor in each shot… but when the images are stacked, it’s clearly a single trail. Best I can assume is a satellite “flaring” as the sun reflects off of a panel that rotates so that the reflection comes into view and then fades again.
Sep 162009
Damnit, why didn’t *I* think of this?
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Sep 162009
From NASA:
Super Typhoon Choi-wan had just become a monstrous Category 4 super typhoon on the morning of September 15, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this photo-like image. Choi-wan is a perfect circle with bands of clouds pin-wheeling around the dense center. The dark blue surface of the Pacific Ocean is visible through the clear eye, which is defined by a towering wall of clouds.
At the time the image was taken, Choi-wan had sustained winds estimated at 230 kilometers per hour (145 miles per hour or 125 knots), according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Choi-wan was strengthening. Twenty-four hours later, the storm reached Category 5 status with sustained winds of 260 km/hr (160 mph or 140 knots). The Joint Typhoon Warning Center expected the storm to intensify a little more.
While the storm raked across the Northern Mariana Islands and was targeting the small islands of Iwo To and Chinchi Jima, it was not forecast to hit any major land mass. In this image, Super Typhoon Choi-wan is centered over the northern arc of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, with the larger islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian located on the southern edge of the storm. The islands north of Saipan are volcanic and are either unoccupied or sparsely populated.
Sep 162009
This video is definitely worth the watching:
‘Where the Hell Were You?’
Sep 162009
From news.com.au, an Australian news outlet:
Medical student ‘slays burglar with samurai sword’
A US student has killed a burglar with a samurai sword, slicing off his left hand and severely cutting his neck after he spotted the intruder in his garage, police allege.
The undergraduate medical student at Baltimore’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University was being questioned by police but he may not be charged if found to be acting in self-defence.
So far, so good. Simple straightforward facts of the case. But the report does go in a slightly odd direction:
Samurai swords are legal in the United States.
Well, duh.
The United States, where the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, has few restrictions on owning swords although some local jurisdictions limit the right to brandish them in public.
“I think everyone has the right to first of all defend themselves and defend their home and if this individual felt that a samurai sword was an appropriate tool to do so, I’m not in a position to say that’s good or bad,” [Baltimore police spokesman] Mr Guglielmi said.
Most “samurai swords” are dangerously poorly made cheap pieces of crap, as shown fantastically well in this video right hyar. They tend to be brittle, and like as not will shatter if whacked against something that puts up a good solid resistance. Still… it takes a special kind of moron to decide to lunge at someone weilding a sword in the defence of his own home. But wait… “The burglar, who was in his late 40s, had a history of burglaries and had just been released from prison on Sunday…” Yeah, there it is. A special kind of stupid.
A vaguely similar case from a few years ago.
Sep 162009
A 1960 Boeing concept (most likely part of SR-183, kinda shown HERE) for manned lunar landing spacecraft based on Dyna Soar aerodynamics.
Compared the the Saturn V/Apollo spacecraft, the booster seems massively undersized. The Dyna Soar-derived spaceplane would land on the lunar surface and take off again for the trip to Earth… and the Dyna Soar was not a lightly constructed vehicle. As shown, the top half of the entire launch vehicle is lunar landing payload.
My guess is that this model was not built to reflect a fully-fleshed-out detailed engineering design, but might have instead been a “sketch” of a general concept. Evidence of that viewpoint will be posted soon.
Sep 162009
A stand will be included with the Nexus model. This is a first stab at it… I think it’s too big, and I’ll simply scale it down.
UPDATE:
The CG of the CAD model is shown below. The CG of the actual physical model *should* be pretty close to the same location.
To display the model with maximum stability, the support rod should go through the CG. An example of that for an arbitrary angle is shown here:
The model can be made to look less “lopsided” by either putting the rod through some point offset from the CG, or loading weight in the nose, shifting the CG forward
Sep 162009
The NY Times has actually mentioned the ACORN video scandals, but in a way that demonstrates the lack of jounralistic integrity that seems rampant there. Take for example this article from September 14, announcing that the Sentate had voted to cut off funds. The article doesn’t mention the scandal until halfway through, when it finally gives up this detailed explanation:
More recently, Acorn employees in Washington, Baltimore and Brooklyn were caught on tape giving tax pointers and other advice to conservatives posing as a pimps and prostitutes.
A more recent article from September 15 covers the scandal specifically. But rather than deal with the problems with ACORN, the article is about how this is the fault of Conservatives. Instead of being about ACORN, it’s about ACORN’s critics. This downplays the extreme scumbaggery of those at ACORN who nanchalantly describe how to game the tax system while setting up girls to be systematically raped.
There was one good part in the NY Times article:
Mike Gonzalez, vice president for communications at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the episodes simply reflected a Web-based democratization of investigative reporting, made necessary in part by the failures of the mainstream news media. “It should have been ‘60 Minutes’ doing this stuff – not two people whose combined ages are 45,” Mr. Gonzalez said.
No, it wasn’t “60 Minutes” doign that reporting. And neither was it the New York Times. They can’t even bring themselves to explain in any coherent detail just what they’d been scooped on.
Sep 162009
Here’s an older shot showing Raedthinn and Tak.
