http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265873/Primark-withdraws-padded-bikinis-7-year-olds.html
High street giant Primark pulled padded bikini tops for seven-year-olds off its shelves this morning after children’s protection experts warned that they exploited youngsters.
The store had been selling £4 sets in a low-cut halterneck style with padding in the cups which meant girls from the age of seven looked as if they had breasts.
Padded bikinis for 7-year-olds?
Dude.
Weak.
Finally got some weather worth looking at today. Since fall, all there have been are gray days and bright sunny days, not much in between. Today we got this, with lightning well off to the south before sundown.
Obviously a stable mate of this concept. A somewhat simplistic design for a two-stage booster utilizing a conventional hydrogen/oxygen first stage (recoverable) with a spherical second stage. The second stage was to be powered by a single terribly powerful gas-core nuclear thermal rocket.
More on this engine & stage in the next APR…
This feller is an occasional visitor with the outdoor cats. Comes by maybe once a month or so, and is spooked by humans. Beautiful animal, though.
Obviously, he/she didn’t much care for me taking his/her photo. Immediately after this, there was a cat-shaped hole in the air.
These days, far too many people think that “the market” is not a good enough determiner of what should be available. Not surprising, as many people also think that “intelligent design” makes more logical sense than evolution. But as I pointed out some time back, free market capitalism is to central planning as evolution is to Creationism. And in evolutionary systems, if you are not able to compete in the existing environment, you either adapt or you die. This applies to businesses every bit as much as organisms and species.
Take, for instance, the pharmacy business. There are some products commonly carried by pharmacies that give many people pause on moral grounds, typically religion-based. Some pharmacists don’t want to sell contraceptive products – birth control pills, condoms and especially “morning after” pills – because they feel they are immoral. While I happen to disagree with their logic, I agree with their right to stock whatever the hell they want… and to not stock whatever the hell they *don’t* want. And by “they” I mean the owners of the pharmacies. If the owners want to have a complete supply of condoms, and the pharmacist employed there doesn’t want to sell them… then somebody needs to find a new job. And what sort of job? Why, how about starting their own pharmacy, where they can stock their own products as they choose.
And then the market can decide.
And let’s see how that works out….
The article points out that similar pharmacies elsewhere are doing well. But those successful, limited-product pharmacies tend to be in rural areas with minimal competition. In this case, however, there *was* competition:
Unfortunately, the location was within walking distance of at least one other drugstore and across the street from a Kmart with a pharmacy.
Ooops. A dodo bird is a fine survivor on an isolated island with minimal competition, but import dogs, pigs and European men with guns, nets and a hunger for big-ass drumsticks, suddenly things don’t look so good.
Back in the day, NASA didn’t just dream large with large launch vehicles… they dreamed large with large models of launch vehicles. For example, here’s a detailed 1/10 scale model of the Saturn C-1 with launch stand, circa 1960. Note that it’s a cutaway model showing innards. I hope that this model, which clearly was the product of a great deal of skill, talent, effort and money, managed to survive somewhere… but I wouldn’t bet on that.
Remember those suction-cup equipped “Garfield” toys that appeared on windows a couple decades back (yeesh)?
I’ve got a real-life version of that, in the form of Fingers. She likes to climb up window screens and hang there for a while, typically staring at me all the while. I believe it’s her way of telling me that I need to get off my ass and feed her. At noon, it’s amusing. But believe me, around midnight it can be a bit disturbing.
Note: the white metal screen below is in place to keep my indoor cats, Raedthinn in particular, from battering their way out through the relatively flimsy window screen.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100410/local/panda-print
Two billboards in Marsa advertising the Pope’s visit to Malta got the unlikely addition of two stencilled images of what looks like a panda. It is not clear why the “artist” in question juxtaposed the bears with the Pope. The organising committee was alerted yesterday morning and it plans to erase the images.
“Pandas?”
Ummm… no. Not pandas.
The best known approach to using detonations as a form of space propulsion is the Orion, which uses nuclear bombs to provide a “kick in the pants” to a spacecraft. But over the years the use of conventional chemical explosives to drive a ship has also been proposed. Early on, in the era before Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, the use of gunpowder and dynamite bombs seemed to make a measure of sense. But after the 1920’s or so, solid and liquid fuel rockets proved themselves far superior to such crude explosive system. The specific impulse of even a mundane rocket typically well exceeds the Isp of an explosive system, with far less danger, complexity, weight and cost. Still, the idea continued to be of interest. Recently, “pulse detonation engines” have proven of substantial interest. These use conventional liquid propellants, but do not burn them in a continuous fashion… instead the propellants are mixed and then detonated. In this case, the explosive system provides *higher* specific impulses than the equivalently-fueled rockets.
But the use of dedicated high explosives for propulsion may still be of interest. Blog reader Michael Holt recently provided a link to a NASA document that discusses the concept and provides data tables on a wide range of proposed explosives. As expected, the Isp’s available are generally fairly unimpressive; note also that these are the theoretical maximums, with percentage losses certain.
One of the more impressive explosives listed is 1,3-diamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene (DATNB, C6H5N5O6). Density is a good 1.65 grams per cubic centimeter, and theoretical Isp is 501 seconds… well in excess of conventional hydrogen/oxygen.
Explosives as propellant offer a few advantages, but a lot of disadvantages. The three most important disadvatages:
1) The propulsion system must be considerably heavier and more complex than an equivalent rocket
2) The risk of the whole ship being blasted into vapor
3) Cost.
In my view, #3 is the killer. I don;t know how much it would cost to buy, say, one hundred tons of 1,3-diamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene… but I can’t imagine it’d be cheap. Even with the cost of petroleum far higher than it used to be, kerosene is still less than a dollar a pound. Explosives will always have a hard time competing with that.