Day one of driving is done. Didn’t get as far as planned… my head feels like it’s about to split open. Hopefully some aspiring will take care of it.
Raedthinn, as expected, spent the entire drive in the enclosed litterbox.
Oct 192010
Oct 192010
I’m off. More later.
Oct 182010
So there I was this evening, loading up my car. I was of course doing this in the garage, which accesses the house through a standard doorway. A simple screen door (armored with steel mesh to keep Fingers from clawing her way through it) was all that separated the garage from the next room. And the whole time I was loading the car… the cats sat at the door and stared at me. Fingers looked a little puzzled, but Raedthinn looked downright spooked. Of the cats, he’s the only one who has done the long-road-trip thing before, and I think he recognized the signs.
He doesn’t like long road trips. Previous trips he spent the entire time hiding in the litter box. I quickly learned that it’s best to have multiple litter boxes, to give the others someplace to do their business.
Oct 182010
While Islam is often singled out for having a worldview at odds with rationality, the West is hardly free of such things. Forget for a moment goofball cults and celebrity based “religions,” many of those who profess Christian beliefs have a view of the world that seems to me to be utterly at odds with reason, facts, science and the Constitution. Beyond even such patent falsehoods as Intelligent Design, there is the basic theology that some hold.
For example:
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20101013/jesus-isnt-your-homeboy/
I remember seeing a t-shirt a few years ago with a portrait of Jesus on it that said: Jesus is my homeboy. On one level, that could be considered funny or creative or relevant. But Jesus Christ isn’t your homeboy. He’s the sinless Son of God who suffered brutal torture and crucifixion on a Roman cross. His blood was shed to pay the sin debt that you owed. And that makes Him more than your homeboy. He is the sovereign Savior who is seated on His Throne and the earth is his footstool.
Holy crap!
A: Declaring that Jesus paid a debt that you owed indicates that you owed the debt in the first place. Can someone owe a debt for something they didn’t do and didn’t profit from? It has long been policy in enlightened Western cultures that *you* don’t get punished for some wrong done by an ancestor.
B: “The Earth is his footstool?” Nice. Actually, no, not nice… fricken’ disturbing.
I’ve long seen some SuperChristians argue that if aliens ever show up on the White House lawn, the most likely explanation is that they are actually demons, here to lead us from the path of righteousness (which always seems to be the path of the SuperChristian). But it seems to me a dandy sci-fi yarn could be written from the opposite direction: aliens come to Earth, study us in secret for a while… and then make an appearance as the Second Coming Of Jesus (or the 12th Iman, or Elvis, or whatever). Once you have come to the conclusion that it is *right* for some entity to view a planet of living, intelligent sentient beings as his “footstool,” you have declared yourself a slave awaiting a master. Someone sufficiently devious and willing could then step right into those shoes.
NOTE: for those who choose to over-generalize from this post, I am not saying that all of Christian theology is inheirently wacky. But belief that humans are the “footstools” of God, or that any God that views humans with such disdain is worthy of worship and adoration, is a belief I not only can’t get behind, but can’t even friggen’ understand.
Oct 182010
Yeesh.
More intellectually disabled youths go to college
Short form: colleges are accepting more and more students with Downs syndrome. Colleges are gettign Federal funds to accept more students with Downs syndrome. Colleges are putting Downs sydrome students in regular classes, and are modifying the classes to make them easier for those with Downs syndrome.
Oct 182010
Keep in mind that while we’ve not sent a human past the moon, we now not only have indirect evidence of hundreds of planets around other stars, we have *photos* of some of them. Imagine what we’d see if we had had an actual space program for the past forty years!
Slideshow of exoplanet photos: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/10/18/gallery-of-exoplanets-real-pictures-of-alien-worlds/
Oct 182010
I will very shortly grab the cats, hop in the car and drive a few thousand miles. I will have internet access, so the downloading part of the business will remain up and running; what I won’t have is access to printing services. So the various prints I offer… are no longer offered. When I return home, I’ll fire ’em back up again.
Expect blogging to be abridged for a bit. Perhaps less arguing with the local advocates of total government.
Oct 172010
A NASA-Langley video of free-flight tests of a powered 1/8 scale model of the Bell D-188A VTOL strike fighter (see APR issues V2N3 and V2N4 for a sickeningly large amount of info on this and related designs). For propulsion, compressed air was piped in and ducted to the exhausts; the hose for the air can be seen coming in from above. Of particular interest are the tests showing the aircraft go through transition from hover to forward thrust. This was facilitated by parking the model in the big, controllable low speed wind tunnel. Note that for the model, transition was a *really* slow process. It was to have been faster for the actual aircraft.
[youtube -p7UJEDG4E0]
For those playing along, this is an example of a *good* government program: providing assistance to US industry in developing technologies. NASA (and the NACA before it) differs from the rest of the US Fed Guv in that it winds up actually adding more to the US economy than it sucks out. Perhaps if the Social Security Administration shot senile people into space to test space suits and re-entry shields, or if MediPonziCare used wind tunnels to blow people off of government assistance, or if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were strictly limited to dealing with off-world real estate deals, I’d be a bit more positive.
Oct 172010
Do you want to interest kids in space? Do you live far from where rockets are built, tested and/or launched? Do you live far from anything of aeronautical interest? Adn do you live in some nightmarish urban blight or bureaucratic craphole where you’re not allowed to build and launch your own rockets? Then try THIS idea on for size:
Father-Son Team Launch Balloon With HD Camera, iPhone Into Space
The team was headed by Luke Geissbuhler and his 7-year-old son Max, who found the camera about 30 miles from the launch site in upstate New York. At its peak, the balloon reached an altitude of about 100,000 feet and battled 100-m.p.h. winds before it burst, sending the camera and iPhone hurtling back to earth at rates of 150 m.p.h. A specially designed parachute attached to the capsule eventually slowed it to about 15 m.p.h.
This sure as hell put my crappy fossil display to shame.
[youtube y6ZMscMp8UM]
Oct 172010
Also less cuddly.
5 Creepy Ways Animal Societies Are Organizing
1: Chimps wage war with efficient tactics and strategies
2: Monkeys have a functioning economy
3: Fish understand advertising
4: Ants farm
5: Killer whales and crows share ideas
None of these are particularly new discoveries, but it’s interesting and amusing to see ’em all in the same place, described with humor and profanity.
Interestingly, monkeys understand market forces and basic economics, which I guess makes them smarter than socialists.