Less appealing than the XB-46 but still pretty interesting was the three-engined XB-51 attack bomber. No other post-war American aircraft looked more like it had come straight from the fevered imaginations of wartime German aircraft designers.
Back in the day, the USAF sure loved Day-Glo Orange…
Photo from SDAM via Mark Nankivil.
Remember this post from a month and a half ago, where I discussed what to do if you found a GPS tracker on your car? Seems someone finally got the opportunity to put that into practice.
Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back
Short form: FBI spies on a 20-year old college student, sticks a GPS tracker on his car. he finds it, removes it, posts photos online, and hey presto, half a dozen FBI agents show up at his apartment and demand it back.
For the moment, photos of the device are online HERE. I’ve included one such photo below. The thing that really surprises me is just how *huge* it is. One of the comments at that site:
It’s a Guardian ST820. It’s a GPS tracking unit made by the company Cobham, the product line is called Orion. The redditor who said that the battery and magnetic unit is hand made is wrong, you’ve got the standard kit, it is sold like that by Cobham. Sales is restricted to army and law enforcement.
Oy.
British children believe Buzz Lightyear was the first person to walk on the moon and 24’s Jack Bauer blew up the Houses of Parliament, according to research released yesterday…
One in five kids believe Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear was the first person to set foot on the moon rather than Neil Armstrong.
And one in twenty youngsters thought Counter Terrorist Jack Bauer was the brains behind the Gunpowder plot.
But two thirds of the 6-12 year olds correctly identified malaria as Cheryl Cole’s illness and David Beckham as being the most recent player to be dropped by Fabio Capello.
Spectacular.
An old magazine photo of the Convair XB-46. A truly beautiful aircraft, and had the Boeing B-47 not come along, it almost certainly would have spent several years swarming the airways, scaring the pants off the Russkies and looking good doing it.
A few months late, but still… some sci-fi science:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/061110-eyeborg-bionic-eye
Spence’s bionic eye contains a battery-powered, wireless video camera. Not only can he record everything he sees just by looking around, but soon people will be able to log on to his video feed and view the world through his right eye.
Hmmm. Now, where have I heard of that idea before…
Not with a whimper, but with a…
It’s been about a week since the blog had its last hiccup, and I disabled a number of plugins. Since the hiccups had been coming daily… it seems likely that the plugins might have been the issue. Well, I’m getting bombarded with spam… several hundred per day. It’s annoying and needlessly time consuming (like our local Comintern representative). So, I’m going to reactivate the spam filter. If you notice anything goofy – in particular, if the blog shuts you out from commenting, by demanding that you be logged in, or if it simply closes commenting on recent posts – let me know.
Every now and then, people in the political world slip up and let their true feelings/intentions show. In one recent case, a well funded British environmental project known as “10:10” (reduce “carbon footprint” by 10% in 2010) produced a slick ad for the concept. The problem: the ad shows those who do not intend to join the greenherd being violently murdered, with those doing the murdering doing so with little more care than a shrug. Those shown murdered include children.
http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/10/01/most-honest-political-ad-of-all-time/
YouTube video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDXQsnkuBCM
The message seems to be that unless you join the greenherd, you not only do not matter, you are to be eliminated.
While there may be some sort of “nuance” here that escapes me, what’s clearly on display is the necessary endpoint of all forms of collectivism: the elimination of dissention and intimidation of all. Considering the expense and manhours that went into this thing, the idea that this was just some minor oversight or slipup seems unlikely. The producers knew what they were creating, and the message they wanted to send. “If you don’t act the way we want you to act, think the way we tell you to think, then you do not deserve to live.”
Of course, the rampagingly-fascist Guardian newspaper gushed glowingly about the video. It included a quote by Franny Armstrong, one of the filmmakers behind this murder fantasy:
“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?”
One wonders what would the reaction be if a similar ad was produced that showed, say, British people on the dole being murdered in the same fashion. Say, the “0:10” project… 0% of the British population on welfare by the end of 2010.
And of course, it didn’t take long for people with some skills to start modifying the video. Heres’ one that takes the greenherd mentality to it’s logical conclusion:
A few days back (just before things went to hell out here), I recieved some photos and a first-hand account of the delivery of external tank ET-122 (which is due to be launched on STS-134, the probable next-to-last shuttle flight) to KSC. Something unique about this tank, nicknamed the “Katrina tank” since it was at Michoud when Katrina hit, damaging some of the insulating foam, is that it has “nose art.” The art is on the intertank access door, and the assumption is that it will be left in place through launch. However, normal practice is to foam over the door, so while the art might still be there, it may be hidden behind inches of foam.
Given how twitchy NASA became about foam after Columbia, I have my doubts… I’d bet that the art is stripped over before foam is applied (how well does the foam bond to the art?), or the door might be simply replaced. But it would be interesting to see it launch with the art on display.
In the early 1960’s, Republic Aviation came up with a general configuration for a high speed aircraft… pointy-nosed fuselage, highly swept delta wings and small variable geometry wings for low speed. Republic applied this concept to at least four aircraft designs… the relatively small D-24 “Alliance” (with Fokker), several designs for the TFX program (eventually the F-111), a Mach 3 supersonic passenger transport, and a supersonic strategic bomber.
The D-24 was a nuclear strike plane, vaguely sorta akin to the Douglas A-4 in concept, but with one major difference: a Rolls Royce Pegasus vectored-thrust jet engine, like the Harrier uses. The D-24 would be able to fly strike or recon missions from small fields, and land on even smaller fields. The other designs all used basically conventional turbojet arrangements.
A whole lot more information on these (including numerous detailed diagrams and photos of contemporary display models) can be found in issue V2N2 of Aerospace Projects Review:
