Near the Wall in D.C.
May 202011
May 192011
A month back I stayed at a motel near Chantilly, Virginia. As I approached the front door, I noticed this lizard hanging out… and when the door opened automatically, it just ran right in to the lobby. Entertainment ensued.
May 192011
The lighting stinks, but this came out more or less ok:
May 192011
Is there a 3 in the A.M.? As it turns out, yes, there is. I would have prefered to have been several hours asleep at this point, but tinkering with Word documents and PDF files and uploading huge files over a slow connection takes time. I just put in an order for some “proofs,” with an estimated arrival date of May 30; if they look good, on or about that date six (6) publications will be made available on my MagCloud account. Keep an eye either here on the blog (feel free to hit that “donate” button while you’re at it, or click on a whole bunch of the advertisers) or on my MagCloud page for updates:
May 182011
So accused rapist and convicted Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn (chief of the International Monetary Fund… did *anyone* think that putting a Socialist in charge of a major economic system might have a down side?) gets arrested for rape in New York City. Of course, he is still “accused,” not “convicted,” so who knows what really happened… but apparently (some of) the French are already certain that It’s Americas Fault. And from this LA Times summary, it’s some funny, funny stuff. I recommend giving it a read.
May 182011
Jeff Conaway, best known (to me, at any rate) for playing security chief Zack Allen in the Nobel Peace Prize winning TV series Babylon 5, seems to have just about run his course. It seems that after a number of years abusing drugs, he finally overdosed on painkillers and went into a coma he’s not expected to wake up from. DETAILS.
That Babylon 5 reunion movie is looking less and less likely.
May 182011
The Bell X-14C was described in an article in Aerospace Projects Review, issue V1N3 (still available, by the way). Here is a piece of artwork from the Ira G. Ross Aerospace Museum archives in Niagara Falls, NY, depicting the three-engined VTOL X-14C in flight. Derived from both the X-14 and the T-37, the X-14C was to be an operational ground attack/troop support plane. Payload, range and speed would be limited when compared to something like a contemporary Fast Mover, but it would’ve been notable faster than something like a Cobra attack helicopter.
Hey, if’n ya like this sort of thing, why not wander over HERE and show your appreciation…
May 172011
Following THIS…
May 172011
In case you wanted to build one from scratch, this might be helpful:
May 172011
Wikipedia has this to say about the number Pi:
The decimal representation of π truncated to 50 decimal places is:
π = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510…
Various online web sites provide π to many more digits. While the decimal representation of π has been computed to more than a trillion (1012) digits, elementary applications, such as estimating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, the decimal representation of π truncated to 11 decimal places is good enough to estimate the circumference of any circle that fits inside the Earth with an error of less than one millimetre, and the decimal representation of π truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to estimate the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe with precision comparable to the radius of a hydrogen atom.
It’s easy to forget the true magnitude of exponentials.
Compound interest, such as on national debt, also has to be carefully watched…
But sadly, there will always be those who do not understand basic math, and who refuse to try.
