The Smurfs Are Racist, Anti-Semites, Antoine Buéno Suggests In ‘Le Petit Livre Bleu’
Claims:
Discuss.
EDIT: a documentary on the subject.
[youtube Qra0hlO6hZk]
Quantum mechanics rule ‘bent’ in classic experiment
He explained to BBC News that “while the uncertainty principle does indeed forbid one from knowing the position and momentum of a particle exactly at the same time, it turns out that it is possible to ask ‘what was the average momentum of the particles which reached this position?'” .
“You can’t know the exact value for any single particle, but you can talk about the average.”
Ummm… neat?
Here endeth the lesson:
A couple of photos of the SR-71 at the Museum of Aviation. I’d intended to get enough of ’em to stitch ’em together into a panorama… but several came out blurry (tripod motion). Bleah. So… there’s this.
The left side of an inboard cutaway drawing of the Martin Model 313.
I feel relatively certain that some people will get all snippy about this book.
Meh and the City: A Book on New York’s Mediocrity
Mostly it’s just the attitude of self-importance that rubs us the wrong way. There are plenty of things that are legitimately great about New York. Our point is that there are plenty of good things about a lot of places.
Heretic!
The UK’s “Office for National Statistics” has issued a report with a bunch of, well, statistics about the British labor market. One of the interesting bits (and, god, yes, economic statistics are fascinating):
Along with recent increases in unemployment rates there has also been an increase in the number of households in which no one has ever worked. Between Q2 1997 and Q2 2010 the number of households in which no one had ever worked almost doubled from 184,000 to 352,000 households (ONS, 2011c). The 352,000 households where no one had ever worked equated to 1.7 per cent of the households in the UK up from 1.0 per cent in 1997. Excluding student households, where everyone was aged 16 to 24 and in full-time education, there remain 269,000 households where no one has ever worked in Q2 2010. Across the country, the highest proportion was in Inner London at 6.5 per cent of all households, three times more than the next highest – Outer London at 2.2 per cent. The lowest percentage was in the East of England at 0.5 per cent, followed by 0.8 per cent in the South West and 0.9 per cent in the South East. As can be seen in Table 4 the majority of households where no one has ever worked were oneperson households followed by lone-parent households (around 39 per cent and 35 per cent of households where no one has ever worked, respectively, increasing to 40 and 44 per cent respectively when student households are excluded). Only 29,000 of the 352,000 households where no one has ever worked were couple households (around 8.2 per cent).
…
In Q2 2010 around 552,000 adults were living in households where no one had ever worked, with a third of these in student households not wanting to work because of their studies. Of the remaining 374,000 adults:
68 per cent were not seeking a job and would not like to work
16 per cent were not seeking a job but would like to work
13 per cent were unemployed, therefore looking for and available to work
There are also around a quarter of a million children under 16 years old, living in households where none of the adults has ever worked (265,000 in all households that have never worked and 258,000 in non-student households) (ONS, 2011c).
So, uh… success?
As with the “A-11,” this concept was painted by an artist named de Beek while at White Sands in 1946, under the direction of Werner von Braun. It is clearly the ancestor of WvB’s later “wheel” space station concepts used for the Collier’s and Disney series of pro-space propaganda throughout the 1950’s. Unlike the “A-11,” this one seems fairly practical. It was to be at least partially inflatable, launched collapsed and expanded once in orbit. The specifics, however, are currently vague.
It rotated to generate “artificial gravity,” a feature that, at the time, everybody just knew would be pretty much mandatory for a manned space station. The effects of extended freefall on human physiology and human phychology were entirely unknown, and left to pure guesswork. As it turns out, “everybody” was pretty much right: zero gravity is fun for a little bit, and good for some science experiments, but it’s a terrible way to actually try to live.
The solar power generator is kinda unique. Keeping it tracking the sun while the station rotates around it might have proven to be a challenge.
Once again, more on this and related designs can be found in issue V5N6 of Aerospace Projects Review.
So first my email account gets tagged as a source of spam, and a message to the email list gets nuked. Then Google decides to yank my account due to vague, handwavy “inappropriate click activity.” And today… my anti-virus software goes *bonkers* fighting something, I shut down the computer, and the damned thing won’t start up again. So now it’s in the shop, and I’m working on the backup.
AAARRRRGH.
So… is THIS what happened?
[vimeo 24556364]
Or maybe this?
[vimeo 24408090]
These *would* explain the commenting dropoff…