The sun has recently had a bit of a hissy fit, and as a result the aurora on on a bit of a rampage. Utah is sadly a bit too far south to get any decent auroral displays, but with the naked eye I can make out a distinct glowy dome on the northern horizon… and the whole sky has a bit of a pinkish tinge to it. The camera, however, is able to pick up rather more than my eyes can.
Boeings design that won the Dyna Soar competition was an odd, odd little thing. All sharp edges and fins like a 57 Cadillac, it wound up looking almost nothing like the Dyna Soar that almost got built. Irritatingly for Bell Aerospace, the final Dyna Soar design looked a *lot* like the Bell entry. The winning Boeing entry was just very, very wrong. The baseline launch vehicle for it, for instance, was a kludged-together monstrosity composed of Minuteman ICBM stages clustered together. Of course, Minuteman had the advantage of being a Boeing product, so there ya go.
Another oddity about the Boeing design is that even though it won, and you can get some pretty detailed drawings and wind tunnel reports and whatnot about many of the competing designs… the Boeing design is rarely depicted with much more detail than a bare three-view. It’s like they phoned it in, not expecting to win… and they won anyway.
Scare at State Fair: witnesses describe mobs, some people claim racially-charged attacks
Witnesses tell Newsradio 620 WTMJ and TODAY’S TMJ4 of a mob of young people attacking innocent fair-goers at the end of the opening night of State Fair, with some callers claiming a racially-charged scene. … Witnesses’ accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.
I’m seeing a lot of these racially-motivated “flash mobs” in the news lately.
I’ve just come in from spending something like three hours outside taking photos of the sky. I’ve taken stabs at photographing lightning before; usually the results are meager. But tonight… wow. Usually an active storm produces a good bolt every fifteen to thirty seconds; I was clocking them at more than one per second for a quarter hour period tonight. I haven’t had a chance to take a close look at the photos yet… need to dump ’em off the card and onto the computer, but from what I saw I should have *hundreds* of really good photos.
UPDATE: I’ve scraped the images off the card and onto the computer. Well over a thousand photos… and *most* of them have lightning. The vast bulk of *those* simply show clouds being lit up internally, and are generally not very good. A fair percentage of the images showing actual lightning bolts are zoomed way out, so as to capture large areas, with resulting itty-bitty bolts. Some of those that were zoomed in were off-center, only catching part of the bolt. And some that were zoomed in and centered were out of focus (Hey… YOU try manually focussing a camera in the dark!)
Still, that left me with a *lot* of pretty good shots, from one to maybe three dozen, depending on your tastes. Here are a few:
And some more after the break:
Scruffy is not one to let his opinions be muffled. He will sometimes follow me around the yard, bitching the whole time.
Looks like Mars might still have some liquid water, at least of the muddy & briny variety:
A few days ago I posted some photos of a cropduster. One poster suggested that this was a job for drones, which I dismissed as being legally unlikely. HERE is an article which discusses the commercial use of drones in the US… and it turns out that drone use is even *more* restricted than I thought. Several news outlets have used Really Small remotely controlled VTOL platforms to get low-altitude aerial footage of disaster areas… and apparently the FAA has a problem with that.
Apparently it’s legal to mount a video camera to an RC airplane or helicopter. But if you do it for commercial purposes… yer in trouble.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/04/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm?hpt=hp_c1
Dow tanks 512 point. All the gains made in 2011 have been wiped out.
Explained graphically:
http://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-process-rage/
Starts with the “public perception of the scientific process,” which is just a little bit different from the *actual* process.