Where MSNBC suggests that Romney’s bus exploding would make them happy:
[youtube 1yHsaBt8sEg]
Come on, let’s hear it again about how conservatives are the ones whose jokes are all lame and violent.
Jun 152012
Jun 152012
Exciting headline, no?
Plague confirmed in Oregon man bitten by stray cat
Short form: A guy tried to take a rodent away from a stray cat. Cat, unsurprisingly, didn’t care for that and bit the guy. Guy comes down with the Black Death, good ol’ Yersinia Pestis. Sadly, cat has keeled over (no reason given, but presumably because of plague).
Rather than this being a case of “Bad kitty!” this is in fact a case of cats saving our butts. Plague is carried by fleas carried by rodents; they are not carried so much by cats. But cats *do* kill the rodents, which reduced the number of fleas, which reduces the plague.
So remember: if you see someone abusing or killing cats, it may be that this person is in fact an enemy agent trying to infect the local population with the plague. Treat accordingly.
Jun 152012
And anyone else who thinks that “tanned” equates to “healthy.” A 69-year old trucker spent thirty or so years on the left side of the cab of his truck, getting sun exposure preferentially on the left side. This sunlight differential left differential skin damage, as reported on in the New England Journal Of Medicine:
To aid in visualization, I made two modified versions… split the photo down the middle and mirrored the halves of his face. Here we have what he’d look like without the sun exposure:
And here’s what he’d look like evenly sun-exposed:
Obviously I didn’t get the mirror line quite perfect, but you can see that he looks substantially older with sun than without. Magneto has seen better days, apparently.
A bit of advice for all you Hot Chicks that I know read the blog: You looks best when you are what you are, not when you try to be what you think society wants you to be. Because society is a schizophrenic retarded monster. If you are black-skinned, be happy with that; anyone tells you to use skin lightener, you tell ’em where to cram the bottle. If you are white and pale… avoid sun over-exposure and tell tanning salons and tan-in-a-can pushers that they are no less racist than the skin lighteners.
Jun 142012
I’m having a hard time seeing these people as villains.
S.F. couple kill daughter’s alleged pimp, cops say
UPDATE, just for the hell of it: A vaguely similar case from a number of years ago. A guy (Jeffrey Doucet) kidnaps an 11 year old boy from Louisiana and takes him to California, where he proceeds to sexually assault him. In relatively short order the boy is rescued and Doucet is captured. He is flown back to Baton Rouge… where the boys father, Gary Plauche, is waiting for him with a revolver. As the police walk Doucet down the hallway, they walk past a bank of payphones, where Plauche is waiting. The cops just happen to separate slightly from Doucet as they pass the phones; Plauche turns and puts a single .44 magnum (IIRC) bullet into Doucets brain. After some bad acting by the cops (along the lines of “I’m shocked. Shocked! To find gambling going on in here.”), Plauche is arrested, put on trial for murder… and sentenced to 5 years probation with a suspended sentence.
[youtube Oi3Hyxuf5AE]
THAT’s how it’s done.
Jun 132012
Stephen Baxter’s 2009 book “Ark” has a starship launched by an Orion booster. As with the “Michael” from Niven & Pournelle’s “Footfall,” is it described with a few snippets of text, here and there, but somewhat confusingly and with incomplete detail. I have attempted to reconstruct it for my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book (“NPP in popular culture” chapter). In short:
1) Derived from 4,000 ton General Atomic design
2) 40 meter diameter dish-shaped pusher plate
3) Apparently only a single stage shock absorbing system… no gas bags or intermediate platform
4) payload composed largely of two 8 meter diameter, 50-meter long tanks
5) Pyramid-shaped nosecap
6) Lots of exposed structure, looks like a factory
Not shown here are the four glider-shuttles that the starship carries.
Suggestions and critiques welcomes.
Jun 132012
Now, imagine instead it was Barack Obama’s head on a stake.
Jun 132012
International team starts sea-based asteroid drills
An international team of aquanauts has begun training at a lab deep in the Atlantic Ocean for an eventual visit to an asteroid, NASA said.
The scientists, astronauts and engineers making up the 16th excursion of NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) come from the United States and the space agencies of Japan and Europe.
Jun 132012
Not satisfied with taking away your guns, knives, freedom, income and soda pop, now the power-mad goons who run New York City seem to want to do away with popcorn. Coming soon: bright colors, flashing lights, kittens, pretty girls…
Jun 132012
1) The Centaurus Alps:
With a primary mirror 39 meters in diameter, situated on a Chilean mountaintop. I’m quite dubious of the claim of being able to resolve a mountain lightyears away, but it’d still be a hell of an instrument.
2) The universe before ours?
Hmmm…
Jun 132012
Found in the NASA HQ Historical archives was an artists impression of a supersonic manned ramjet powered aircraft, dating to either the late war years or early postwar period. It’s a fairly sizable craft with very small wings of unusual planform, razor edges and angular cross-section. The fuselage is almost entirely engine; the cockpit is squeezed into a structure used to hold the internal “spike” diffuser.
On the whole the design looks like it’d fly extremely fast, after having been launched to altitude by a rocket booster (or carried by a large aircraft), but I certainly wouldn’t want to try to land it.
