A photoshop contest on Fark:
Photoshop a movie poster for a stand-alone Star Wars character
Some are good, some are lame, one *nails* it.
Feb 122013
Feb 122013
A piece of North American Aviation promotional artwork depicting a VTOL transport aircraft. It’s not clear if this design was a “real” design, or just artistic license. In either event, it depicts a jet-equipped tilt-wing design with four engines, with the wing pivot point disturbing close to the passenger cabin. It would be an incredibly loud vehicle for the passengers.
It depicts a type of aircraft that the mid 1960’s thought would soon be popular… a VTOL “bus” for relatively short range flights. It is shown here seemingly operating between a transit hub just outside of the suburbs and a very small vertiport in the mountains, presumably near a resort.
Feb 122013
North Korea Says It Has Conducted Third Nuke Test
The USGS reports an earthquake in the 4.9 – 5.2 range. According to THIS, the South Korean government estimates a yield of 6 or 7 kilotons.
Just in time for the State of the Union speech. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.
Feb 112013
The Redstone missile was a battlefield nuclear missile from the 1950s… a concept that doesn’t really exist anymore. Certainly not liquid fueled rockets, as the Redstone was; virtually all military rocketry these days is solid propellant. The Redstone would have required a great deal of time and effort to fuel and prepare for firing… as opposed to later missiles such as the Pershing, which, being solid fuel, was virtually point and click.
Still, this V-2-derived missile served as Americas first successful satellite launcher, the first vehicle to lob an American into space, and, in very modified form, as propellant tankage on the Saturn I series of boosters.
Diagram comes from the website “My Army Redstone Missile Days” which has a lot of good Redstone stuff.
Feb 112013
Cleaning out the memory of my cheapo cel phone, one of the last photos I took was of Marvin a day or two before I brought her in. It’s a terrible photo, but it shows her in one of the shelters I set up just outside my back door. She’d been chased in by Fluffys Brother, so I got her some food and kept FloBro from pestering her while she ate.
Feb 112013
Is The Earth Cooking Up Another Super Volcano?
Where we read about a blob of semi-molten magma the size of Florida lurking under Samoa. The seismologist studying it suggests we may have as little as 100 million years before if explodes.
That’s it, I’m outta here…
Feb 112013
[youtube ANH-0dAO_kw]
In my experience, a fair proportion of kittens notice their reflections on mirrors and take an interest in them (often doing their little arched-back war dance in front of the mirror), but adult cats either don’t notice their reflections or – perhaps more in keeping with feline personality – simply are not interested.
Feb 112013
Photos of the HRA subsonic wind tunnel model at NASA-Langley. These were supposed to be in the earlier post, but got left out somehow.
Feb 102013
Thanks to CNN, the question now exists whether asteroids are a manifestation of global warming.
[youtube lQhX4gJgv6o]
Feb 102013
Raedthinn, Fingers and Buttons curled up together to stay warm. Who’s not in the picture? Marvin. She’s *under* the bed.
Efforts to interest Marvin in socializing with the other cats have so far not met with success. A very popular activity, zoning out on a window perch, proved of virtually no interest; I guess not terribly surprising as recently there has been nothing to see but snow and I suspect Marvin has no good opinions about snow.
Fingers didn’t seem overly thrilled with Marvin being there, either.
One activity that does go over like gangbusters is finding a human lap and flopping down in it.
