A group of people who want to put together a manned mission to Europa, one of the most dangerous (ionizing radiation) places in the solar system outside of the day side of Mercury, the methane lakes of Titan, the surface of the sun or the south side of Chicago.
Lots of hideous stories out of India recent regarding gang rape. Apart from publicly executing the perpetrators and arming women, I’m unclear what can be done in the near term to fix that problem. But longer term, the dual solutions of weeding out the gene pool and changing the culture should help a lot. To that end, some Indian women put together a video featuring some of the harshest mockery I’ve seen in a while:
[youtube 8hC0Ng_ajpY]
I thought the bombing of the Christian church in Pakistan a few days back was just another Random Act Of Religion Of Peace. But it may have turned out to have been a sacrificial offering by a Cthulhu cult. And, sadly, a successful one:
The quake was strong enough to cause a mass 20 to 30 feet high to emerge from the ocean like a small mountain island off the coast of Gwadar… The island is about 100 feet in diameter and about one mile off the coast, GEO TV reported.
Other news sources suggest a far bigger island:
The newly appearing island is said to have a mountainous terrain rising up to a hundred feet.
I would imagine the smaller estimate is more accurate, but still… I’d be on the lookout for any cyclopean stone structures featuring non-Euclidean geometry. And stand by with the nukes.
Artwork from the 1960’s (latter half of the decade) depicting a six-man space station. This was published in “Lockheed Horizons,” so almost certainly depicts a Lockheed concept. it is shown being services by Gemini-derived logistics craft. While these were McDonnell vehicles, Lockheed really didn’t have an important space logistics craft of their own in design, so they didn’t have much choice in the matter but to use either the McDonnell Gemini or the North American Apollo.
This design is clear similar to the Manned Orbital Laboratory. Like the MOL, this design was meant for launch atop a Titan III. Length uncertain, but diameter would be about 10 feet.
Short form: Scientists tinker with the Tet1 gene in mice. A group of tinkered mice, and a group of untinkered mice, are introduced to the Mouse Cage Of Terror and all come to learn its horrors (electroenzapulation). When, after they’re all good and skeered of it, the scientists turn off the electricity, the un-tinkered mice eventually come to learn to not be afraid of the Cage Of Horrors. But the tinkered mice remain afraid. Tet1 has something to do with learning new things…s crew with it, and apparently mice have trouble learning. Reportedly this might have value in nuking specific memories, which would be handy for reducing PTSD in veterans and the like. Also handy for removing – or messing with – pesky memories of criminal enterprises.
A video of two jetliner landing attempts in Taiwan during “super typhoon” Usagi. The first plane, a 747, lands without incident, but look at the wings: they are flapping a hell of a lot more than they really should. The second plane, an Airbus A330 (I think), has an even more entertaining time of it.
[youtube 4M2fZ8CfDLk]
Sphincter factor of about 9.5 there.
Of course, if you want to ratchet it up to 9.95…
[youtube 8R6I28KMCpo]
Whenever some whackjob goes buggo with a firearm in the US, you can rely on the talking heads to crank out the usual talking points. One popular one is “there are eleventy bajillion gun murders in the US annually, but only four in Britain,” or stats to that effect. It’s an odd metric: if you are about to be murdered, does it much matter to you if it’s by firearm or by being beaten to death with a bar stool? Heck, you just might rather be shot… but I suspect, given the choice, most about-to-be-a-murder-victim types would prefer to skip the whole “about to be murdered” thing and just go home.
So, what are the murder rates – all murder, not just firearms – in the US and the UK? comparing stats from country to country can be irksome, since each country counts things differently. in the US, if you are murdered, you are counted by the FBI as a “murder victim” and added to the stats appropriately. But in the UK, it appears that you are only listed as a murder victim in the homicide stats if your murderer has been convicted of your murder *and* exhausted all his appeals. Without a murderer, there’s no murder (officially). It’s a strange way to go about it, but it has the advantage of making your country seem safer than it actually is, which is great for PR.
Fortunately, a little while back someone else tried to dig through the number and find out what the actual murder rates are. The US is easy: in 2011, 14,022 homicides out of a population of 292,364,075 gives a rate of 4.8 per 100,000. Th UK, though, is nowhere near so straightforward. The official number was “636 murders “provisionally recorded” for a murder rate of 1.15 per 100,000.” The US looks bad comparatively. But those “provisionally recorded” murders weren’t even close to the total, which may have been as high as 4,700… for a murder rate of 8.5 per 100,000… about *twice* what it is in the US.
Numerous news sources are reporting (read: probably “speculating”) that the Kenyan mall massacre was masterminded by someone the British tabloid press seems to have dubbed “the White Widow.” Specifically, one Samantha Lewthwaite, a 29-year-old British woman who converted to Islam and married a Muslim feller who thought it would be a fun lark to blow himself up in the 7/7 attacks. Apparently in the years since her husband fast-tracked himself to Náströnd, the “White Widow” has taken it upon herself to become quite the troublemaker. It seems she *may* have been in the mall running the show and got killed in the process, or it may be that a female hostage was killed and dressed up in the uniform of evil to serve as a distraction, or it may be another female jihadi entirely.
If there’s anything worse than an adherent to a whackadoodle ideology, it’s a recent convert to said whackadoodle ideology.
A whole lot of photos showing what’s happened in Kenya:
Five of the jihadis might be Americans. Wonderful. We’ll have o wait to find out of they’re converts or imports. My guess would be that, if it’s true that Americans were involved, they were originally Somalis who came to the US as refugees, gained citizenship, then went back to Africa. In any event, a bullet is too good for ’em, but let’s hope they all catch a few.
Grumpy Cat has some competition in the area of “malformed cute kitty” from “Sir Stuffington, a recently rescued kitten that is missing an eye and has a now-fixed jaw fracture that has resulted in a permanently curled upper lip:
https://www.facebook.com/Sir.Stuffington
So what do you do with a one-eyed kitten that looks like it’s snarling? You dress it up like a pirate, of course.
