The High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, a 10 kilowatt solid-state laser mounted to a HEMT truck, successfully zapped 90 mortar shells and several UAVs. It did this over a span of several weeks, from November 18 to December 10, so it’s not clear just how fast this thing shoots and reloads. An operational system would upgrade to a 100-kilowatt laser.
Lawrence Livermore National Lab artwork of the Brilliant Pebbles anti-missile satellite within its protective “cocoon.” Compare to artwork HERE. Dimensions remain elusive.
If you want a little bit of your Christmas cheer to subside, read this article. If you want to lose a little of your faith in the basic goodness of humans, read this article. If you want to lose a good chunk of your appetite, read this article.
Sadly, “Molly” here is not “Molly Ringwald,” but another name for MDMA, a.k.a. “Ecstasy.” I’ve cropped the full title, because it’s pretty horrific. Let me put it this way: it involves one Emmanuel Paulino reaching into his girlfriend and removing bits of her… while she was alive and conscious.
And here is where “insult” is added to “horrific injury:”
While walking to Dixon’s courtroom, Paulino indicated he wasn’t worried because he has Jesus on his side.
The only good part of this story is that the victim apparently survived, and the perpetrator is not only locked up, but has apparently tried to kill himself (failing to do so because he’s a drugged-up idjit). This here’s one of those times where you want the criminal in question to try to kill himself… and fail.
Short form: a tunnel-borer working to make an automotive tunnel 60 feet or so under Seattle ran into something it can’t bore through. Boring, reasonable explanations include:
1) A really hard rock (granite, iron ore, etc)
2) Something man-made, like a big chunk of iron or steel. It’s boring through a region of “fill”, so it could be anything, including concrete.
But… yawn. What else could it be? A naquidah deposit? An actual Stargate? A Cybertronian Ark? Dragons? A Martian spaceship full of dead telepathic grasshoppers? A Martian war machine?
Or, could it possibly be…
Another good possibility: since this project is to create a tunnel 1.7 miles long but costs $4 *BILLION*, perhaps it’s just a whole lot of bags of pennies.
Turns out the SyFy network has decided to shoot a pilot based on the 1995 Terry Gilliam movie starring Bruce Willis. The basic idea, for those who don’t know or don’t remember, is that in the near future a disease breaks out that virtually wipes out humanity. Willis plays a future criminal who is sent back in time… not to stop the outbreak, but to study its origins so that future scientists can try to understand and combat it. This was interesting: usually time travel movies try to *change* the past, not *understand* it.
So, you’re a network on a budget. You need to find a location that will let you film what appears to be a post-human world. Where would you possibly go to find such a place? WHERE?!?!??? Let me think…
At worst, flying during the Golden Age of Flying meant paying an exorbitant amount of money to lock yourself in a pneumatic tube full of smoke and vomit, where the only possible relief from the mind-numbing boredom of travel was the significantly greater prospect of your own death or dismemberment.
Here’s another mashup of ISS footage with pre-existing music. Compare to “All Alone In The Night.” I think you’ll see the importance of picking the *right* music. While “AAITK” did not use space-specific music, it freakin’ worked. This, on the other hand, uses music that is specifically space related, and it’s just not blowing my skirts up. Which is kinda weird, because I really loved “Moonraker” back in the day. Which itself is pretty weird, because even as a nine-year-old, I watched the space scenes with the knowledge that “this just ain’t right.” Still… this is what the seventies had to give us. The sixties – the early parts of it, at least – gave the world the 1964 Worlds Fair and Futurama and a vision of a spectacular technologically awesome tomorrow; the seventies gave us… well, Moonraker. Sure, Star Wars too, but that was explicitly *not* our future.
[youtube wS1ksHh3P88]
I’m not a secret agent by any rational reckoning. Even so, I’m pretty sure that most intelligence services try to downplay what they do. Except, apparently, the National Reconnaissance Office.
Yeah. Great. Spec-friggen-tacular.
And then there’s this not-at-all-embarassing headline:
August, 2010, satellites show that eastern Antarctica got to 135.8 °F (93.2 °C) below zero.
Fun fact: solid carbon dioxide sublimates at -78 °C/ -109 °F. This, of course, means that if you were goofy enough to be in eastern Antarctica in August, 2010, your breath would have turned to dry ice dust. And then you’d die, because that’s *way* too friggen’ cold.