Mar 062014
Mar 062014
The meter-bore “Babylon” supergun that ballistics genius Gerald Bull was building for Saddam Hussein prior to Gulf War I has, so far as I know, never been terribly well documented publicly. You’d think that there would be all manner of diagrams and the like available, but if they exist, I haven’t seen ’em. A few fairly uninformative photos taken after the war and a poorly reproduced photo of a display model are all I’ve seen.
The made-for-HBO-movie “Doomsday Gun” (which I recommend, it’s good) has a scene set at an arms show, with a scale model of the gun. I *assume* that the model was a prop made for the movie, not the real item, but you never know. And if it’s a movie prop, I don’t know how accurate it might be. Still, it’s the closest thing to a clear shot of the gun I’ve ever seen. Fortunately, the camera gets in close and pans along the whole length of the thing. I took screenshots all along the pan, and stitched ’em together, and it came out surprisingly well. The full rez image (which you can get by clicking the small one here) is fairly sizable.
Mar 052014
This is not a news story with the startling announcement that the number of people living on the largesse of the taxpayers via “entitlements” has plummeted. No, this is the even more important announcement that One-Eye and her kid have been returned to the outer world. She seems to have healed up from her spaying well, and the weather is good, so it was time. In all the time they spent in my basement neither of ’em got even a little bit friendly. After a while I stopped trying; I figured it was for the best to *not* try to socialize them since they weren’t going to get to stay in a home.
They were released about noon. A few minutes ago I caught sight of the both of them on my back deck, and One-Eye is at the back door staring in…
Mar 052014
TU-95MS – Soviet Bomber
There are a number of photos indicating that this plane has seen better days. But still… dayum. Can you imagine Hill Aerospace Museum, say, getting this, fixing it up and parking it next to their B-52? The sheer awesomeness of those two together… Giggitty!\
It belongs at Hill:
Mar 052014
I’ve had an uncomfortableness with the PayPal “Donate” button. Not because it didn’t work, but because of the “must be a non profit or a charity” fine print. So I’ve yanked it, and replaced it with a Tip Jar that shouldn’t set off alarms. It now has a drop down menu with different amounts… $1, $5, so on. I also have several variants with different descriptions, so I’ll at least know what it’s *for…* cats, photos, bloggery, fiction. Need to work up different “Tip Jar” icon images, I suppose.
Hasn’t been tested yet. I’m just sorta assuming it all works…
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Mar 052014
A photo taken on the trip I took last August. This trip produced some of the more spectacular photos I’ve taken (not that that’s saying a whole lot, really), but I’ve not much mentioned it on the blog. Anyone care to hazard a guess where this was taken? Kudos to whoever gets close…
You can also download the very much larger version by LOOKING HERE (over at my long-disused photo blog), good for printing and such. Permission granted for personal use.
If you like the photo and want to toss a few coins my way… well, here ya go.
Mar 042014
A lot of people didn’t like Transformers 3, but I did… the very, very dark tone of the last third or so of the movie, with the city of Chicago effectively wiped out, hundreds of thousands dead and numerous skyscrapers reduced to rubble. was a major shift from the chuckleheaded inanity of so much of the series. And TF:4 looks like it’s actually carrying over that tone. Which to my mind is the *appropriate* tone, given the basic idea: extremely dangerous artificially intelligent war machines can drop out of the sky randomly. Some are human-friendly, but by far the majority are opposed to humans, and have tried to wipe us out several times. And there are more, probably many more, out there. Even if humans and their extremely few Autobot allies have managed to fight them off a few times, the basic math says that the universe is essentially out to get us. This would have an interesting and kinda dismal effect on human society.
Plus… dinobots! Woo!
[youtube ubGpDoyJvmI]
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And I gotta wonder what Lovecraft would have made of this pooch. It’s like an eldritch horror from beyond tried to materialize in our corporeal realm, but a small fishbait dog wandered into the stone circle at just the wrong moment and now Cody the dog is possessed by Yog Sothoth.
[youtube y-lthKQa5io]
Mar 042014
A zoom-in on the galaxy ESO 137-011, which is one of the more disturbing-looking places in the universe. The long blue streamers are millions of stars that have been basically “blown” out of the galaxy by the thin intergalactic medium that the galaxy is passing through. It’s zipping through the Norma galactic cluster, and is hitting a really strong “wind” that’s stripping the interstellar gas out of the galaxy. A result of that is that the gas is getting shocked and quickly forming hot blue stars, but these stars are out of the galaxy and short lived. The galaxy is being denuded of feedstock for *new* stars. As the bigger stars blow themselves up, the gases they release are getting blown away. What’ll be left are the stars that don’t blow themselves up… typically the smaller, cooler, longer-lived stars. The end result will, many hundreds of millions of years down the line, is a galaxy populated by sullen little red dwarfs and not a whole lot else.
[youtube ITlxsP1_jEc]
A Hubble photo. The high-rez version can be downloaded HERE.
And here’s mashup of the Hubble view with an X-Ray view from Chandra, showing the incredibly long stream of gas. High rez available HERE.
It’s sad-looking, but danged if it ain’t awesome.
Here’s a good video explaining what’s going on, using someone with a Bond supervillainess accent as a narrator.
[youtube bOSQcDBMwJA]
Mar 042014
10-year-old suspended for making fingers into shape of gun
As if the basic idea isn’t stupid enough, apparently the school-rule fascists have this sort of thing pretty well codified:
the reason for Nathan’s suspension as a “level 2 look alike firearm.”
Yeah.
What’s worse is that if this sort of nonsense continues, not only are the control freaks going to damage generations of kids with respect to firearms and *play,* they’re also going to mess with teaching physics. Anyone else here remember the Right Hand Rule?
Good for physics::
Good for statics & dynamics:
I can see it now….
Oh My God! He has a rocket launcher!!!
Oh My God! He’s got a detonator!
Where things get interesting is when two inviolate areas of political correctness collide. What happens when this ban on “finger guns” runs into Sex Ed?
Mar 042014
Remember these? Ah, good times….
[youtube MNxEDomUlXw]
[youtube ZH5kFqlTPls]