The SP-100 was a 1980’s NASA/DoE/DARPA program to develop a space-based nuclear reactor capable of putting out 100 kilowatts of electrical power. A great deal of progress was made, and plans were in place to use on for space stations, interplanetary probes, military satellites and the like, but of course it was cancelled.
Oh, goody, another drive to censor everyday speech. In this case, it’s the “Ban Bossy” movement. The idea seems to be that the word “bossy” somehow stifles little girls, and thus should be banned from use.
When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a “leader.” Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded “bossy.” Words like bossy send a message: don’t raise your hand or speak up.
Whenever I’ve seen “bossy” being used, it’s not been with respect to “asserting oneself,” but instead “being fricken’ pushy and overbearing.” And that is *exactly* what kids do. Go to a store, and you won’t see a kid assertively saying “I think you should but me this toy,” you’ll see a kid bossily saying “buy me this toy.” And then pitching a fit when denied.
Kinda like pitching a fit to hector people into not using words you’ve chosen to take issue with.
Guess what: if you want to get rid of a word, trying to badger or force people to stop using it… ain’t gonna work, y’all.
And they said it couldn’t be done…
The dog is female, so the story has the gay marriage angle built right into it.
So, the Armalite firearms company ran this ad:
And in a magnificent example of the Streisand Effect, the Italian government goes goofy:
Various Italian government officials want Armalite to withdraw the ad, claiming it’s *illegal* because the Italian government holds the copyright on images of Michelangelo’s David. Which was made over 500 years ago. By a guy who is long dead.
A photo taken in August, same trip that produced this photo. Anyone guess where?
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.
As I mentioned just a little while ago, the Fusion Energy Foundation publications have been posted online. I’ve been looking through the issues of their magazine at random, and stumbled across a review of the book version of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” It was of particular interest since the new version of Cosmos premieres tonight. The review is… err, interesting. It seems not entirely accurate in its description of Cosmos as I remember it, and seems to rely a lot on the conspiracy theories that appear to have been pretty common at the FEF. Some kinda indecipherable issue dealing with Kepler, an issue I’ve seen raised numerous times in the pages of “Fusion” (I haven’t read the pages of Fusion in any depth as yet, but from what I gather they seemed to have some sort of problem with Newton, while they thought that Kepler and and the nested solids or some such were the bees knees). It is, in short, quite negative in its view of Cosmos, and declares it “anti-science.”
So, anyway, I skimmed through the review sorta half-heartedly, interested solely due to the coincidence of tonights premiere. And then I saw a name that, were I the kind of person who did such a thing, would have caused me to do a spit-take all over my keyboard.
I’ve posted it below in both JPG and PDF format.
Pages from 19810505-fusion – cosmos review
In the late 70’s-early 80’s the Fusion Energy Foundation published the magazine “Fusion.” It, as the name suggests, had a number of articles on the politics and physics of nuclear fusion for power generation purposes, and a few on space propulsion. It also had a number of articles on directed energy weapons for strategic defense and forward-thinking by the likes of Krafft Ehricke on space colonization and industrialization. But it also had more than it’s share of loopy pseudo science stuff like intelligent design, anti-Einstein and even anti-Newton stuff. And… it was a Lyndon LaRouche publication. Wiki has a fairly extensive writeup on the Fusion Energy Foundation; it makes for interesting reading.
And it turns out that all, or at least a good chunk of, the FEF’s publications are available online as PDFs:
In the “Books” section you can download Winterberg’s “Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices,” which is not only a fun read for the pure physics, but also as supervillain fodder.
The mix of science and Cold War era LaRouchianism makes for a WTF-inducing experience. If you remember the early 80’s, or are interested in a time when people still dreamed of a nuclear powered future, you can lose days here.
As ISON irritatingly demonstrated, comets are known to fall apart. This is because they are made up of materials that are easily volatilized, and when they pass too close to the sun they are not only disturbed by gravitational tides, they are cooked enough that large fractions of them simply cook. But asteroids, being just rock, are supposed to be better behaved. Well… so much for that.
The Hubble data showed that the fragments are drifting away from each other at a leisurely one mile per hour — slower than the speed of a strolling human. The asteroid began coming apart early last year, but new pieces continue to emerge in the most recent images.
This makes it unlikely that the asteroid is disintegrating because of a collision with another asteroid, which would be instantaneous and violent by comparison to what has been observed. Some of the debris from such a high-velocity smashup would also be expected to travel much faster than observed.
Nor is the asteroid coming unglued due to the pressure of interior ices warming and vaporizing. The asteroid is too cold for ices to significantly sublimate, and it has presumably maintained its nearly 300-million-mile distance from the Sun for much of the age of the solar system.
This leaves a scenario in which the asteroid is disintegrating due to a subtle effect of sunlight, which causes the rotation rate to slowly increase. Eventually, its component pieces, like grapes on a stem, gently pull apart due to centrifugal force. The possibility of disruption by this so-called YORP torque has been discussed by scientists for several years but, so far, never reliably observed.
Huh.
This sort of thing could have implications for both asteroid mining and planetary defense. Asteroids may be easier to break up than might have been thought, which would make mining easier… and deflection harder. Of course, this is a single example, so it’s not good logic to assume it’s a universal fact that asteroids fall apart this easily. But still, it’s an interesting event, and if the asteroid was accessible it’d make an interesting target for exploration.
Speedbump is one of those cats who is comfortable in whatever position he’s in.
First, watch this:
[youtube RBQ-IoHfimQ]
The idea, I gather, is to show what a year in the life would be for a cute little British moppet if Syrian-style civil war came to London. The idea being to make you ponder “it could happen here,” I guess.
But it seems to me there’s a flipside: it *isn’t* happening in London. Britain, with all its troubles, at least is not yet loaded to the gills with Allahu-Ackbar-shouting savages blowing up schoolbuses or dropping barrel bombs out of choppers. So… it seems to me that this video is aimed at the wrong crowd. What good is there in trying to depress the people who are doing it right, culturally? It would be far better to tell the Syrains “Stop Being Jackasses.”
The secondary meaning would be “You see the kind of barbarians that are doing this in the Middle East? Don’t let them into Britain. Those that are there… kick them out.”
So, in short… *not* “what if the West was like the Middle East?” Instead, “what if the Middle East was like the West?”