Jim’ll Paint It

 art, humor  No Responses »
May 242014
 

Here’s a neat idea: Jim will use MS Paint to illustrate your idea. His Tumblr page has a whole boatload of his illustrations. Sadly, most seem to be of British celebrities, so the gag is often lost due to British celebrities generally being a strictly regional phenomenon, but some are *inspired.* Such as:

Dear Jim,



Can you please paint me Chris Hanson, anchor of Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator”, bursting out from behind a curtain in one of those big open plan American kitchens to surprise a clearly humiliated Predator – the trophy hunting action/horror kind. The beast, sat at the breakfast bar, is wearing a Wham t-shirt as part of a misguided attempt to appear hip with the kids and is holding a helium balloon in one hand. With the other hand he is trying unsuccessfully to cover his face from the cameras as a SWAT team approaches from behind, headed up by a clearly confused Danny Glover who has come dressed only in the loveheart boxer shorts he wore in the opening scenes of Lethal Weapon 4. Gun gripped in both hands, Glover can be seen to utter his world-weary catchphrase: “I’m too old for this shit”.



tumblr_mwkw3eTBky1s6ylubo1_1280

——————

Vladimir Putin as every member of the Village People

tumblr_n0oe1bfTmS1s6ylubo1_1280

 Posted by at 10:29 pm

Aero-X Hoverbike

 aircraft, art, blather, Hmm..., projects  7 Responses »
May 242014
 

I know nothing of this company apart from what’s on the website. They’ve built some sort of prototype that seems capable of hovering and forward motion while in ground effect; that’s a good start, but far from what’s really needed for a truly practical flying motorbike (though it appears that what they’re currently working on is essentially a ground-hugging hovercraft-like vehicle, not a free-flyer). Note that the videos on the website also have the sound shut off, possibly because the prototype is probably loud enough to give bystanders brain damage.

I admit to being somewhat stumped about the utility of the thing if it can’t fly freely. Seems an expensive way to build something that could be done better by a standard ATV. On the other hand, if a future version is powerful enough to fly freely – and almost certainly controlled almost entirely by computer – I can see a lot of interest in such a thing.

http://aerofex.com/theaerox/

 

dev_top

 Posted by at 3:14 pm

Sell crazy someplace else

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, news, ಠ_ಠ  55 Responses »
May 242014
 

Today is a Day of Days if you’re looking for videos of people proving themselves to be absolute whackjobs. First up: one Elliot Rodger, who, it seems, went on  shooting spree yesterday in California, killing at least seven (including himself) all because chicks don’t dig him. Before he went on his spree, he posted a video of himself laying out his plans and reasons. And while I’m not a female, and don’t pretend to be able to understand what motivates most people (women included)… wow, his failure with the ladies makes sense. He looks like he had money, and he appears to have been a “pretty boy” who should have been able to score with a  certain percentage of the womenfolk, but he projects WOW HE’S NUTS. I imagine he had an “aura” that repelled.

He seems to be reading from a script that had “insert weak sniggering HERE” in in in many places.

UPDATE: YouTube yanked the original, but there are other copies of it hosted by other YouTube users. Here’s one that’s still running (at least for now).

[youtube P8ZEjruo5eI]

And don’t even try to suggest that you don’t think his face was incredibly punchable.

And a different but just as unhinged form of crazy is on display with this crackpot who thinks that NASA wants to wage war on all of humanity, based on misreading a powerpoint presentation describing possible future technologies:

[youtube iskAWKctIAY]

And then there’s this asshole:

[youtube kQA_AM3EO88]

 Posted by at 9:28 am

Eroom’s Law

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, science, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  18 Responses »
May 232014
 

Moore’s Law is well known… computers get about twice as fast/powerful every 18 months. But less well known is Eroom’s Law, which shows that developing new drugs becomes more difficult/expensive over time. Gentlemen, behold:

nrd3681-f1

That new drugs are becoming exponentially more expensive to develop should not be surprising. Beyond the problems of government regulation, there’s the fact that the “low hanging fruit” have already been picked. As with physics, the days when one lone guy or a small team can make great strides are very likely largely over, because everything that could be done cheaply and easily has been done cheaply and easily.  but unlike physics, medicine also has the problem that germs are actively evolving to combat the medicines. Galileo didn’t have to worry about Earth reversing gravity just to muck with his acceleration experiments.

 Posted by at 9:28 am

Home again

 blather, news, nukes, Obamazombies, politics  2 Responses »
May 222014
 

The place is still standing, though I ain’t. Amazing how tiring six or seven hours of sitting on your butt can be… especially when it followed a couple hours of hiking through some truly bizarre terrain.

I need to work with my files a bit (step one: BACK UP EVERYTHING) and buy some new DVDs, but I should get burning on them by the weekend. Might take a little while to get them all done.

Also: I will also get back to work on the “prototype” version of “A Guide to American Nuclear Explosive Devices” within the next day or so. I don’t have an estimate of when these will be ready, but I don’t think it should be too long. Certainly far faster than the “Space Station V” thing: I find writing about Real Stuff goes vastly faster than fiction, and the same holds for CAD drafting. Fiction requires a certain aspect of imagination that I’m finding a bit difficult to access as easily as I once did.

Also also: I’ve decided on the “special” for the “early adopters” of the nuke expedition. As appropriate for the subject, the decision came with a proper MUAHAHAHAHAHA evil genius laugh. This should be available well in advance of the book prototype.

——————-

And to get back into the swing of things, I heard about this on the radio today:

Howard’s Daily: Finding Infrastructure in the Stimulus Plan

Remember the $800 billion “stimulus” package from 2009? Guess how much of it got spent on physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc…. you know, the stuff the government is actually *supposed* to do): 3%.

Woo.

About $500 billion went to tax cuts, unemployment benefits, and “state fiscal relief” (shoring up insolvent state budgets). The remaining $300 billion was spent on actual projects, of which the big beneficiaries were: (i) subsidies for clean energy ($78 billion), (ii) subsidies for education and child support ($50 billion)(student loans, special ed, and support for disadvantaged children), (iii) health and health IT ($32 billion), (iv) transportation infrastructure ($30 billion, as noted above); (v) environmental cleanup ($28 billion), (vi) new buildings ($24 billion), (vii) scientific research ($18 billion), and a few other categories.

Stimulating, no?

 Posted by at 4:40 pm

Gorignak

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, nukes  13 Responses »
May 212014
 

I managed to miss a hell of a photo op today. I visited Goosenecks State Park, which is the next best thing to the Grand Canyon, and took a boatload of photos. While sitting in my car swapping out lenses, I heard a loud rumbling. It turned out to be a B-1B bomber going balls-out just a few hundred feet up, wings swept all the way back and banking *hard* directly overhead. And so there I was with a disassembled camera in my hands. Hrrrmmmph.

That’ll teach me to be unprepared for high-subsonic strategic bombers…

 

Anyway, the Nuke Trip paypal button has been yanked. A “thanks” to all who contributed. I’m still a day from home (post title indicates current position), but when I get there I’ll start cooking up DVDs for the $50 and $100 contributors. Might take a little while to organize & burn ’em. One more nuke made it into the files at the last minute: a B43 welded to a post outside a recycling center in Socorro and slathered with a quarter inch of paint. Huh.

 Posted by at 10:50 pm

VLA

 art, awesomeness, blather, books, drawings, history, new products, news, nukes, photography, science  2 Responses »
May 202014
 

The nuclear phase of the expedition is now complete, after one last pass through the museum today (which included getting a look at the back, where a number of interesting display models are stored). The numbers:

Sunday: 810 photos, 3.9 gigabytes

Monday: 519, 2.41

Tuesday: 192, 1.0

Some of these will be trimmed out… out of focus, or pointed at the floor, or excessively redundant, etc. A few will be crudely edited… a lot of the photos show details of display pieces with a tape measure for scale, and a hand holding the tape measure… and sometimes a good chunk of my whole person. Can’t have that. No friggen’ selfies.

So if you want in on this, now is the time. Now is the end of the time, in fact. Next time I get to a motel with good wifi (or, barring that, get home), the options to buy in will be removed. You can get the PayPal button to get the complete set of photos on DVD (and the option to get an early prototype version of the resulting book of nuclear weapon diagrams) here:

http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=24608

After finishing up this afternoon, I launched south to see the Very Large Array. The dishes were scattered to hell and gone, rather than bunched up close; this reduced some  of the photo opportunities. Bu I still managed a few interesting shots.

Dsc_4932 Dsc_4953 Dsc_4970

 Posted by at 9:40 pm
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