There are worse places to be trapped

 blather, books, Hmm..., news  2 Responses »
Oct 172014
 

U.S. tourist gets trapped in London bookstore

Short form: guy wanders into a sizable bookstore just before closing, goes upstairs to use their WiFi, doesn’t notice when they close and gets locked in for several hours.

I was reminded of “The Tattered Cover.” When I lived near Denver in the late 1990’s, there was a bookstore in downtown Denver right across the street from an upscale shopping mall that, IIRC, claimed to be the largest bookstore in the world (or perhaps the US, I forget). In any event, it was *big.* Loved that place, even though, oddly, only a small percentage of the store was devoted to science, engineering and sci-fi. Then I moved away in 2000.

A few years back I passed through Denver and decided to stop in and see the place. I was shocked to find that the site was now some other wholly unrelated business. Fortunately, I found that they had simply moved. So I found their new digs. Their new smaller digs. Their new much less impressive digs. Their new stomp-on-my-youthful-memories digs. Bah.

The original Tattered Cover was the sort of place a bookworm could get lost in. The new one… meh.

 Posted by at 9:24 pm

Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization

 Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Oct 172014
 

The White House floats a rial balloon:

Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization

If we want to want to create a robust civilization in our solar system, more of the energy, raw materials, and equipment that we use in space has to come from space.  Launching everything we need from Earth is too expensive.  It would also be too expensive to send all of the factories required to manufacture everything necessary to support a solar system civilization.

Ultimately what we need to do is to evolve a complete supply chain in space, utilizing the energy and resources of space along the way. We are calling this approach “bootstrapping” because of the old saying that you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.  Industry in space can start small then pull itself up to more advanced levels through its own productivity, minimizing the cost of launching things from Earth in the meantime.  Obviously, this isn’t going to happen overnight, but I think that it is the right long-term goal.

…

Have ideas for massless exploration and bootstrapping a Solar System civilization? Send your ideas for how the Administration, the private sector, philanthropists, the research community, and storytellers can further these goals at massless@ostp.gov.

It would be nice to think that this is the sort of thing the administration was actually interested in doing something with. But let’s just say I won’t be holding my breath on this.

 Posted by at 7:17 pm

Small victories

 AARRRGH, blather, news  2 Responses »
Oct 172014
 

So, huzzah. My right shoulder has improved to the point that I could actually reach to the top of my head to wash my hair. Woo. Granted, there was a point between A and B where the nerves still went bonkers, but once past that, things worked. I can pretty well run a mouse now. Woo.

 Posted by at 7:10 pm

Does Ebola make people stupid???

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  23 Responses »
Oct 172014
 

On the one hand, there is a good, rational case to be made for not freaking out, for not panicking, for maintaining a rational outlook. On the other hand, there is a good case to be made for caution. But Ebola seems to make people ignore both of these. And it seems to be making people *stupid.* For example:

Thomas Duncan*knew* he had been in contact with Ebola, yet thought it’d be a good idea to fly halfway across the planet.

Nurse Amber Vinson, who worked with known Ebola victim Thomas Duncan, decided to hop *two* jetliners and fly across the country.

A worker at the same hospital who “may have” handled Ebola samples thought it’d be a good idea to hop on board a *cruise* *ship* and has now been quarantined in the Caribbean.

It’s almost as if one of the symptoms of Ebola is an unaccountable urge to travel and spread the virus.

But at least now President Obama has selected an “Ebola Czar” to deal with the issue. Who? One “Ron Klain,” someone not immediately familiar. So who is this guy? What are his medical credentials? Well, fortunately he has a Wikipedia page:

Ronald A. “Ron” Klain is an American lawyer and political operative best known for serving as Chief of Staff to two Vice Presidents – Al Gore (1995–1999) and Joseph Biden (2009–2011).[1][2] He is an influential Democratic Party insider. Earlier in his career, he was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Byron White during the Court’s 1987 and 1988 Terms and worked on Capitol Hill, where he was Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination. He was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the HBO film Recount depicting the tumult of the 2000 presidential election.

multifinger

 

 Posted by at 7:44 am

PDF Review: STS tiles. Every. Single. Vertex.

 aircraft, history, Hmm..., models, Patreon, rockets, spacecraft  23 Responses »
Oct 162014
 

This is the second of four “PDF Reviews” I plan to have in October, to make up for the lack of any in September. The idea is to present interesting online resources for those interested in the sort of aerospace oddities that you can find in the pages of Aerospace Projects Review. This little project is supported through my Patreon campaign; at current levels, I’ll post two such reviews per month. If you’d like to see more, or just want to contribute to help me along, please consider becoming a patron.

This one is a bit different from usual. Instead of a report full of art and diagrams and charts and, well, sentences, this one has none of those. Instead, what it does have is 5,271 pages of data. Data, specifically, on the X-Y-Z positions of every single vertex of every single tile on the Shuttle. Of what value is that? Well, someone with a whole lot of patience could, I presume, feed this data into a 3D modeling program and produce a *really* accurate model of at least part of the Space Shuttle. So… knock yourself out.

Orbiter Coordinates of All the Vertices on the Outer Mold Line (OML) of Each of the OV-ID5 Tiles

The abstract page is HERE.

The direct download link for the PDF file is HERE.

 Posted by at 12:49 am

Sheesh. Whine harder.

 dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Meh., politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Oct 152014
 

State rep defends ‘Machine Gun Social’

Ummm… okay, so we’ve got a Republican Ohio state rep who’s going to have a public campaign fundraiser – called a “Machine Gun Social” – where there will be a few fully automatic weapons available for the public to shoot. As far as campaign fundraisers go, that sounds like a hoot (caveat: there will be only one gun at a time and it will be mechanically locked so it can’t shoot anywhere but downrange). Who could have a problem with that? Why… the Republican’s Democrat opponent, who opines:

“It’s hard to imagine the words “machine gun” and “social” in the same sentence. It’s an oxymoron. It doesn’t jive. It causes cognitive dissonance. … In my opinion, there is nothing social about machine guns, ever. They are weapons. The reason they exist is to kill people.

Feh.

 

 Posted by at 8:18 pm

Passive-aggressive atheism is worth $2 million

 awesomeness, I'm from the government, news, politics, religion  13 Responses »
Oct 152014
 

Neato:

Barry A. Hazle Jr., Atheist, Wins Nearly $2 Million In Settlement Over Faith-Based Rehab Program

Short form: in 2007, Hazle was arrested for meth possession and sentence to rehab. but the only rehab that was available was one of those worthless faith-based things that’re no better than quitting cold turkey. Since Hazle was an atheist, he didn’t want to be involved, but he was made to go. So he was “disruptive, though in a congenial way, to the staff as well as other students” and  “sort of passive-aggressive.” As a result he was kicked out and sent to jail for three months.

And now his lawsuit has netted him just shy of $2,000,000.

Good.

 Posted by at 1:46 pm

Nuking 20 American Cities

 blather, Hmm..., nukes  41 Responses »
Oct 142014
 

An interesting thought experiment:

What Would Happen If the 20 Biggest US Cities Were Wiped Out With Nukes

In short: Jihadists wander off with 20 45-kiloton Pakistani nukes and detonate them in 20 carefully chosen major US cities. The end result is million dead, the relocation of the Capitol to Denver, the collapse of the US economy, a series of Constitutional crises over succession after much of the chain of command is wiped out, a US military response that takes out a chunk of Pakistan.

The variables are too many to guess at, but I could see the US military response to such a situation range anywhere from virtually nil, to lashing out with a whole bunch of Trident missiles raining nukyular death all over the middle east.

 Posted by at 4:22 pm

This is why I don’t open carry

 blather, news, weapons  2 Responses »
Oct 142014
 

Gresham man robbed of pistol at gunpoint while exercising ‘open carry’ right

I believe that people have the right to openly carry firearms in public. I also believe that people have the right to openly flash fat stacks of $100 bills in public. But in both cases, you’re making yourself a target. So unless you are sufficiently skilled *and* trained to reliably defend yourself in a case like this, where the Bad Guy wanders up to you on the street, engages you in conversation, then pulls out a  concealed (and almost certainly illegal) gun, then consider carrying concealed.

 Posted by at 4:10 pm
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