Jan 122015
 

This here is the kind of preacher who makes people atheist:

 

 

In short… he *claims* that he punched a “kid” square in the chest because he wasn’t believing the right way and was bright enough to be dangerous. In all probability, Internet Tough Preacher here is making it up. However, even if so he is claiming to be pleased with himself for the use of violence upon a kid for the purpose of forced religious conversion.

The video is a short crop of a presumably much longer sermon, and so context is lost. What he’s describing, if it actually happened, seems to have taken place in a “youth group,” which might mean that ITP was himself a kid at the time. But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t make it better.

 

 Posted by at 1:30 am
Jan 122015
 

I have been plugging away on USSP#2, pretty much to the exclusion of all else, for a little while now. Shown below is the current status of the diagrams. USSP#2 has substantially more diagrams than the usual US Aerospace Projects publication. The empty spots are for two further spaceplanes. I really wish I was a faster draftsman, but there it is.

Generally I release these sort of things two at a time, but this might be released on its own.

ussp 02

 Posted by at 1:09 am
Jan 102015
 

Dartmouth: 64 Students Cheated

… in an ETHICS CLASS.

But it was a sports ethics class, so I guess it’s ok. And kinda expected. I keep hearing people yap about how athletics is important in high school and college because of the teamwork and honor and sportsmanship and lessons it teaches and blah blah blah, but I keep seeing that all it really seems to teach is how to be a bigger jock douchebag, to abuse the chicks, drink the booze, cheat and somehow still wind up on top.

 Posted by at 6:32 pm
Jan 102015
 

The SpaceX Falcon 9 with a Dragon resupply module was successfully launched early this AM, an the Dragon is on its way to a rendezvous with the ISS. The first stage successfully oriented itself, guided itself successfully down to the landing barge, landed on the barge… and then either hit hard or hit and fell over. In any event, the stage was destroyed, but the barge was not. As the stage would have been destroyed if they *hadn’t* tried to recover it, it’s no great loss; as they’re still very early in the learning process, it’s still a  pretty good step in the right direction. They came, almost literally, this close to making it.

Sadly, there is apparently no video of the landing due to dark and fog.

 Posted by at 8:54 am
Jan 102015
 

This is one of the more unlikely-looking launch vehicle designs I’ve seen… a 1961 Saturn I first stage with an S-IV second stage and a nuclear upper stage. In and of itself that’s not that unusual… but the upper stage is *really* long and thin and appears to be devoid of a recognizable payload. The result, if it managed to survive launch and bending forces, is that at burnout it would be accelerating *really* hard.

However, the great probability here is that this was not an actual serious engineering study for a launch vehicle, but instead a notional concept, useful for studying the whichness of the why regarding the use of automated systems for nuclear rocket preparation an launch.

missiles and rockets Sept 61 nuclear rockets

 Posted by at 5:27 am
Jan 092015
 

While Islamists were busy making a mess in France, Islamists in Nigeria were showing those European pikers how it’s *really* done:

Boko Haram crisis: Nigeria’s Baga town hit by new assault

Numbers are vague, but the dead civilians range from the hundreds to 2,000, depending on who you ask.

Surt must be most pleased at his followers actions.

 Posted by at 11:52 pm
Jan 092015
 

As soon as I branched beyond just Bombers in the “US Aerospace Projects” publications, a series on launch vehicles became both inevitable and mandatory. I haven’t yet put any together, however. I’ve been thinking about how to format them. The series on Spacecraft, of which a grand total of a single issue has been released, is very eclectic, with everything from work pods to space stations to starships; I asked the “up-ship emailing list” if that worked, and the result is that the *next* issue will be focused on a single type of spacecraft, and the one after that eclectic, rinse and repeat.

For Launchers, though, I’m considering following a pattern for each issue. As with Bombers, Transports, Spacecraft and so on, each issue will cover eight vehicles. I’m considering:

1) Designs leading up to the development of the Saturn I and V

2) Designs derived *from* the Saturn I and V

3) Heavy lifters… Nova, Post-Saturn and beyond

4) Aerospaceplanes of various types (airbreathing and non, just so’s they’re launch vehicles not payload)

5) early Space Shuttle designs

6) Shuttle derived vehicles

7) & 8) Misc

Here’s the thing: early Shuttle might often be *two* designs… the Booster and the Orbiter.

Comments? Complaints? Suggestions? Large bags of cash?

 Posted by at 11:25 pm
Jan 092015
 

An image from the Chandra X_Ray Observatory merged with a Hubble optical image equals artistic awesomeness. What’s shown here is a single galaxy in the foreground with a single quasar in the distant background. In a Newtonian universe, the quasar would be hidden by the foreground galaxy, but since this is an Einsteinian universe, gravitational lensing not only brings the quasar into view, it brings it into view as four separate images. The end result sure looks like a sci-fi wormhole, just the thing you’d expect to see the Jem Hadar or Great Old Ones come squeezing through. High-rez at the link.

RX J1131-1231: Chandra & XMM-Newton Provide Direct Measurement of Distant Black Hole’s Spin

rxj1131

rxj1131 closeup

 Posted by at 9:17 pm