Oh come *on*…

 blather, Crazy, news  16 Responses »
Jan 102016
 

I don’t play Lotto. This is aided by the fact that the Lottery doesn’t exist in Utah, and I ain’t gonna drive hours out of my way to go throw money away on something I won’t win. But, dayum, this is getting wacky enough that I’m sorely tempted to throw reason to the wind, peddle my butt to Wyoming and throw money I ain’t got at a cash register in a gas station.

Powerball jackpot might reach $1.3B after latest drawing sees no winners

If you took the winnings as a lump sum, the $1,300,000,000 would turn into roughly $650,000,000, and after taxes, probably something like $455,000,000. That’s…a  pretty good chunk of change. Step One would be to take a third of that and make my very own Star Wars movie. And then I’d be a billionaire. After that? Who knows. Maybe buy the Boeing Historical Archive, and spend my nights rolling around in the 8X10 glossies of aerospacecraft concept art.

 Posted by at 12:28 am

2D B-1 Mockup

 aircraft, art, history  No Responses »
Jan 102016
 

A photo of a Rockwell “mockup” of the B-1 bomber. Taken sometime in probably the early/mid 1970’s, this mockup is composed of two 2D images… an inboard profile showing the innards of the craft, and a plan view “shadow.” This is an effective way to get across the scale of the craft without having to build a terribly expensive 3D mockup.

b-1 2d mockup

 Posted by at 12:12 am

Those Wacky Germans

 books, history, Hmm...  3 Responses »
Jan 102016
 

Two newsworthy events occurred in Germany at the turn of the new year: the copyright expired on noted socialist thought leader Adolph Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf,” and a number of sexual assaults were reported, half by immigrants/refugees from the middle east. The two events are of course not related, but one might be tempted to suspect that a secondary result of the first event might be somewhat related to the second event:

New edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf goes on sale in German bookshops and sells out instantly

The edition in question is a 59-euro TWO THOUSAND page “critical edition” (presumably with just a whole lot of new footnotes and commentary and such) that was limited to a  print run of 4,000… but 15,000+ orders were made for it before publication.

 Posted by at 12:06 am

Cathedrals of Light

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., photography, rockets, science, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Jan 072016
 

Yeah, yeah, the title hearkens back to some politically unfortunate events, but it fits here.. two photos of the Saturn Ib and Saturn V on the launch pad lit up by the amazingly brilliant lamps NASA used for the job. The image of the Saturn Ib gets to me… I think it’s the contrast of The Most Amazing Thing EVAR in the background, while in the foreground are a number of fellers just doing a job.

S68-46285 S69-25879

 Posted by at 11:38 am

A different time

 history, Hmm..., photography, weapons  3 Responses »
Jan 072016
 

In digging through my files, I came across a few photos showing John Glenn being presented with a gift sometime after his Mercury flight.  Somehow I suspect that today the chances of an astronaut being presented a firearm as a recognition gift seems slim, especially as the presenters seem to be NASA itself. The placard in the box and engraved on the rifle state that it’s from the “PROJECT ENGINEERING OFFICE.”

glenngun5 glenngun4 glenngun3 glenngun2 glenngun1

 Posted by at 1:35 am

And *BOOM* goes the productivity

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., news, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Jan 062016
 

The Aviation Week archive is now online. You need to sign up to gain access; I had to try with two different email addresses. Part of the process is they send you an email you have to click on to finish the registration process; the first address never got the email, the second got it in seconds. Shrug.

Not that it’s not the *complete* archive. There are still a number of issues missing… perhaps unsurprisingly, one specific issue from the 1980’s I went looking for isn’t there. Presumably it’ll show up eventually. But even so… there is a productivity-destroying amount of stuff available. At least in some cases the online images are higher resolution than the best scans from actual issues of the magazine.

http://archive.aviationweek.com

 Posted by at 5:21 pm
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