How does a Marine drive his tank around on ice? Like a boss, that’s how.
I’m not so sure that “desert tan” is the best camo for these conditions… but function before fashion, I suppose. Looks like those treads are put under some serious strain.
The USMC forces shown here are in Norway for some joint training exercises.
They will surely sell out fast:
Coming this September 21-28, complete with beer festival. Best line:
Only 636 spaces for international visitors are available, and North Korean citizens are not allowed in.
No word on whether it’ll feature a volcano-nuking.
Jeb Bush has suspended his campaign. It’s kind of amazing how amazingly poorly he’s done; a year ago he was seen as if not inevitable, then at least highly likely. And yet he never got *anywhere.*
And since Bernie got burned in Nevada, chances are pretty good that Hillary’s coronation as nominee is back on. Which means that chances are *really* good that this will be our President in a year:
Gah. What a choice.
That… would be spectacular. Nothing immediately springs top mind as being more downright entertaining than the Norks nuking one of their own volcanoes into wakefulness, spewing out buckets of liquid-hot magma onto the surrounding countryside.
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On other matters, one of the sidebar articles describes how miffed a bunch of refugee/colonist-apologist groups are about a cover of a Polish magazine. The cover shows a blond woman wearing the EU flag being groped by hands belonging to fellers who are out of the frame, with the caption “The Islamic rape of Europe.” I can see the complainers point… why would anyone associate sexual violence with the colonists, just because sexual violence has shot up where the colonists have set up camp?
Raedthinn has always been a puker. Almost every morning, I wake up to the Barf Alarm and he hocks up a hairball. But recently he seems to have turned it into a damned hobby, perfecting his craft via constant practice. So… in to the vet he went, about a week ago. Step one was to assume hairball issues. So he got some meds and some tuna-flavored goop to help move that stuff out. Seemed to help… for about two days. So back in he went today. This time, blood tests… which showed nothing other than he’s healthy (yay, because kidneys and liver were suspects). And an Xray which showed that he is plugged up but good.
Seems he has himself a case of megacolon, which is jsut what it sounds like. It is also an issue that the late lamented Marvin had. In Marvins case, it was because she suffered from malnutrition before joining the household; in Raedthinn’s case… the vet suggests it’s because he’s just been holding it in. Might be because he doesn’t want to poop where Bruce poops. Who knows. So today, I got a brief description of why I’m glad I’m not a vet-tech… because Raedthinn got several enemas. Thrilling for everyone involved, I bet. He’s spending the night at the vet so they can measure his overnight poop. Exciting stuff.
It’s stuff like this that makes the tiny part of me that’s still willing to look on the bright side glad that I am utterly uninteresting to the female of my particular species. Dealing with unwell cats is bother and costly enough. Imagine if I had to care for a *child.* Hell, you’ll get in trouble if you boot one of *those* out to the curb. You can’t even put one of those “invisible fence” collars on ’em!
FYI… I’ve increased my stock of “human figure scale references.” The top row here are drawings I’ve put together; the figures in the rows below are (with two exceptions) taken from CAD files found online. The two purple lines represent 5’10” and 6′ heights above the ground line. Some of these are… well, unlikely to appear too often.
Apparently an incident from the late 1990’s on board the USS Bonhomme Richard, when the rear transmission of a CH-46 sprung a leak.
This is kinda big:
In short… 300 million lightyears away in the galaxy NGC 4889 is a black hole with the mass of 21 *billion* suns. The event horizon is 130 billion kilometers in diameter. That’s 434.5 AU in *radius.* In comparison, Neptune is a measly 30 AU from the sun.
The black hole seems to be quiet… it appears to have gobbled up all the stars and gas in its immediate vicinity. It has swallowed its own accretion disk. But back when it was active, astronomers estimate that the accretion disk would have been so vast and so hot that it would have emitted a thousand times as much energy as the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Without an accretion disk, the black hole is invisible. However, astronomers have measure the velocity of stars in the region and were able to calculate the mass of the invisible object they are orbiting.
A black hole this vast would have a very gentle entry into the event horizon. I did some back of the Excel envelope math and came up with an acceleration of gravity at the event horizon of 659.8 m/sec^2, or about 67.27 G’s. Pretty crushing if you were standing there, but if you were simply falling in the acceleration of gravity would not be felt. What you *would* feel is the tidal force. In any documentary about black holes, you will almost inevitably get to the point were they discuss tidal forces, with the presenters inevitably, and gleefully, describing the process of “spaghettification,” where your feet and head are pulled apart from each other. In short, this is because the black hole is so massive, and you are so close to it, that the force of gravity at you feet is vastly higher than the force of gravity at your head, 1.8 (or so) meters away from each other. But for *this* supermassive black hole… assuming my math is right, the delta in acceleration due to gravity at the radius of the event horizon is about 2X10^-11 m/sec^2 per meter. That… is pretty damn weak. You would fall through the event horizon without even noticing.
But when you get closer to the singularity at the center, the tidal forces would increase. At 1 AU, the acceleration is 1.25E8 m/sec^2, and the delta seems to be 124.6 *million* m/sec^2 per meter. That’ll shred ya good. At 0.1 AU, the numbers are 1.87E20 m/sec^2 and 1.87E20 M/sec^2/meter. This math was run without recourse to relativistic effects, largely because I couldn’t be bothered. But you can see that while you could slip past the event horizon without getting squashed, you’ll get nowhere near the center before things turn really quite awful.
Now available… the first of two new US Aerospace Projects titles.
US Fighter Projects #01 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #01 includes:
USFP #01 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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US VTOL Projects #01 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #01 includes:
USVP #01 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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Anybody have experience using this, or something similar?
At this very moment I’m watching “All American Makers,” and there’s a couple guys flacking almost exactly this, claiming they invented it. It sure looks like they are claiming to have created something you can buy off the shelf.
