Flipping through the channels, I stumbled across this listing. Oddly, it didn’t seem appealing.
And because why not, here’s a crappy photo of the moon rising over the mountains earlier. Been here more than a dozen years and the rise of a full moon over the mountains remains a hell of a sight.
Now, this right here is some funny, funny stuff:
The author of the piece discusses the idea that the advent of self-driving cars will allow for the spread of suburbs, with people leaving dense city centers for spread-out suburbs. This sounds not unlikely to me. But where it gets funny is… well, right off the bat:
If you are exactly like me, you live in a dense urban environment and assume that dense urban environments are the way of the future, and suburbs are dark hellpits full of enormous PetSmart outlets and molly-soaked teens. … If you are exactly like me, you naturally expect that over time a larger and larger percentage of the population will move to dense urban areas, which are more efficient and more lively and more ecologically sound and which will be, with proper political leadership, more cost-effective…
No, dude. Not exactly like you. I’ve lived in the burbs, I’ve lived in the country, and I’ve spent time in the dense urban environment. While I certainly prefer the country to the burbs, I couldn’t get out of the city fast enough. And that’s just on a one-day *visit.*
Sure people are different. lots of people prefer to be in tightly packed peoplezoos like Chicago or New York. But the reasons typically given for why they prefer the cities generally strike me as being logically flawed (such as the notion that citylife is “greener” that non-citylife… how many acres of green growing stuff does the author have? I have 4.5 or so), or appeals to emotions that will only appeal to a certain percentage of the population. If your big thrill is to get coked up and party all night at a club, or to spend *vast* sums at restaurants, then, great, cities are for you. If your goal is to be able to see the Milky Way, to see wildlife, to actually look *outwards* rather than *inwards,* then cities really aren’t for you.
Something I inevitably see in these articles about how preferable cities are to anythign else is that public transportation, buses and trains, is just vastly better, cheaper, cleaner, more efficient than privately owned cars. If your world is just a few miles wide, from your small apartment to your small cubical to your clubs to your bars… then, yeah, being on a small track makes sense. But if your world is wider than that, then public transportation is less than useless. If I suddenly decide that I want to be 100 miles away in some random direction, simply because that’s what I want to do, what train or bus will take me there?
Plus: when the inevitable happens – a nuclear/biological/chemical attack, a Carrington event, an economic downturn, a public sector strike, a plague, etc. a self-contained arcology full of feminist studies majors and artisanal wine connoisseurs and man-bun aficionados doesn’t really seem the place to be. When New York City goes down, that place is going to eat itself… and then it will slowly spread outwards, turning the surrounding regions into a blasted wasteland.
The FBI has changed their mind and released an unredacted version of the brief transcript. The relevant bit is this:
Orlando Police Dispatcher (OD)
Omar Mateen (OM)
OD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
OM: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficent [Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [Arabic]. I wanna let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What’s your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.
OD: Ok, What’s your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him [Arabic], on behalf of the Islamic State.
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call.]
Now, was that so hard? What, is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi friggen’ Candyman or Voldemort? Say his name and he’ll getcha? No.
It’s interesting that we live in a time where those in power are afraid to say the name of our enemies. Was Reagan afraid to say “Communists?” Was FDR afraid to say “Nazis?” I think there is a disturbing amount of magical thinking on *both* sides of the issue… the right demanding that Obama and such say “radical Islamic terrorism” rather than more generic “terrorism,” and at the same time Obama and such virtually refusing to say it. Both sides seem to think that the word “Islam” has some sort of inherent power. But there is a definite difference between one side wanting to speak the truth twice as much as needed, and the other side not wanting to speak the truth at all.
Original post, earlier in the day:
The FBI has released edited transcripts of Omar Mateens calls to 9-11, made during his terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It has some unusual redactions.
——
ORLANDO—In order to provide an update on the progress of the investigation into the Pulse nightclub shooting, the FBI is releasing an excerpt from the timeline of events inside the Pulse nightclub during the early morning hours of Sunday, June 12, 2016. Out of respect for the victims of this horrific tragedy, law enforcement will not be releasing audio of the shooter’s 911 calls at this time, nor will law enforcement be releasing audio or transcripts of the calls made by victims at the Pulse nightclub during the incident. Furthermore, the name of the shooter and that of the person/group to whom he pledged allegiance are omitted.
The following is based on Orlando Police Department (OPD) radio communication (times are approximate):
Orlando Police Dispatcher (OD)
Shooter (OM)
OD: Emergency 911, this is being recorded.
OM: In the name of God the Merciful, the beneficial [in Arabic]
OD: What?
OM: Praise be to God, and prayers as well as peace be upon the prophet of God [in Arabic]. I let you know, I’m in Orlando and I did the shootings.
OD: What’s your name?
OM: My name is I pledge of allegiance to [omitted].
OD: Ok, What’s your name?
OM: I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].
OD: Alright, where are you at?
OM: In Orlando.
OD: Where in Orlando?
[End of call.]
(Shortly thereafter, the shooter engaged in three conversations with OPD’s Crisis Negotiation Team.)
In these calls, the shooter, who identified himself as an Islamic soldier, told the crisis negotiator that he was the person who pledged his allegiance to [omitted], and told the negotiator to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq and that is why he was “out here right now.” When the crisis negotiator asked the shooter what he had done, the shooter stated, “No, you already know what I did.” The shooter continued, stating, “There is some vehicle outside that has some bombs, just to let you know. You people are gonna get it, and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid.” Later in the call with the crisis negotiator, the shooter stated that he had a vest, and further described it as the kind they “used in France.” The shooter later stated, “In the next few days, you’re going to see more of this type of action going on.” The shooter hung up and multiple attempts to get in touch with him were unsuccessful.
(While the FBI will not be releasing transcripts of OPD communication with victims, significant information obtained from those victims allowed OPD to gain knowledge of the situation inside Pulse.)
(An immediate search of the shooter’s vehicle on scene and inside Pulse ultimately revealed no vest or improvised explosive device.)
Based on OPD radio communications, there were no reports of shots being fired inside Pulse between the initial exchange of gunfire between responding officers and shooter, and the time of the final breach. During this time, the shooter communicated with an OPD 911 operator and an OPD crisis negotiator, and OPD radio communications reported that victims were being rescued.
The FBI urges the public to provide information about the shooter and any contact they may have had with him. Since the release of the FBI’s Seeking Information poster, the FBI has received thousands of tips. The FBI will investigate every tip.
To provide a tip, please call 1-800-CALL-FBI or visit tips.fbi.gov.
————
And there it is. Note the multiple incidents of “[omitted],” reportedly “Islamic State” or some variation. Why delete that? Before the transcripts were released, a lot of right-wing commentators and bloggers and such were claiming that the FBI was deleting all references to Islam from the transcripts for the usual politically correct reasons, but the transcript explicitly points out that Mateen called himself an “Islamic soldier.” Note that only the first call to 9-11 is transcribed in more-or-less full; the other conversations with the authorities are summarized.
“The name of the shooter and that of the person/group to whom he pledged allegiance are omitted.” This just strikes me as odd. I can’t really come up with a good reason why the FBI would do that. Magical thinking? If you invoke the name of ISIS, they’ll come flooding through the mirror like a bad horror movie demon?
There’re some neat photos here…
“Last Saturn V Rocket” in this context means “last unrestored S-IC Saturn V first stage.” It has been in storage at Michoud for 45 years, and will now be restored and put on display at the INFINITY Science Center. This booster was meant for Apollo 19.
Every time I see one of these I get a little bit more annoyed at Lyndon B Johnson who had production stopped in 1968. The Saturn V should have remained in production, with incremental improvements, into the early 1980s.
This one I think will take some explaining.
Yelchin was discovered by friends at home around 1 am, after he was late to rehearsal. He had been pinned by his car in his driveway at his San Fernando Valley home. Yelchin’s death was confirmed by his publicist earlier today. Foul play is not suspected.
Buh? Pinned by his own car, while alone? That’s… a bit odd.
What’s the use of a gunship without guns?
The Tachi/Rocinante looks best with its PDCs out…
Alejandro “Jano” Fuentes was shot three times in the head Thursday. Ah, Chicago, jewel in the crown of the anti-firearm lobby…
This came less than a week after Christina Grimmie, another “The Voice” contestant, was shot by some random whacko in Florida.
And the most important science news of the day:
Basically, cats use their hunting skills to predict the future.
The EM drive has caused a lot of debate, in no small part due to the fact that it seems to violate the known laws of physics… and because other experimenters haven had difficulty replicating it. Well, it *seems* some experimenters have gotten it to work *and* have come up with an explanation for how it works… and how it works without busting Newtons laws.
In short: the “exhaust” spat out by the EM drive is just photons. It’s a photon rocket, something that has been understood for decades. But the EM drive has been confusing because it hasn’t been seen to emit photons. The theory here is that it *does,* though. But rather than just your standard flood of photons (such as you’d get from a flashlight, a laser, a microwave oven or a social justice warrior who has undergone spontaneous proton decay), in this case each photon is paired up with another. And the two are paired up in such a way that they cancel each other out… they are emitted, their momentum is transferred, but their not detectable because the crest of the wave of Photon A is matched with the trough of the wave of Photon B. Or so goes the theory, anyway.
Gotta admit this one is a bit of a headscratcher. On one level I get the idea of the waves cancelling each other out; junior high school double-slit experiment stuff. But imagine if the EM drive was *ridiculously* powerful. Say, it spat out a hundred megawatts of “invisible” energy. If you put something fragile and easily damaged behind it (like an industry standard Trigglypuff), you’d be dumping a whole lot of energy into it that’s undetectable. So does your Triggytarget burst into flames or not?
Buh.
I’m looking for good diagrams of the Lockheed XF-90, especially cross-sections of the fuselage. Here’s where it gets a little weird: I need to be able to accurately 3D CAD model the XF-90… but it’s not for an XF-90 kit.
More later (of course, the first to provide such diagrams gets the full lowdown on what’s up).