Let us not forget the true meaning of this day…
Feb 142017
Feb 132017
Nazis. Nazis everywhere.
It was quickly pointed out that these are not the sort of misshapen swastikas that you could expect to see scrawled on a wall or sidewalks (perhaps more likely by the “victim,” as a way to gin up sympathy), but are instead construction markers for utility or sewer workers.
I expect we’re going to see a *lot* of sloppy swastikas over the next few years. A tiny number of actual neo-Nazis/white supremecists, a larger number of juvenile trolls, and a substantial number of “anti fascists” trying to fearmonger, agitate, raise funds or just plain cause trouble.
And then there’ll be the idiots who fearmonger over honest symbols that have nothing to do with politics.
Feb 132017
The goofy idea to convert a B-21 into Air Force One? Yeah, shockingly, it didn’t originate with anyone who actually matters, but rather with a consulting firm acting on their own initiative.
A Bargain for President Trump’s Air Force One
Wright Williams & Kelly, Inc.’s (WWK) aerospace and defense team took up President Trump’s challenge and confirmed that the price of Air Force One Program can come WAY DOWN!
The mark of a truly serious proposal is phraseology such as “WAY DOWN!”
But hey, if you want to read more about it, they are ready to sell you a copy of their report.
What bugs me is that Aviation Week ran this as meaningful news. Meh.
Feb 132017
Newcomer centre has no more room for border-crossing refugees
It seems a lot of asylum seekers are flooding into Canada… from the US. The article is incredibly vague about who these asylum seekers are. They don’t seem to be the likes of Hollywood celebrities who promised to leave the US if Trump won. Heck, they don’t even seem to be US citizens.
Given all the platitudes we keep hearing about how great it is to import masses of immigrants from very alien cultures, Canada should be thrilled to death for this to happen.
Feb 132017
One of President Giant Middle Finger’s campaign promises was to fix up Americas rather decrepit physical infrastructure. If there were any doubts that things are troubled, the dam in Oroville, California, seems to be working overtime to dispel them.
Oroville Dam Spillway Failure: Nearly 190,000 Ordered to Evacuate
This is especially depressing when one considers the tens of trillions that have been squandered over the decades on useless and downright counter-productive social welfare programs. Imagine what we could have done if, say, half of the Medicare expenses had instead been spent on infrastructure. And the space program, so long as I’m dreaming.
This is a dam in California. One wonders if it would be currently having these problems if California and San Francisco and the like had spent there money not on making bums comfortable, but instead putting them to work. A few thousand drugged-up homeless equipped with shovels and notified that “you want lunch, you do work” could have moved a whole lot of earth over the last few decades.
Feb 122017
Has China beaten Nasa in building warp-drive technology dubbed the ‘impossible engine’?
Oy.
OK, the basic claim seems to be that China has built an “EM engine.” Fine, whatever. But the article goes off the rails in a hurry. Firstly, there’s the title of the article: the Em engine is *not* a warp drive. Then the article claims that an EM engine could send a ship to Mars in a matter of weeks. Ummm… no. The tests that have been done have shown that if there is any net thrust at all (and there’s every reason to suspect that this is actually a matter of experimental error), the levels of thrust are *exceedingly* low. Instead of shoving a ship to Mars in a matter of weeks, a few weeks at full thrust will *maybe* rack up a few meter per second of delta V.
Fake space news, baby.
Feb 122017
Fark.com ran a photoshop contest… take a photo and photoshop it to be funny. The photo this time came from NASA… and it’s just kinda begging to be photoshopped.
Photoshop this exciting NASA wind tunnel project
Here’s the original unretouched image. I assume the pink color is due to special paint, presumably pressure-sensitive paint that changes color.
Insert lame low-brow innuendo-laden joke HERE.
Feb 112017
Played by Mel Gibson in “We Were Soldiers.”
Lt. Gen. Hal Moore dies at 94
I have a tenuous connection here. The movie depicts one hell of a battle between US Army forces and NVA forces in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. The NVA had been dug in to that valley for a long while, with considerable stores of supplies and troops underground in tunnels. The NVA *owned* that valley. And several days before the battle, my fathers platoon just… wandered right on through the valley. Never saw the enemy, never engaged them, never had any indication they were there. But most assuredly, the NVA was aware of the small group of American GIs. But they let them pass unmolested; presumably in order to keep their presence secret. Had a slightly different course of events happened, Mel Gibson wouldn’t have been in that movie and you wouldn’t be reading this blog.
Feb 112017
Apparently the makers of Star Trek: Discovery think that Klingons look like this:
Star Trek: Discovery is supposed to be set about ten years before Kirk took command of the Enterprise, in the “original” timeline. And it has been established that in that timeline, and at that point in time, due to the “Augment” virus introduced in season four of “Enterprise,” the Klingons look like the swarthy humans of the original series. So WTF is going on here? Are we going to get some explanation that these are mutant Klingons who reacted weirdly to the virus? Early experiments in fixing the virus? or is this just the usual “I know TV producers… they love to change things?”
Feb 102017
NASA has just released a report on a Europa lander mission. I haven’t read all the way through it (in fact, I’ve just glanced through it), but it seems fairly extensive. The lander design itself seems pretty preliminary. It also looks like a walking “rover,” but the legs are just long in order to allow the lander to safely come to rest on whatever terrain it happens to land on.
The lander would have instruments meant to look for the signs of life. Pretty obviously, the chances of life appearing *anywhere* near the surface of Europa are as close to zero as you can get. However, assuming that many, many kilometers below there is a liquid water ocean, and assuming that there is recognizable life swimming or floating around in the water, chances are fairly good that bits of it, everything from biochemicals on up to actual critters, would get trapped in the ice. Over extremely long periods of time the cold, icy equivalent of geological processes might drag that stuff up to the surface, where it might be detectable.
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You can download the report here:
Europa Lander Science Definition Team Report
Some of the illustrations:
