Neither rain nor snow nor the fact the customer ain’t there no more…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., news, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Oct 122017
 

Ummmm… when an entire neighborhood has been burned to ash… shouldn’t the Post Office just sorta sit on the mail for a while, rather than delivering it to, well, nowhere?

Beyond the flat-out bizarre sight of the mail being delivered to ruins, the footage is just extraordinary. Scenes of whole areas of houses reduced to just a steel structure, presumably a foundation that the house sat on. note how the steel structures are largely sagging and twisted, even though JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL ARRRGLE BARGLE.

What’s especially extraordinary is the sight of a whole neighborhood burned to ash… with every house on the other side of the street seemingly intact. Utterly ruined lots with intact houses mere feet away. You gotta wonder if that was due to the wind patterns, or if the surviving nearby house was being deluged with water, or if it was just dumb luck.

 

 Posted by at 10:01 am

Estimating the cost of BFR

 awesomeness, Hmm..., projects, rockets, spacecraft  16 Responses »
Oct 112017
 

The Space Review has an interesting piece that attempts to figure out how much BFR might cost to fly. My own estimate: I dunno. Done the old fashioned way, you’d go through a thousand pages of calculations, totaling up all the palm-greasing and bonuses and regulatory hoop-jumping and congresscritter bribes and extraneous R&D and sub-sub-subcontractor troubleshooting… and only then try to figure out what the actual manufacturing and testing and propellant and operations and maintenance will cost. And then tack on an extra zero, because of course you will. But here, SpaceX is operating in a whole new environment. Ten years ago I would have said the BFR would have been a ridiculously, laughably optimistic concept; now… you know, I bet they can pull it off, even if they need to slip the schedule some.

Estimating the cost of BFR

They come up with a conclusion that $240,000 per ton delivered to the surface of Mars is achievable. They also come up with a cost per seat of $1,200 for a point-to-point ballistic transport version stuffing 853 passengers on board, but here I become distinctly dubious. I’d bet real money that even if the technology works fantastically, the regulatory banhammer will come down on SpaceX SpaceLines the moment they try to actually fly passengers. Heck, I bet the US FedGuv will drop ITAR on SpaceX like a ton of white-hot bricks the moment SpaceX seriously proposes to launch  a BFR upper stage to some darned furrin country like Japan or Australia, never mind China or Dubai. Plus there will be practical issues which I think stand a *very* good chance of torpedoing an affordable ballistic transport system… passengers keeling over due to acceleration (or being ejected from the boarding line because a doctor says “no”), the sort of delays that space launch systems would find trivial would be monumental for a system meant to operate for only 30 minutes, difficulties getting passengers loaded on board, bad weather at the launch or landing site making it impossible for the vehicle or its booster to safely land… these can all cause a serious headache.

I am much less interested in the global transport aspect than I am in the orbital and interplanetary aspect. Sure, it’d be great to have a half-hour-to-antipodes transporter… but that wouldn’t have one percent the impact that a colony transport to Mars would have.

 Posted by at 11:54 pm

Bump fire vs full auto

 Hmm..., weapons, youtube  3 Responses »
Oct 112017
 

A good video to see the differences. Fortunately they use multiple camera angles with good slow motion. Clearly visible is just *how* the bump stock works… and just how much the bullets are sprayed all over from the bump stocked AR-15 compared to the relative stability of the true full auto M-16.

 

 Posted by at 10:13 pm

SpaceX: Another rocket re-use

 awesomeness, history, news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  2 Responses »
Oct 112017
 

SpaceX has landed another previously-launched Falcon 9 first stage (it flew a resupply mission to ISS in February). It’s not there yet, but this sort of thing is becoming routine… which is fantastic.

Note that at about the 21 minute mark the grid fins begin to glow white-hot during entry. Which would certainly explain why they switched from aluminum to titanium for those fins.

 Posted by at 10:10 pm

“Roof” space station concept

 art, history, projects, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Oct 102017
 

Posted to a NASA Flickr page is this illustration of a 1984 space station concept:

This is the Johnson Space Center’s 1984 “roof” concept for a space station. The “roof” was covered with solar array cells, that were to generate about 120 kilowatts of electricity. Within the V-shaped beams there would be five modules for living, laboratory space, and external areas for instruments and other facilities.

This would probably be a very heavy station for the volume and usable surface area provided. However, once that truss structure is in place, it seems like it would be possible to keep adding on to it without overly stressing the structure, with the possible result of a very capable station. It should also be possible to keep tacking on new truss elements.

The design would necessarily keep most of the station elements shadowed by the solar arrays.

 Posted by at 10:15 pm

I question this toy-like object

 Hmm..., humor, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Oct 092017
 

While in a cheap-crap store, I happened across this “toy.” I didn’t pay it a whole lot of attention to it; I *think* it’s one of those highly gummy things that just sticks to things. I think.

There was one thing about it that made me go “huh” and take a few seconds out of my day to take a photo. And then when I got home check online to see if the thing that made me go “huh” was, indeed, huh-worthy.

Here’s a link to the Urban Dictionary definition of the term in question. I’ll leave it to you to decide if this was the result of ignorance, or someone was a smartass and it got past ignorant higher-ups.

It would also surprise me precisely none at all if it turns out this isn’t actually an officially licensed product.

 Posted by at 5:06 pm

Talking past each other on guns

 blather, Hmm..., politics, weapons, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  48 Responses »
Oct 092017
 

This piece seems to be reasonably well reasoned, and if you are a left-winger or an anti-gunner, or if you know one, I’d suggest giving it a read.

6 Reasons Your Right-Wing Friend Isn’t Coming To Your Side On Gun Control

As the title suggests, six reasons are given. But I think the first one is perhaps one of the most important:

The most destructive, divisive response when dealing with Second Amendment advocates is the notion that we aren’t on your side of the issue because we “don’t care” about the tragedy and loss of life. Two years ago at Christmas I had a family member, exasperated that I wasn’t agreeing about gun control, snarl, “It appears that if your [step] daughter was killed because of gun violence you wouldn’t even care!”

Me, I’m a jerk. I’ve long since ceased to really care about convincing people who disagree with me to agree with me, because to a large degree politics has become so stultifyingly polarized that no matter what evidence is produced that there isn’t some phantom wage gap, or that nuclear power is the way to go, or that the United States isn’t the greatest evil in world history, or that the world is more than 6,000 years old or that vaccines aren’t going to give you autism or that a firearm I own isn’t going to jump up and shoot you or that maybe you should be allowed to keep what you earn and control your own stuff and destiny, there will be people who just will not accept it. A few decades of these fights have largely drained the hope from me that many people are even open to understanding anything that even comes close to libertarianism or conservativism or a rational scientific outlook. So I just throw the occasional bomb onto my blog and call it a day.

But if you actually hold out the hope of convincing The Other Side of your viewpoint, coming at them right out of the gate with “you don’t care about victims” is *exactly* the wrong approach. And for two reasons:

1: If the other guy doesn’t believe that you believe what you’re saying, he knows you to be a dishonest and disreputable liar.

2: If the other guy *does* believe what you say when you declare that he doesn’t care about actual victims, he’s going to assume that *you* are the actual sociopath in the situation.

And somethgin that has coem up in the comments section of this blog many times is also discussed:

5. We Seriously Don’t Care About Gun Laws in Other Countries

We really, really don’t.

We don’t.

Most Americans give precisely zero shits about “but everyone else in the world does X.” Whether “X” is:

  • Fanatical devotion to soccer
  • Disdain for American beer/chocolate/fast food/movies/music/culture
  • Acceptance of anti-blasphemy laws and other forms of legal strictures on the expression of unpopular opinions
  • What y’all think the US should do about gun laws.

We really, really don’t. Sure, some do, but we tend to sequester them in Hollywood where we can point at them and laugh.

 Posted by at 12:18 am

Ah, vegans…

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Meh., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  10 Responses »
Oct 082017
 

On a day when I received emails telling me that the mailer will not be purchasing my cyanotypes because he disagrees with my politics, this news story came along to make me sigh and shake my head:

Vegan’s life upended after Facebook rant about “carnists” killed in Vegas

The owner of a vegan food truck (uuuughhh…) posted some interesting things about the victims of the Mandalay Bay Massacre, including:

“Yes, I am jaded. Fifty-nine meat eaters dead. How many animals will live because of this?” And “I don’t give a REDACTED about carnists anymore”

And now she’s shocked, SHOCKED, that people are reacting poorly to her essentially expressing appreciation for the fact that fifty nine of her fellow Americans were murdered, because they had perfectly normal and natural diets.

This is her and her clearly well adjusted son/business partner in front of the food truck they are no longer operating. So if in a few weeks you see them tooling around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in a repainted food truck, make sure to pay them a visit. Do not do like the people in the article death-threatening her, but *do* demand that she make you a good burger. Use the same court rulings that force religious bakers to make cakes they don’t want to make.

 Posted by at 8:00 pm
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