Scanned from a 35mm slide at the NASA HQ some years ago. The basic shape here (FDL-7/McDonnell Model 176) appeared on a great many McD designs for the latter half of the sixties from small one-man experimental designs on up to full Shuttle-sized craft like this one. It had both sharply swept fixed wings on the bottom and stowable high aspect ratio wings for landing up top.
“There will be war if…” spins wheel “… Georgia is admitted into NATO.”
Things seem to be moving on the “social media stuffs non-leftist media down the memory hole” front. Yesterday virtually every social media platform spontaneously de-platformed whadadoo Alex Jones (I’m *sure* that it was purely co-incidental and not at all conspiratorial). Twitter banned a conservative commentator, Candace Owens, for 12 hours for re-tweeting the racist comments of a shiny new New York Times staffer… comments which are still up.
And Facebook banned an ad for a Republican Congressional candidate because… reasons. It took five days and a public outcry for Facebook to decide that they’d made a mistake, and un-blocked the ad.
Once again… these are private companies, and they’ve the legal right to drive away whatever customers they want… just like a baker has the right to turn down whatever business he wants for whatever reason he wants. But there should be no mistaking that these companies are controlled by people who want to silence at least half the country.
This is the ad that Facebook found to be beyond the pale. See if you think it’s so bad as to be somehow outside the terms of service… or if it simply gives a message that someone at Facebook found to be politically incorrect. Perhaps someone was offended that a “person of color” daughter of immigrants went off the reservation.
Yesterday afternoon I drove the surprisingly short distance up to the site of the Goring fire from a few days ago. Not a lot to see except several miles of scorched earth. The difference between this sort of fire and what’s currently tearing the ecoptopia of California apart? Here in Utah, this is essentially the desert. All there is to burn are dried weeds and scrub, probably amounting to a few ounces of fuel per square yard. But the Ecological Success Story fires in California seem to be burning down more heavily forested areas… potentially hundreds of pounds of fuel per square yard. The fire here burn quick and burn *out* quick. The scorched land you see here will be back to normal next year. Apart from any structures that may have burned, this was not far off from simply mowing the lawn with fire.
Of course, the air quality was still wretched for a few days.
This photo was from a few miles away, showing what the landscape looks like, unburned. Not exactly Mirkwood.
I’m not a particular fan of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentaries. They’re *ok,* but they are clearly propaganda and seem kinda *meh* to me. Still, this amuses me to no end:
I have no idea if this is any good as a historical documentary. I have no idea if it’s any good as pro-Trump or anti-Democrat propaganda. But I do know that having left-wing reviewers excoriate the film is a dandy way to get pro-Trump butts into seats.
This guy seemed to like it:
Bonus: is that kid speakin’ English?
I just caught a good documentary on TV about the history of the Bundy standoff in Burns, Oregon. Fortunately the documentary, “American Standoff,” is available on YouTube…
Basically, it all comes down to an over-reaching, power-mad Federal government that owns too much land out here in the west and likes to screw people over. Shocking, I know. A lot of the main figures in the story acted unwisely but were massively and disproportionately mistreated for it both by the judicial system and the media; a lot of the narrative around them is about as accurate as Gamergate, the Pink Tax and the Wage Gap. In other words: not at all accurate, but instead outright dishonesty in the form of insults and slander.
This story helps make plain some of the major political divides in the US. The two guys who basically started the whole thing, Dwight and Steven Hammond, were pardoned by President Trump a bit less than a month ago. There was considerable outrage by the professionally outraged class, because these two were nothing more than arsonists… but if you actually live in this part of the country, what they did – burning off fields – is standard agricultural practice. The way they were screwed over by the courts is why people were so upset…and why Obama (who did nothing) is so unpopular and Trump (who pardoned them) is seen as damn near a hero.
Oh, Star Trek. How I loved you. How you’ve burned me.
Very little hard data (heh). What we got:
Presumably Picard is no longer Captain Picard. Small possibility he’s Admiral Picard. Slightly larger possibility he’s Ambassador Picard. Very low possibility he’s Federation President Picard. My bet is he’s Retired Old Man Picard.
On one level, this is going in the direction of a *proper* star Trek series. It’s set in the “future” of Trek, not yet Another Prequel. It’s set in the “prime” universe. It will presumably – though I may well be waaaaay off base here – pay proper homage to canon and existing design ethics. Klingons might look like Klingons, Federation ships might look like they were designed by the Federation, etc. But given how Trek, and pretty much the rest of Nerd Fandom, has been taken over by a vile cabal of suits who care for nothing but cash and SJWs who care for nothing but cultural domination and weak-willed, weak-minded suckups who will virtue signal at every turn, I expect that they will *badly* mangle this.
In a world of boundless optimism, there would of course be a place for Old Man Picard. In every conception of Star Trek, every Captain who lives long enough will eventually become old and will presumably retire. They could then go on to do any of number of things which *could* be turned into interesting and uplifting television: he’s now a teacher, perhaps on a teaching *ship,* taking a school full of future Kirks and Scotts out around the universe. Old School Trek… exploration and discovery. Or perhaps he’s now CEO Picard, perhaps running a starship development company; he and his staff including Old Man Scott and Kinda Old Man Laforge are developing amazing new technologies while reinvigorating the spirit of entrepreneurship and capitalism. Or perhaps he owns his own, small exploration ship and out exploring beyond the rim with Lyta, G’kar and Dr. Franklin (a man can dream). Or, since this the era of Grimdark, perhaps he’s leading an underground resistance against the leadership of the Federation… those creepy little bug-things from the first season of TNG have finally shown up and have taken over the government of the Federation and have turned it into a fascist SJW state, and it’s up to Picard and his rag-tag group of Alt-Rikers to save the day.
But this is not a world of boundless optimism. I fully expect Old ManPicard to be Broken Old Man Picard. He’s sad. He has lost his friends, he spends his days morose and dreaming of lost glory days. His sole comfort is his PanTransSpeciesFluid life partner, who he met at a Federation Furry meetup. Every episode will have barely-veiled “Trump is evil” and “people who liked the original Trek are toxic fans” messages. Because the heroes of your youth *must* be deconstructed.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. Maybe this won’t actually suck. I’ll just get on with holding my breath, shall I.
…for extracting water from rocks on the moon. This dates from 1963-65 and was part of a North American Aviation study relate to post-Apollo lunar exploration… which at the time was fully expected. The LESA (Lunar exploration Systems for Apollo) program would land habitats on the moon for extended exploration; the later phases of the LESA program were expected to occur in the late 1970.s The conclusion was that solar was preferred for the earliest phases, transitioning to nuclear. Basically, either system would cook rocks till the water came out as a thin vapor, which would be collected.
In the more than fifty years since this came out, the technologies involved haven’t changed a whole lot, especially solar: it remains a mirror and sunlight. Nukes should – hopefully – have improved. So it might still be a bit of a tossup on the moon; of course, any long-term lunar exploration is going to need nukes anyway for the simple reason that two weeks of night is a *real* long time if your base is solar powered. Going further out – asteroids, outer planet moons, comets and such – the math increasingly works in nuclears favor. But then, what’s needed is power, and mirrors in microgravity can be made extremely large.
It’s an interesting report. If not for the technology and techniques described, then for the basic worldview that suggested to engineers more than half a century ago that they’d soon have to crack water out of lunar rocks.
Direct PDF download link.
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The Goring Fire seems to have moved on from “humdinger” to “whamdoodler” overnight; 15,000 acres burned. Here are some photos…