The Raider uses coaxial counter-rotating rotors and a pusher prop to go really, really fast (by helicopter standards), recently pushing past 202 knots in level flight. It can fly forward in two modes… “helicopter,” with the pusher prop contributing little or no forward thrust, and “propulsor,” using the prop. In helicopter mode it’s reasonably quiet; in propulsor it’s fast… and sounds unique.
I hope to see this program successful and a bunch of derivatives zipping around the sky in a few years.
Beyond a doubt, Raedthinn was the ladies man of the house. All the chicks dug him. With his passing, a hole has been left… many, in fact. But here’s Speedbump doing his part to fill the role of Feline Beefcake.
Does it work? Well, according to Fingers, the one female hereabouts… no, not really.
This is durned interesting:
Short form: a guy started hearing voices and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because the universe has a weird sense of humor, a year later he was also diagnosed with leukemia. To treat him, his immune systems was nuked and replaced with a donor via bone marrow transplant. And afterwards, his schizophrenia seemingly nearly vanished, and now he’s more or less normal and no longer on meds.
The article makes it clear to not read too much into this. Could be the schizophrenia was wiped out by the leukemia meds. Could be any of a number of things. But it could also be that the immune system plays some role in such things, a notion buttressed by the fact that in the 19th century – when the ethics of medical experimentation were a bit looser – a doctor intentionally gave some psychiatric patients malaria and found that some of them noticeably improved after recovery.
On wonders if there might be some value in doing bone marrow transplants – after wiping out the original immune system – on people with severe cases of schizophrenia. The medical ethicists might have a field day with that, but what the heck: find someone in some prison for the criminally insane, someone locked up forever or on death row, someone who talks to the bricks and the bricks talk back… and give it a shot. That might end up raising a whole different ethical quagmire: let’s say the treatment is fantastically successful. Someone who was violently bugnuts is made sane and non-criminal. Do you keep them locked up or on schedule with their date with the executioner? If someone is truly crazy and had done horrifying things and is actually *cured,* do they remember what they’ve done, and do you need to keep them on 24/7 suicide watch? Would it be fair to turn a raving looney into a guilt-riddled doomed soul? Hmm…
Here’s some fun journalismization:
Which includes a slight correction at the very top:
Anyway, the story is that the Manchester University Student Union has decided to go with “Jazz Hands” rather than clapping Because Reasons. Foolish as it sounds, the argument is lauded by some:
The “very serious reason” is that there is a tiny minority of students with mental or neurological issues that makes them either incapable of hearing clapping, or they get twitchy at loud sounds. And these Student Union geniuses believe that the best way for a university to prepare students for the harsh realities of the world is to clad them in Nerf and bubblewrap. The latter article includes the go-to trope/fall-guy for 2018… Autism spectrum. Because some autistics/Aspies get spooked by loud noises, then the whole world needs to be quiet. Well, fark *that* noise. Speaking as someone who *really* doesn’t like loud noises, I’d appreciate it if the students of Manchester U replaced clapping not with jazz hands, but with banging their swords against their shields.
Patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon received last month:
Diagram: A foldout diagram of an Apollo-derived logistics spacecraft
Document: “The Piasecki Story,” an illustrated history of the company and its products
Document: “The N.S. Savannah,” a brochure about the sole nuclear powered merchant vessel
Document: “Lunar Spacecraft Design” A paper describing the evolution of the General Electric Apollo design, quite similar to the later Soyuz spacecraft
CAD diagram: 1985 design of the British HOTOL spaceplane
If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
The first two nuclear weapons dropped are very well known. But for a long time that was not the case. In fact, the appearance of these weapons was hidden from the public until late 1960, more than 15 years after they were dropped. As a consequence, there are a number of depictions of these bombs – magazine articles, movies and such – that show configurations that are fanciful and entirely dead wrong because the artists behind them had no idea what an atom bomb actually looked like.
But in late 1960 the Atomic Energy Commission (replaced in 1974 with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission… note that even the names denote a change from an organization meant to provide energy to one now devoted to regulation) finally released a pair of photos showing Fat Man and Little Boy. Since then far more information has been released, including the display of real but inert bomb casings in numerous museums.
This is how Aviation Week reported the reveal in the December 12, 1960 issue. Note that even then there was a distinct tinge of political correctness, a fear that showing photos of the bombs would hurt feelings. There’s also discussion of putting the Enola Gay on display at the Smithsonian, something that would not come to fruition for another four decades.
You’d *THINK* that people who are paid to be professionally intelligent and to impart knowledge and wisdom to the next generation would not be openly racist and sexist and advocates of insanity and violence. Guess what: you’d be wrong.
Ahhh… anybody else flashing back on the terrifying days of the “recovered memory” and all the professional scumbags who helped to convince regular folks that they had been abused years earlier by “helping” them to “recover” memories of traumatic things that didn’t actually happen?
BREAKING: This is HUGE (waiting for permission to h/t): One of Christine Ford Blasey's research articles in 2008 included a study in which participants were TAUGHT SELF-HYPNOSIS & noted hypnosis is used to retrieve important memories "AND CREATE ARTIFICAL SITUATIONS." pic.twitter.com/11n1JVnArM
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) October 1, 2018
Those old enough to remember the 70’s will doubtless remember the fearmongering (some valid, some not) about overpopulation. How “The Population Bomb” was going to kill us all. I can *vaguely* recall movies shown in grade school on the subject, and how little apparent impact those had on people of my generation when it came to reproductive behavior… but wait until the 80’s and the AIDS panics, and *that* had an impact.
But in places like India, where the effects of overpopulation were more immediate and obvious, the governmental response to the dangers of overpopulation were rather more muscular:
In the 1970’s the Indian government managed to sterilize (via vasectomies) a vast number of men. In the years since, though, the efforts have switched to sterilize (via tubal ligation) women. The author of the piece seems to be of the opinion that that’s sexist or some such, but consider:
1) In a society filled with poverty and bagrillions of kids, who most directly suffers from unplanned pregnancy? The guy who can simply split, or the woman who actually gets pregnant?
2) Assume a hypothetical… ten healthy men, ten healthy women. On one hand, assume nine of the men get sterilized. How many pregnancies can you theoretically have? Well, ten. That one unsterilized guy can still impregnate all ten women. on the other hand, assume all ten guys remain untouched, but nine of the women get sterilized. How many pregnancies can you have now? If the goal of your sterilization efforts is population control… you go after the women.
On one hand, the efforts to control population in India failed: the current population is 1.3 *billion,* twice what it was during the “Emergency” of 1977. From the viewpoint of the time, this should have led to utter disaster of Soylent Green levels. But two things overcame that: India became more of a free market capitalist economy, thus enriching everyone, and the Green Revolution came along and made Indian food production much more efficient and productive. Consequently, Indias population exploded to the point where it has almost caught up with China, while at the same time the overall quality of life has greatly improved. Whether that will last… shrug. One good war, one good crop-blight, one good plague, one good switch to a socialist economic system, and one point three billion Indians could find themselves suddenly *really* hungry, really fast.
We’re finally going back to the Moon, but this time we’re going to stay.
Uh-huh.
I’ve seen this sort of thing before. But maybe *this* time we’ll actually get that Moon base, with blackjack and hookers.