I’m always amazed at how much wiser this whippersnapper is than an army of experts.
Plus, he knows how to use colorful metaphors.
Apr 282019
Insanity is a disease. An *infectious* disease.
AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., news, religion, ಠ_ಠ
No Responses »
Apr 282019
So we had a whackaloon shoot up a synagogue in California. In this case we have an orgy of evidence about the shooter in the synagogue because the guy, in the finest tradition of true whackaloons, left a friggen manifesto. You can read it HERE. It’s not very long, but great googaly moogaly is it jam-packed full of Jew-hating crazy. It reads like the sort of unhinged monologue that a poorly-written movie Klansman would screech to his three inbred followers.
A few things can be gleaned from it. First, there’s a level of antisemitism there that is hard to fathom where it even came from. It had to have been building for a good long while. But it seems that the motivation for doing this came about recently… specifically, the Christchurch New Zealand mosque shootapalooza. This guy calls it out specifically as an inspiration, while also throwing in a bunch of video game and even PewDiePie references. He’s clearly a fanboy of the Christchurch shooter. Would he have gone after the synagogue had it not been for NZ? Hard to say, but this level of crazy must have been around for a good long while. Chances are that he would have snapped at some point, but it’s clear that Christchurch was the thing that got him moving. It has long been suggested that a big part of the cause of the modern school/mass shooting “epidemic” is crackpots seeing the news coverage that others get and becoming infected with a copycat virus. It seems that this is another data point.
In the modern lunatic manifesto tradition, it has a “question and answer” section. Seems he’s not a fan of either Trump or conservatives, though you know that both of those groups will be tarred by this guys actions. He’s a European, which he takes great pains to repeatedly go on about, and he’s quite vocal about his Christianity… which I bet will irritate the hell out of a whole lot of Christians who seem to think that that Jesus feller might have looked a little askance on someone trying to massacre Jews.
Apr 282019
Back in 1982, Argentina and Britain went to war over the Falklands. Those are a tiny smattering of rather underwhelming islands in the south Atlantic, hell and gone away from anything, with virtually no meaningful resources to speak of. It was consequently an unusual war: nobody was trying to grab goodies (there aren’t any) or expand living room (the Argentinians don’t really want to live there). It was, for the Argentinians and their dictator, one of those truly dumbass sort of wars: “a matter of pride.” For the Brits… the Argentinians were invading British soil and capturing British citizens. One could well argue about what Britain wants with those islands since they provide neither strategic advantage nor economic boons; wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper to simply give them up? But, unlike, say, some uninhabited rock, British people lived there and called the place home.
The Argentinians, in contrast, once laid claim to the land, but hadn’t exactly colonized it. For most of its history up until the time the Brits finally laid claim to the place in 1833, it’s population was highly variable between “a few” and “absolutely nobody.” At various times the French, Spanish and even Americans landed military forces there, and the occasional fisherman dropped by, but until the Brits nobody wanted to *live* there. It is by all accounts a cold, damp, fairly miserable place… Scotland, in other words. So why the frak the Argentinians *still* get all pissy about the place it anybody’s guess.
And pissy they seemingly are, to the point of cranking out some fairly amusing “The Malvinas (the Argentinian name for the Falklands) were always ours, and will be again!” propaganda. How they expect that to happen, I dunno, since the 3,000+ Falkland Islanders are pretty unanimous in wanting to stay British. If Argentina *really* wants the islands, the obvious approach would be to simply pay off the people living there. A million US dollars per person would seem like it might stand a good chance of buying their votes; a mere three billion dollars or so, and the Falklands can be the Malvinas without firing a shot.
The Falklands have been British for going on 180 years. Nobody alive ever knew anybody who remembered when the Falklands weren’t British. If you’re Argentinian and this sort of propaganda speaks to you… just let ’em go, because, man, they’re gone. Otherwise you’re going to ulcerate over something you can’t have, wouldn’t want it if you had it, and might do something stupid over. Instead, devote your efforts to colonizing, say, Eros. Even worse than the Falklands, but they can be yours forever.
This reminds me: one of the stories I wrote for “War With The Deep Ones” was “Falklands.” I thought it was pretty good, others did too. Might have to do something about all that one of these years.
Apr 272019
When the United States nuked Japan, President Truman was right up front with everybody in stating clearly that the new weapons used were atom bombs. What *didn’t* happen, though, was the publication of photos of the bombs themselves. As a consequence, films from the 40’s and 50’s that depicted the actual atom bombs – such as 1947’s “The Beginning Or The End” – showed rather fanciful bomb designs… because the film-makers had to guess. And surely (I have do doubt the logic went) bombs that are based on such an unconventional process must have unconventional configurations.
It was not until 15 years later that the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were actually shown to the public in the form of photographs. Now, of course, you can get up close and personal with any of a number of actual bomb casings scattered around in numerous museums, but up until the reveal in late 1960… the average person had no idea what those early nukes looked like. Below is the December 12, 1960 article in Aviation Week showing the first photos; it’s interesting to note that even 60 years ago there ere already stirrings of the ulcerating over sensitivities and feelings that now so dominate any discussion of nuclear technology.
Apr 272019
North Salt Lake man accused of bomb plot
One “Jose Benito Guanajuato” of North Salt Lake had apparently built quite the chemistry lab in his home in order to manufacture explosives for the purpose of bombing the “American Towers” in Salt Lake City, because he believed that these towers contained ICE, Homeland Security and customs facilities. Turns out they’re just condos, so his plan was to murder a lot of people (a thousand? Dunno) in order to kill people who aren’t even there.
Guanjuato, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wants to eliminate ICE. Let’s see if he gets the sort of press that a major terrorism plot deserves.
Apr 262019
So Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) went to Gibraltar to… I dunno, vacation or campaign or something, and Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of Gibraltar decided to smack talk about him on Twitter (with bonus extra-special high government official spelling and grammar errors):
I don’t believe anyone in #Gibraltar interested in listening to anything that this person has to say. My disgust grows at the mysogenistic, rascist & anti-Semitic diatribe that his person utters. This is not politics. As far as I am concerned its hate speak with no place in Gib. https://t.co/88rFMKqUwt
— Fabian Picardo (@FabianPicardo) April 25, 2019
So… how did Benjamin respond to this? Epically:
What is best in life? Mockery.
Apr 262019
So driving along I listened to Science Friday on NPR today. They had a segment about poetry based on science, a concept which at least seemed like it aught to be promising. But the poems they read… wow, just, just awful, including one by the worlds most over-rated hack, Maya Angelou, which sounded like so much word salad. (Rather tellingly, both the description of the “poem,” that it was “an absolutely stunning poem,” and the title of the poem, “A Brave and Startling Truth,”are the sort of SJW buzzwords that make you sit up and take notice that you are about to be barraged with self-important nonsense.)
Everything they had on display sounded like the “poets” not only had the level of science understanding of your average Star Trek: Discovery writer, but the poetic skills of a lobotomized Speak N Spell. This crap is to “poetry” what low-end rap lyrics are to opera. I know art is subjective, but shouldn’t poetry sound, you know, like poetry, and not the stream of consciousness gibberings of someone whose experiences with science is restricted to “experimenting” with shrooms?
If you want to listen to this drivel… well, here ya go.
Gaaaaaaaggghhhhhhggkgkgkgkgkkkktttpppbblblblbllbtttt…..
Gah. I needed to wash this gak out of my brain with something that actually *could* pass for “science poetry,” both the words and the images.
Anybody have any favorite poetry about science that is actually poetry, actually about science, and actually good?
Apr 252019
Carl Benjamin is a Brit on on the left side of the policy spectrum… but man, does he know how to deal with the press.
Apr 252019
Chris Ray Gun posted a video of a “debate” he had live during a video game stream with his friend Todd where they discussed what to do with all the Earth’s trash. “Shoot it into the sun” was the suggestion raised. Now, on one hand as an aerospace engineer with an understanding of orbital mechanics, I can assure you that this is a *bad* idea. On the other hand, as someone who was once *not* an aerospace engineer with an understanding of orbital mechanics, I can remember when this sort of idea seemed like it might be worth doing. Hell, I remember a junior high exercise where I was on a team that argued in favor of shooting nuclear waste into a black hole to be rid of it (ah, to be young and incredibly naive again…). So, some regular non-aerospace people debating shooting trash into the sun? I have no cause to jump up and down and point and holler.
But there is some other incredible ignorance shown here, such as a complete lack of knowledge not only of what space probes we’ve actually launched, but also a complete lack of understanding of the scale of the solar system. Our boy Chris is not terribly knowledgeable, but Todd is just dead wrong. And he’s so wrong that Chris’s over the top visceral reaction to his wrongness just struck a whole lot of chords.
When the other guy is so wrong that you have no choice but to run around the room and hurl a chair…
This is an urge I can empathize with. Whenever confronted with astrologers and anti-vaxxers and socialists and gun grabbers and young-Earth creationists and faith healers 9/11 truthers and televangelists and politicians who worry about Guam tipping over, the urge to turn into a human-scale Brownian motion demonstrator complete with ballistic furniture is very, very high.
“The Space Debate” is eight and a half minutes. Chris starts to freak out at about 3:40.
Note: Earth’s orbital speed around the sun is about 30 kilometers per second. If you want to dump trash into the Sun, you need to impart a velocity change you your garbage-package of at least that much. Think of it this way: you’re nonchalantly floating in Earths orbit around the sun, when all of a sudden you are slowed a little bit in your orbit. Do you plummet into the sun? No, your orbit simply changes a little bit, becoming more elliptical. If you want to get all the way to the sun, you basically have to cancel *all* of your orbital velocity. And to do that from the surface of the Earth you also have to factor in Earths escape velocity (~11 km/sec): if you don’t exceed that, then you’ll either stay in orbit around Earth, or fall back to Earth. So if you want to shot garbage (or anything else) to the Sun, you’ll need to shoot it at about 41 km/sec. Getting from the Earth to the moon, in contrast, takes ~16 km/sec. so it would be a whole lot easier to launch garbage at the moon. Not to mention that on the moon, garbage would be *awesome.* Lunar inhabitants would fight over the latest batch of untreated sewage from Bangladesh.
Apr 252019
(I thought that I had posted something about this before, but an exhaustive five-second search didn’t pull it up)
In the mid-1960’s the US Air Force became interested in solid rocket motors that you could not only throttle on command but also stop and then start again. Motors like this would, it was assumed, be quite useful for ICBM upper stages, varying the range of the missiles as well as tinkering with the otherwise ballistic – and thus predictable and interceptable – trajectories of the warhead-carrying bus.
The usual accepted wisdom holds that solid rocket motors cannot be stopped once started. This is quite wrong: you can stop them by flooding them with an inert fluid such as water, but this of course requires a pretty substantial mass of an otherwise useless substance. Or you can “blow them out” by suddenly greatly increasing the total throat area. If you can drop the internal pressure by several tens of thousands of PSI per second, the combustion zone will lift off away from the surface of the propellant far enough that the propellant will cease to boil and combust, and the motor will shut down. It can then be restarted by firing off another igniter, similar to the one originally used to get the motor going.
Several US rocket companies responded the the USAF. Shown below are two small Aviation Week articles describing two motor designs put forward. Both operated using an adjustable pintle: basically a plug that *almost* fills the throat. When closed down the throat area is low, and the chamber pressure is high; as the pintle moves away from the throat, the throat area very quickly gets far greater and chamber pressure drops. Done quickly and with full contraction, the combustion should cease; done slowly, with shorter strokes, the throat area will change less drastically and the motor can be throttled up and down. Testing showed that the idea worked as advertised. But the motors had all the performance of a solid rocket with all the cost of a liquid, with all the weight of a forklift added on; it simply wasn’t a practical solution. Storable liquid propellant rockets are more typically used on the upper stages of ICBM for fine trajectory control. Pintle nozzles are, however, often used on solid propellant kinetic kill vehicles.
