Huh.
SpaceX put a camera in the fairings used on the Falcon 9. They finally recovered one, and the results are spectacular.
View from the fairing during the STP-2 mission; when the fairing returns to Earth, friction heats up particles in the atmosphere, which appear bright blue in the video pic.twitter.com/P8dgaIfUbl
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 3, 2019
Ninth in the series. Read after the break…
Disney, in their eternal struggle to produce new, fresh content, is remaking “The Little Mermaid,” a tale from Hans Christian Anderson about a mermaid who lives near Denmark and falls in love with a prince. Not having actually seen the Disney animated movie, I can only assume that it closely adheres to the original tale… the Little Mermaid suffers horrifying pain in order to acquire humans legs and feet in order to win the princes love, but in the end fails to do so, watches as he marries some other woman, then dies and dissolves into sea foam because she made a ridiculously bad deal. Lesson: listen up, kids… life is pain and in the end you will die in failure.
Anyway, Disney is remaking the story with a live action cast, presumably a bucket of CGI as well. They’ve just announced the starring role. See if you can make any assumptions about that based on this headline:
Never mind who “Halle Baily” (*not* Halley Berry) is. Pay attention to the “celebs applaud.” Do they applaud over things like “the most skilled acting unit,” or “looks most like the character?” Or do they applaud over “most PC selection” or “most likely to annoy regular folks and provide an opportunity for their woke betters to mock them?”
You be the judge.
The Bell Cobra attack helicopter prototype was built on company funds as a bit of speculation; more than 50 years later (it first flew in September of 1965… only 8 months after go-ahead), it clearly turned out to be a good decision. And while modern Cobras such as the AH-1Z “Viper” are doubtless far more advanced and capable, the very first Cobra prototype still looks sci-fi slick. Especially considering that it was built with retractable skids, a feature not included on production Cobras. The added weight, cost, complexity and reduced internal volume did not make up for the reduced drag… but it just looked *awesome.* The prototype was also fitted with a ventral extension to the tailfin that turned out unnecessary. The AH-1Z looks like a bulldozer compared to the prototype.
Give the Cobra prototype larger wings, install small, modern, powerful cruise missile turbofans in each wing root, an overall gloss black paint job with a white underside and a kick-ass 1980’s synthesized theme song… and you’d really have something.
People who say that cats are antisocial… don’t know too many cats.
Bubbles’ protest at an empty parking lot lot is even more ridiculous in video form, where you can clearly see:
1: The other side was an empty lot, not a concentration camp
2: There were far more photographers than protestors
3: The friggen’ gate was *open.*
Let’s talk about photo ops pic.twitter.com/17zxQnyqSi
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 2, 2019
A lot of movies have a scene with Someone being chased by enemies; Someone jumps into a body of water to escape, swims deep, and catches a bunch of bullets fired from above. This is patent nonsense; water will stop most bullets in just a foot or three, if not a matter of inches. But it seems that if you design your bullets properly, you can get meaningful travel through water measured in *dozens* of feet. Supercavitation forms a thin layer of gas around the projectile so that the projectile seems to be traveling through a gas rather than a liquid, massively dropping drag. In some high speed torpedoes this gas sheath is created by ejecting gas from the nose. But bullets do this by carefully shaping the nose; the shaping causes the water to boil into a vapor.
Just the thing for the Navy to use to take out incoming torpedoes, nearby mines and pesky scuba divers. Now you can use your AR-15 for fishing. Neato.
Eighth in the series. Read after the break…
Adidas-UK’s PR department thought they had a winner: an online promotion where Twitter users could get their handles put onto a shirt, the images auto-re-tweeted by Adidas. It took a fraction of a second before the trolls came out with new offensive Twitter handles that Adidas automatically retweeted to the world.
Gosh, who could have seen that coming. I’m shocked. SHOCKED.
You’d think people would learn a thing or two from Boaty McBoatface.
Very possible that the threat is merely the usual online bloviating. But given the state of things, it’s equally likely that acid attacks are the next stage in the far left’s hatred of normal people.
People are forever saying that if such-and-such were to occur, they’d take up arms and go hunt down the opposition. This, too, is usually mere chest thumping with no actual followthrough. If things turn real bad real fast normal people will often get violent, but if things get real bad real slow, normal people will usually just sit there and take it. I have no idea if the current progression of leftwing violence to straight up domestic terrorism is fast or slow as such things go, but I won’t be the least bit surprised if straight up street battles are in the near future. If you were a conservative/right winger/Republican/nationalist/any-other-damn-thing out in public and someone in a mask came within throwing distance of you… what would you do, knowing that there is every reason to believe that Antifa and the like are ready to commit mass murder?
The history of people like Antifa gaining power is a history of blood, pogroms, planned famines and death camps. It is something that has made a lot of people scratch their heads in confusion over the years… “why didn’t they fight back, rather than just marching off to their deaths?” It may be something we’ll get to examine up close relatively soon.