A music video from long, long ago… 2015. Someone edited together a bunch of clips from vintage movies showing actors dancing and spliced it magnificently into “Uptown Funk.”
Did I previously post this on the blog? I dunno, maybe. It’s still entertaining as hell.
A model I CADded up last year for Fantastic Plastic is coming along in the process. This was a design that was constantly flacked by Krafft Ehricke of Convair back in the late 1950’s, included in everything from small Atlas-derived space stations on up to lunar landers. The references for it showed the design wandering all over the place in terms of shape and dimensions; whether this was due to the design constantly changing or – as seems more likely – artistic license is not entirely clear. Evidence suggests that the design was improved and evolved to become the “landing boat” for the larger Project Orion vehicles designed int he very early 1960’s by General Atomic. GA was a division of General Dynamics, and there was some crosstalk about various aspects.
The model is not yet now available for sale, but will be soon. It will be a pretty straightforward kit in 1/48 scale.
Lots of people love Snopes. Lots of people hate it. I find it to be usually useful as a first check on something, when that somethign is a clear binary choice: did X say Y, soemthgin like that. but sometimes thigns are gray. And sometiems Snopes *decides* that things are gray when they’re really not. Attend:
That would seem to be a binary choice. Did a group have a convicted terrorist on their board or not? Simple to determine a yes or a no. But Snopes… they had some difficulty and decided that the claim is “mixture.” Why?
What’s True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What’s Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of “terrorism,” it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of “domestic terrorism.”
Holy doubletalk, Batperson! Someone who was an active member of a political extremist group that used bombings and armed assaults and who stockpiled and attempted to transfer a battle rifle, a submachine gun, a sawed-off shotgun, three pistols and *740* *pounds* of explosives (the merest fraction of this list would get a right winger labeled as the owner of an “arsenal”), all in the service of intimidating the public and forcing the government to change policies, would seem to be a textbook example of a terrorist.
Gotta wonder who Snopes thinks they’re fooling.
Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, who famously asked if a Mars rover was going to take a photo of the flag the Apollo astronauts left on the Moon, is clearly sub-par in the smarts department (witness her recent House bill 127, which calls for the destruction of 70 million American lives). But she is not alone. Consider this:
This was one of the most heartbreaking moments of AOC’s IG live pic.twitter.com/BumKbriwmy
— grant 🧔🏻 (@urdadssidepiece) February 2, 2021
Where Bubbles Cortez relates her terrifying experience of being stalked by an assassination team during the Storming Of The Capitol.
Yeah, about that.
1: She wasn’t actually *in* the Capitol building at the time, but the Cannon office building, which is not part of the Capitol.
2: Her hallway in the Cannon office building was not invaded by protestors.
3: The “assassin” was actually a Capitol cop come to check on her.
Now, it could be that this false narrative isn’t due to Bubbles being stupid, but being crazy. Evidence backs up this hypothesis:
And it could also be that she’s both smart enough and sane enough to know that her story is utter BS… and she’s smart enough, sane enough and *evil* enough to not only know that much of the media will run with it uncritically, but that a whole lot of the public actually are dumb enough to believe her. Because if there’s one thing the Left worships, it’s victimhood points. Even when the victimhood is entirely imagined.
Maybe she should have taken lessons from Hillary in the fine art of dodging sniper fire. I’m sure it would have served AOC as well as it did Hillary in Bosnia.
This bill does not yet have a number, or much in the way of text:
‘‘Closing the Loophole 2on Interstate Firearm Sales Act’’
https://crow.house.gov/sites/crow.house.gov/files/CROWCO_014_xml.pdf
To prohibit a Federal firearms licensee from transferring a long gun to a person who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe does not reside in (or if the person is a corporation or other business entity, does not maintain a place of business in) the State in which the licensee’s place of business is located.
Translation: the Constitution will no longer cross state lines. Soon you will need special papers to leave your state if these jackholes get their way. The internet will be blocked from going from one state to another, never mind internationally.
There needs to be some form of legal sanction for congresscritters who propose laws that are this blatantly unConstitutional. Automatic ejection from the House and a permanent voting disenfranchisement would seem to be the bare minimum for totalitarian morons like these.
Scott Manley analyses the crash of SN9:
Problem, crudely, was that one of the two Raptor engines meant to ignite for the landing maneuver doesn’t ignite. *Why* that happened is as yet unclear, but it looks like the engine (specifically the turbopump) was falling apart. The end result is that it seemed it hit the ground at about 120 mph, resulting in RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly). Ouch.
This remarkable slo-mo footage of the thing coming down is not to be missed:
It’s beautiful in a way. The fact that nobody was on board, and the fact that it wasn’t an example of taxpayer funded blaot, makes the loss non-tragic. Of course, if you work at SpaceX, your mileage may vary.
I’m not a fan of rap. The song below, “Fake Woke” by Tom MacDonald, doesn’t do it for me. Nevertheless it interests me because of who it offends and why.
For example:
“Fake Woke” is dangerously stupid. But it’s a sign of what’s lurking in plain sight. I’m assuming there will be no radio play, even if to make fun of it. That’s how you normalize.
Reeeeaaalllly.
That link includes the full lyrics. See what’s there to be offended by, to disagree with, to declare “stupid.”
So SpaceX launched Starship #9 today. Grat launch. Great flight. Great descent. A bit of an overcorrection from bellyflop to tail-first. End result; Well, poop.
One of the engines never lit and there wasn't enough thrust to stop in time: pic.twitter.com/BvkPHGIy5l
— Scott Manley (@DJSnM) February 2, 2021
If you look at the base of the engine that failed to light there's a lot more fire there than I might expect pic.twitter.com/LKgWjn43Xs
— Scott Manley (@DJSnM) February 2, 2021
So, first there’s this:
Where some science guys discuss the idea that there *might* be a “preferred” direction for light in the universe, meaning that instead of the speed of light being “c” in every direction, in one direction is *might* be 0.5 c and in the 0ther, infinitely fast. if this was the case, people trying to measure the speed of light would not be able to figure that out since the only way to measure the speed of light is, essentially, to bounce a beam off of a distant mirror and measure the time.
All terribly interesting, but then the Institute for Creation “Research” got hold of the video and spent three months trying to come up with some propaganda based on it:
The ICR author’s premise is that since these two guys discuss the possibility of directionality to the speed of light, then we can no longer assume that the speed of light is measurable. And thus the stars we’re seeing that are a billion light years away no longer present a problem for a world view that has concluded that the universe is a mere 6,000 years old… because that light could have zapped here more or less instantaneously.
Of course the idjit fails to mention that the whole idea of there being preferred directionality for lightspeed trashes his idea. If there was in fact a direction where the speed of light was infinitely fast and the universe was only 6,000 years old… then, yes, we could see distant stars far further than 6,000 light years away. BUT… only in that direction. The other direction where the speed of light was half of c? The furthest you could see *that* way would be 3,000 light years. You could see the nearer stars, and that’s it. The speed of light at an angle perpendicular to the direction of min/max speed would be right at ‘c’ presumably, and in that direction you could only see out to 6,000-ish light years. Most of the friggen’ Milky Way galaxy would be cut off from view. It’d be *dark* across most of the sky, with no other galaxies visible, and every year a few new stars would just seem to pop into existence as the radius of the visible universe expands by (in one direction) another half of a light year.
That’s not what happens, of course. The ICR author is either to dim to figure that out or not honest enough to mention it.
Now, as to the problem of calculating the speed of light in different directions.
In the video they use as an example sending messages from Earth to Mars and back. If ‘c’ was constant either way, or greatly different, the video shows that you wouldn’t be able to tell. But… I suspect they’re wrong. They are right *at* *any* *particular* *moment.* But do the experiment over the course of a year or so. Sometimes Earth would see Mars as it really is Right Now. Sometimes it would see it as it was some time in the past due to light speed lag. OK, so… watch the moons of Mars. Their orbital speed around Mars will seem to subtly change as the speed of light varies. In fact this very experiment was carried out in the late 1600’s; by watching the moons of Jupiter and how the timing of the eclipses seemed to slightly vary, astronomer Ole Rømer was able to determine that the speed of light was finite, and got – for the time – a reasonably good estimate, about 26% short of the actual value. With modern equipment, the variation of the apparent speed of the moons of Mars or Jupiter of Saturn could be used to calculate “drift” in the speed of light based on where the moons *should* be at any instant given a fixed speed of light. Or am I wrong here?
Pretty sure ships aren’t generally supposed to do this:
Whoopsie.
Turns out that the Ukranian-owned, Palau-flagged “Arvin” sank on January 17, losing three sailors in the process. The ship was hauling 2,900 tons of urea. Bleah.