The “journalists” here are freakin’ irritating, but the story is interesting. A *brief* clip of the audio of the *original* Wilhelm scream, with an alternate take and audio direction.
Jun 302023
Jun 302023
A NASA article on the status of the X-57 “Maxwell” says that they’re wrapping up work on it, with no mention of it actually flying:
X-57 Project Creates Paths Toward Electric Aviation
The X-57 is a modification of an existing conventional aircraft to be all-electric. Lots of new technologies were integrated and apparently some useful advances were made, but the real issue remains batteries. Until the energy density of batteries gets a *lot* better, electric-powered aircraft are going to remain pretty niche. Flying the X-57 would be nice, but with the existing batteries it’s kind of dead in the water.
What would be great is if NASA kept working on the X-57 at a low level. The technologies onboard would be occasionally upgraded, and when meaningfully better batteries – or perhaps some sort of modular fuel cell system, perhaps, or indeed a small nuclear reactor (a man can dream) – become available, integrate them into the vehicle and at last fly it.
Jun 292023
Supreme Court strikes down college affirmative action programs
The court ruled that both programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and are therefore unlawful. The vote was 6-3 in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case, in which liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused.
Affirmative action, i.e. systemic racism, is a bad idea on several levels. Firstly, it’s simply racist; it foment distrust and discord. Second, it’s not only unfair to those who are excluded, it’s unfair to many of those it purports to help. For example:
How insane did Harvard's affirmative action policies get?
An African American student in the 40th percentile of their academic index is more likely to get it than an Asian student in the 100th percentile.
Black students in the 50th percentile are more likely to get in that… pic.twitter.com/9vvBuQXA24
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 29, 2023
Harvard is an elite institution in part because it’s *difficult.* Just because you get in doesn’t mean you get through. It’s my understanding that the curriculum and grading policies there are such that you have *got* to be the best of the best. but if you got in while being the best of the mid, your chances of making it through a Harvard degree are in serious doubt. How much debt did you put your family in to go to a school you’re very likely going to fail out of? After you’ve been made to feel inadequate *and* impoverished, are you going to go to the mid-level school you should’ve in the first place, or are you going to simply bail on the whole thing?
When I was getting ready for college, I had dreams of going to MIT or Stanford or the like. My advisors, fortunately, were both smart and honest and, indeed, *good* enough to tell me that that was an insane notion. I was *not* at that level. It would have been ruinous to try, even if I had someone squeaked in. Fortunately, I didn’t have some institutionally racist program in place to bend the rules to jam my piddly ass into a program I was ill-suited for.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, it’s unfair to society: by driving away the best and brightest in favor of the mediocre, society is denied the opportunity to be served by the best and brightest in their best capabilities.
The Supreme Court just ruled against Affirmative Action. Why?
Because it is systemically racist.
Harvard applicants in the top academic decile have different chances of admission depending on their race:
– Asians: 12.7%
– Whites: 15.3%
– Hispanics: 31.3%
– Blacks: 56.1% pic.twitter.com/AhI6p4n14h— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) June 29, 2023
Obama just released a statement on today's SCOTUS decision in which he said affirmative action "allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged."
Did he just say that he and his wife were not qualified to get into college and only did because of their… pic.twitter.com/IEUVqjKztk
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 29, 2023
Let’s see if cities burn.
Jun 282023
This popped up on ebay a few years ago. It purported to be a Boeing design for an advanced subsonic stealth bomber… but the design is, clearly, rather silly. Supposedly it dates from 1984 and was produced at, by and for Boeing, intended to be a decoy for the B-2 Advanced Technology (Stealth) Bomber competitors. I’m not sure Lockheed or Northrop would have looked at this and seen a serious design, however.
*Some* aspects of it seem like they might have been taken from an actual stealthy bomber design… the inlets and exhaust, indeed much of the middle part of the wing/body, look about right. But the stubby wing and especially the straight-vertical fins in substantial numbers are goofy aerodynamics and spectacular corner reflectors.
At least two of these were made and wandered out into the wild over the years.
Jun 272023
AI doing the jobs humans won’t…
Jun 262023
Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often these discarded shirts and shorts are boxed up and shipped to third world countries where the trainloads of discards can be used to eliminate the local indigenous clothing production industry; this is why you often see some illiterate tribesman wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some midwestern high school baseball team. At some point I suppose this global traffic in clothes might end, but likely not before many places lose the knowledge and ability to make their own clothes.
Anyway, it seems to me the obvious solution for this is so obvious that it’s obvious: FIRE. Clothes are largely made from plastic and cotton; these will happily burn. Sure, some unfortunate fumes will be generated, from the toxic to the CO2; but if incinerated in a large and modern facility this can not only be done fairly cleanly it can also generate a lot of power. Use the combustion to boil water, run the steam past turbines, shazam, electricity. But for whatever reason we don’t much burn our garbage these days, preferring instead to burn rocks and goop we dug up out of the ground. So what happens to all these discarded garments?
If you’re Chile, you dump them in the desert. There it can be picked through by locals and by a company that is trying to separate out the various materials and make something of them.
High fashion! Mountain of discarded clothes in Chilean desert is visible from space (satellite photo)
A recent satellite photo shows the pile:
It’s a little difficult to judge scale from that. At lower left you can see an urban area; the pile is clearly a number of city blocks in expanse.
An article from 2021 shows the pile (from the ground) as it existed in 2021. It was *huge:*
Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers
Here’s the location on Google Maps, satellite view:
Interestingly, the Google Maps satellite photo, which seems to have been taken in July of 2022, shows just bare Earth. It seems that there was a huge pile in 2021, it was dealt with in 2022, and its huge again in 2023. So processing seems to be keeping up. Or… when the photo was taken in 2022, the pile had been buried in the dirt.
Jun 252023
I believe I am unanimous when I say…
An army – a *small* army – of poorly trained, ill-equipped chuckleheads managed to get within range of Moscow without getting kerploded by the Russian Army and Air Force. There is no getting past the fact that this makes the Russian military and leadership – especially Putin – look even more like incompetent ineffectual corrupt and cowardly boobs. Hell, at this point it might be best for everybody if we just have Finland send a few hundred drunken bums into Russia to conquer the place.
This was not something I expected to see anytime soon, but here we are. What’s next? The President of the USA hosting a bunch of half naked perverted weirdos on the White House lawn?
Jun 232023
Russia accuses Wagner chief of urging “armed rebellion”
Ummm…
BREAKING:
The Wagner Group has launched a military coup and are now fighting against the Russian Army.
Around 30 000 Wagner soldiers have now taken control of a large area north of the Russian city of Rostov.
A Russian helicopter has been shot down. pic.twitter.com/wEf7Vw63pJ
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 24, 2023
https://twitter.com/albafella1/status/1672358654794661890
Jun 222023
The Red Rocks Amphitheater in the foothills west of Denver is a neat place. While I never went there for a concert when I lived in the are in the late 90’s, I went there often enough to hike around and test liquid biprop rocket engines in the parking lot when security wasn’t looking (what, was I going to test them in town? Don’t be silly). Along with concerts, something else I never experienced there was a hailstorm. Having seen the videos from last night, I’m just as glad that I missed out on that.
Jun 222023
A “hovertank” is, of course, a terrible idea. A hovering vehicle pretty much by definition has no traction with the ground, thus cannot well handle a lot of recoil… which is the sort of thing a cannon provides in spades. And anything that hovers has to be built light enough to get lurched off the ground, which reduces the capability to be armored. And… on and on.
Nevertheless, the “hovertank” has it’s place in science fiction.
And now modern consumer electronics and drone technology has reached the point where a hovertank can in fact be yours. In subscale plastic model form at any rate.
I’m honestly surprised and impressed that that bitty quadcopter could lift that, and do so effectively. Now imagine that the kit was designed for that from the get-go, using vac-formed parts… or even carbon fiber laid-up components. Far lighter, and better integrated with the lift system.