HOTOL was a 1980’s/90’s British Aerospace idea for an airbreathing SSTO spaceplane. As with all such designs to date, it came equipped with a heavy load of optimism; physics, however, does not care about your sunny worldview, and like all other airbreathing SSTOs to date, the design simply could not be made to work with existing materials, propulsion systems, politics and economics.
Video of Dragon’s Draco thrusters moving the spacecraft closer to the @Space_Station pic.twitter.com/0zBNYgAcDb
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 28, 2022
The question has been asked a bajillion times since about five minutes after “The Lord of the Rings” was published: why didn’t Gandalf simply call in the eagles to fly the One Ring to Mount Doom? Would have saved a *lot* of time and trouble. Fans have dreamed up many theories about why the eagles weren’t called in, but the video below purports to be audio of J.R.R. Tolkien explaining exactly why he did not have that solution in his book. His explanation is *really* good, the best explanation possible:
Unfortunately, it’s fake.
What kind of father wants his son to reject masculinity? A bad one. But at least in this case this weak man bends to his childs wishes and lets his son actually be a boy. This kid has an uphill battle to reach manhood with a father who is as strong as a damp Kleenex. The kid will very likely begin to assert his own power at some point, and if his parents aren’t able to impart the manly virtue of self control, we might wind up with yet another anti-social monster.
Look no further:
Ghostbusters 2016 is a terrible film. Part of that is of course the toxic nature of the people responsible for it, but the film itself is crap regardless of the culture-eroding behavior of those responsible. If the universe was a good and just place, GB16 would be utterly forgotten by now… but here we are, in a world filled with famine and disease and earthquakes and Bernie Bros, so GB16 remains a blight on the ass of society. Fortunately, when it is discussed these days, it is largely discussed in terms of just how awful it is and what makes it awful. The following two-part video does a good job of breaking down the terrible decisions that led to that cinematic trainwreck. It is vastly more entertaining than the movie itself.
An eight-year-old poured gasoline onto a tennis ball, lit it on fire and threw it at the face of a six-year-old. The story is of course lean on details, but if you listen to the report, the neighbors sound like real pieces of work. The bully had apparently previously put the victim in the hospital with a physical assault resulting in a concussion, and numbers of kids reported seen playing with gasoline and setting stuff on fire.
I don’t imagine this story will get a whole lot of press. The curious thing is that if instead of the victim being a 6-year-old kid, it was a *cat,* there’d likely be more outrage; I know I’d certain be more vociferous. And it’s not because cats are necessarily more valuable than kids (though I’d argue that the worst, angriest, feralest alleycat is worth any number of the bullies in this story), but we as a species and a culture have become rather numb to terrible things being done to children, even *by* other children. Coupled with the fact that cats, dogs, possums, raccoons, whatever, are pretty much by definition “innocent” and incapable of evil… while this story demonstrates that children are perfectly capable of evil and demonstrating the validity, nay, the necessity of some sort of eugenics program.
This development will probably result in a *lot* of comedy gold. here are some early winners.
— bongo x (@bongotron_x) April 26, 2022
I don’t know why YouTube decided I needed to see this, but I both rue and lament it. It is a debate (???) amongst a group of shrieking harpies young women about… well, I don’t really know. Something about how men are terrible, or something. One thing I caught was the claim that men are more emotional than women… which if that’s true for the men in *these* women’s lives… wow. Wow.
These are people who seem to get along and presumably have similar outlooks/beliefs. The way they seem wholly incapable of having a thought and not expressing it immediately at high volume would seem to explain why so many college-age people these days cannot witness someone speak political heresy without losing their minds and screaming like dollar store banshees on meth.
I can only imagine what would have happened if some guy had been invited into the room, calmly sat down and, when asked, told them “you’re wrong.”
Here’s a heck of a thing to have just lying about, a late-WWII era M1 carbine fitted with an infra-red lamp and scope. Not a “sniper” scope, but an early night vision system. Cumbersome as all get-out, but apparently it worked, much to the brief surprise of a number of Japanese soldiers who tried to infiltrate Army and Marine positions under the cover of darkness.