The Parker Solar Probe passed close enough to the Sun back in April to arguably be said to have “touched” the sun by zipping through the outermost layers of the solar atmosphere. It took months to get all the collected data back, and John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab has just released the video below of the passage. The video quality is pretty potato, but it looks like it was a hell of a ride.
Once again, this moment of unutterable awesomeness has been brought to you by hard-nosed engineering rigor. STEM for the won… once again.
Is this bad news? I guess we’ll see. If the greens start pushing for nuclear power and *fast,* then this is bad news. If the world starts leaning on China and India to cut carbon emissions, then this is bad news. Lacking those two eventualities, then this won’t *really* be seen as *actual* bad news.
Another progressivism success story. The chaos and havoc and human despair brought about (and at this point it can hardly be said “unintentionally”) by far leftist policies has opened a door for innovation. In this case, the many, MANY piles of human waste littering the streets of the formerly respected city of San Franciso has resulted in a shiny new interactive and zoomable map of the city, showing you where to NOT go, where to NOT shop, not live, not employ, not invest. Where to *leave.*
Those people are wrong. This 1/100 scale model of the German schlachtschiff Tirpitz is loaded to the gills with lights, smoke, sound and moving parts. It’s clearly a labor love, or at least of obsession. (Note: the video is over sixteen minutes long, but it seems to crap out just before 8 minutes)
Imagine if the pizza shop robber had decided to take up building model ships rather than robbing pizza shops. He might have avoided taking a bullet to the face and becoming a laughingstock for the whole human race. I hesitate to guess what this Tirpitz model might sell for if the builder was of a mind to sell it; certainly far more than robbing restaurants would ever net.
A news story came out a few days ago that had a robber at a Philadelphia pizza joint strangling the woman who owned the place… and the robber getting shot in the face by the womans 14-year-old son (who had retrieved a pistol from under the counter) as a result. Video footage has come out and…. that’s not what happened. There was a robber to be sure; he was digging into the till for money and *not* strangling anyone when the kid pulled the pistol from his waistband (possibly) and capped the thief. The other employees at the store signed off on the original story, as did the cops, and no charges were filed.
“The Amazing Lucas,” who sadly has been getting sucked into the social justice rabbithole and losing his amazingness in the process, discusses this in the video below… and includes the security camera footage of the incident. The incident is, to be blunt, a thing of beauty. A worthless human decides to rob a place, rather than get a job; he catches a bullet to the face for his troubles. And nothing of value was lost except, undoubtedly, a whole lot of taxpayer dollars since he *didn’t* actually die and will now be patched up on the public dime rather than yeeted across the border (*any* border) with a trebuchet. Reasonable people will look at the video and conclude that the kids actions are entirely justified; indeed, he should be rewarded by the city government for good citizenship and *reasonably* good aim, as well as remaining functionally calm under pressure. But Philadelphia seems unlikely to be a reasonable place. The fact that the pizza joint was brazenly robbed like this fully explains and justifies the kids decision to pack heat (the video is hard to parse just before the actual shooting; the kids hands flash about wildly and he *may* have grabbed the pistol from under the counter, and what looks like him pulling it from his waist is actually him futzing with the holster the gun was kept in), but doubtless the local DA would view that as an opportunity for a show trial of the *kid* rather than the actual criminal.
It seems the kid, his mom, the other employees and the cops all lied in order to protect someone who *should* have been lauded. This is where we are. Sigh.
Still waiting for my box of books to get here from the publisher in Britain. As repeatedly mentioned before, I will sell a limited number of signed & numbered copies with signed & numbered 18X24 prints. The prints are unfinished yet, but the image below shows what I’m working on: a B-47E (in 1/100 scale), a B-52G and a B-52H (in 1/144 scale), with some of the payloads they carried. I considered the NB-52B, but it had so many payloads that it would end up being a crowded mess.
Opinions?
PS: unrelated to anything, anybody know what plane this is?
Covering yourself in Stretch Armstrong toys seems unlikely, but a vest made of layers of pockets each filled with the Stretch Armstrong goop? Might work, at least for pistol calibers. 700 Nitro Express? Not so much.
