What about “hey, ᚪᛋᛋᚻᚩᛚᛖ?”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 212021
 

China launches, apparently, nuclear-tipped (or nuclear-capable) hypersonic glide weapons into orbit, in violation of international treaty. How does the mighty US State Department respond? Why, with Sheer Manliness, of course!

If you are as confused by “International Pronouns Day” as any rational person should be, don’t worry… they have a FAQ. And why yes, thank you for asking, the executive board members are all American  academics.

International Pronouns Day – Executive Board Members

  • Founder and Co-Chair

    • Shige Sakurai, MBA, MA (they or ze), University of Maryland

  • Co-Chair

    • Crystal Huff (they), Include Better

  • Board Members:

    • Courtney D’Allaird, MBA, MA (they), University of Albany

    • Andrea Holland, MLIS (they), University of Colorado System

 

 

 Posted by at 3:55 pm

Flashback: Engage Smug Mode

 awesomeness, B-47 and B-52 Origins and Evolution, blather, history, Hmm..., news, nukes, projects, science, weapons  No Responses »
Oct 192021
 

Almost four years ago I posted about a project known as “Flashback,” a vaguely-described mid 1960’s program to carry and drop a giant *something* from a B-52. What it was, exactly, was not described with any clarity, but there were enough clues that I tentatively speculated that it was a design for an American “Tsar Bomb” with a yield of fifty or more megatons. To my knowledge I was the first person to yap about it publicly. I sent what I’d found to a few atomic and aerospace researchers to see if they knew anything. At the time, they were as mystified as I was.

Today there’s less mystery. I was contacted by one of the researchers I had contacted back then, letting me know he’s writing an article to appear in a month or so in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, covering Flashback among other things. He has Found Some Stuff. In short… Flashback was a design for a 50 to 100 megaton hydrogen bomb.

Giggitty.

 

 Posted by at 10:49 pm

This kids post-college life in the real world is gonna be ROUGH

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 192021
 

Student at ultra-liberal $80,000-a-year Oberlin College complains that contractors hired to install radiators in ‘women and trans safe space’ dorm rooms were ‘cisgender men’

Wow. *He* is upset that men installed a radiator in his room. Because there are just so many women in the radiator installation field, I guess?

You can read this delicate snowflake’s editorial here:

Male Workers Allowed Into Baldwin, Unsettling Residents

And if you think this idjit is alone in being an Oberlin idjit, allow me to introduce you to:

Why Must International Students Assimilate?

Where someone with the name of “Aishwarya Krishnaswamy” complains about:

When I introduce myself to people, I often receive a “You don’t expect me to say that, right?” in reference to my name. When I went with my friends to Walmart and struggled in the self-checkout counter — having been to Walmart no more than five times in my entire life — my friends were impatient and uncomfortable, slowly skirting away from me. When I sit in conversations laden with American-centric references, I reach a point where tuning out the conversation is easier than asking for the 10th time, “What does that mean?” I’ve even walked into my professor’s office hours and introduced myself, only to have them ask, “Do you have a shorter name?”

And then the absolute topper on the cake of woke idiocy and self-important privilege:

As a foreigner here, I am eager to learn aspects of this new culture, but I refuse to do that at the cost of my identity. Two years ago, it was not easy to brush away subtle acts of “othering,” such as exclusively conversing in American references — on cinema, music, politics, sports, etc. — or mocking me for not doing things the “right” way, not realizing that what happens in this country is just a way, not the way, of doing things. I am a third-year now, and not one thing has changed.

Holy shit, dude. You came to a completely different country and surrounded yourself – of your own free will – with people from that other country. And you’re cheesed off that they converse about *their* culture? you’re PO’ed that Americans in America see the American way of doing things as the right way of doing things? Ummm… what do you call Americans who go to *your* homeland and bitch about the way things are done there?

I have high hopes that that pendulum will swing back, sooner rather than later. With that swing will come the acceptance that some people are just crazy; they deserve our sympathy, our help and hospitalization, but society does not deserve to have their increasingly bizarre and unreality-based  desires foisted upon it.

 Posted by at 4:12 pm

PDF review: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous News Conference

 history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Oct 192021
 

I recently came across something on ebay that looked interesting; the buy-it-now price is a bit steep, so I googled it. Huzzah! It’s available online as a PDF. D’oh: my antivirus program freaked out that the connection to the university website is insecure. Huzzah! It has been archived on the Wayback machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210627145321/http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/apollo/LOR_News_Conference.pdf

This is a writeup, with photos and diagrams, of the July 11, 1962 news conference at NASA headquarters where the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous technique was described. prior to the the understanding was that the Apollo Command and Service Modules would land directly on the lunar surface; this sounds easy, but required a bigger booster than the Saturn V and would have put the astronauts far above the lunar surface (so far as I know, no determination of how exactly the astronauts were going to get some fifty or more feet down, and then fifty or more feet back up). LOR entailed the use of the Lunar Excursion Module,a  small, lightweight spacecraft that could zip on down the the surface from lunar orbit and then hop on back up. Far less mass needed to go to the lunar surface, meaning the planned Saturn C-5 (later Saturn V) could take care of the whole mission in one shot. No need to assemble spacecraft in Earth orbit using multiple launches of hardware and propellant tankers.

Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 3:37 pm

ᛚᛖᛏ’ᛋ ᚷᚩ ᛒᚱᚪᚾᛞᚩᚾ

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 182021
 

Update: Claimed to be a hoax. But as we’ve been told repeatedly in recent years, the seriousness of the accusation is more important than the accuracy of it.

Canada Has a Problem With Brandon

If this is accurate and not a hoax, this seems a rather remarkable abuse of power:

In a notice written late last week, a [REDACTED] official (see photo below) warned that “the use of the wording ‘Let’s Go Brandon” and any variation thereof under any circumstances is banned.”

“Violation of this policy,” the notice concludes, “will be grounds for immediate dismissal without recourse or labour union representation.”

If this is accurate, is there a complete list somewhere of things Canadian government employees must not ever say or write? If it has gotten all the way down to “Let’s Go Brandon,” you’d imagine that that list would be EXTENSIVE.

Also, it should be noted that whoever wrote that memo should be promptly fired without recourse. Note that it specifically says “the use of the wording ‘Let’s Go Brandon” and any variation thereof under any circumstances is banned.” That’s quite clear. We’ve all heard of cases where people have gotten fired/cancelled/demoted/threatened for saying A Bad Word, even when in the context of simply technically describing what the Bad Word is and how and why it’s Bad.

Also seemingly relevant: the Streisand Effect.

 Posted by at 2:50 pm

A modest proposal for “James Bond”

 art, blather, Hmm..., My Fiction, nukes, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Oct 182021
 

As should now no longer be a spoiler of any particular note, James Bond dies at the end of “No Time To Die.” I cannot directly confirm this myself… this is the first Bond movie since the Roger Moore era that I will likely end up not seeing in the theater (the wokevertising that promised a Bond put in his place by a Mary Sue apparently turned out to not be accurate, but it turned me off to the flick). But the credits end with “James Bond will return.”

Now, there are a few ways this could happen, what with Bond being dead and all:

1: He’s not dead. An amazing escape, slid down an escape tunnel, beamed out by Scotty, survived under rubble, whatever. Presumably he received enough facial injuries that the reconstructive surgery will make him look like some completely different actor.

2: The old fan theory that the name “James Bond” is regularly passed along to new secret agents along with the 007 number. So Connery, Moore, Craig, etc. all exist in the same continuity.

3: A complete reboot.

Hard to say what it’ll be. Hard to say if the suits in charge of such things even know right now.

But here’s my suggestion: reboot. What’s more than that, remake some/many of the early Bond movies. Do this with A Plan: crank out the movies assembly line fashion so you get one Bond a year. Something like:

2025: Dr. No: A Chinese mad scientist working for SPECTRE farks with western space launches, risking a nuclear war.

2026: Thunderball: SPECTRE steals some nukes and threatens to evaporate some major cities, with the likely consequence of a nuclear war.

2027: You Only Live Twice: SPECTRE screws with space launches, threatening to spark a nuclear war

2028: Diamond Are Forever: SPECTRE builds an orbital weapon of mass destruction, threatening to spark a nuclear war; use of the weapon causes several nuclear detonations and reactor meltdowns.

2029: The Spy Who Loved Me: A megalomaniac sea-steader steals Russian and British boomers, with the intent of sparking a nuclear war; ends with multiple nuclear detonations at sea.

2030: Moonraker: And here’s the culmination. The remake goes much as the original; eccentric billionaire space industry tycoon steals a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle from The Government, has a secret space launch complex hidden away in South America and plans to launch a bunch of craft all at once. Instead of manufacturing some weird poison, his minions are stealing nuclear warheads and plutonium pits. But when Bond is captured and the Evil Genius begins monologing, it’s none of that “I’m going to create a master race in space and will wipe out all mankind, muahahahaha” nonsense. It’ll be: “Have you seen what’s been going on lately? Ever since 2025 we’ve come within seconds of a global nuclear war like every friggen’ year! I’ve had plans in place to establish self-sufficient off-world colonies; but those plans were based on a thirty-year schedule. Last year multiple H-Bombs went off in the Atlantic! We don’t have thirty years! So damn right I’ve been stealing stuff; I’ve had to accelerate my plans. I’m getting the hell off this rock before it gets turned into radioactive ash by these crazy morons!”

In the end, Evil Genius successfully launches his hundred or so heavy lifters from the Amazon and sets up several self-sufficient O’Neill habs out in the asteroid belt. Bond goes along, hired as the new societies Director Of National Security. The numerous nukes and fissionables stolen by Evil Genius are used to create a range of reactors used to power spacecraft, stations and asteroid-munching factories. Enough power is available at the beginning that the factories are able to process out fissionables from the asteroids and mass-produce PV arrays, so the habs are able to not only self-support but reproduce. Since the thousands of people taken along have all been selected based on merit and STEM abilities, with no patience for “other ways of knowing” or kowtowing to “feelings” or “diversity mandates,” they are able to rapidly increase their technological base. They have functional fusion reactors and fusion engines within five years.

MI6 fires the now absent James Bond, hires a new nonbinary genderfluid dangerhaired Jamie Bond. On zer first mission, World War Five breaks out and the nukes fly; planetary population drops to a few hundred million in the resulting blasts, fallout and nuclear winter. Over the next few years, Original Bond leads a few missions to return to Earth scrape up technology, a few survivors, animals and plants. One exciting adventure where Bond leads a mission to raid the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

 Posted by at 2:27 pm
 Older Entries  Newer Entries