A new Tyrannosaur-like dinosaur is described:
T. Rex Wasn’t Always at The Top of The Food Chain. Meet What Came Before
Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis
Say it three times fast.
Sep 092021
Sep 092021
“Absolutely Mind-Boggling” Massive New Animal Species Discovered in 500 Million-Year-Old Burgess Shale
The Cambrian Explosion was an amazing period in the evolution of life on Earth. Titanokorys gainesi was a weird critter half a meter long at a time when most others were at most a few centimeters.
Sep 092021
Bizarre ‘Bone’ Asteroid Is Even Weirder Than We Imagined
It orbits between Mars and Jupiter (never getting closer to Earth than 120 million miles and is 168 kilometers long along its long axis. That’s big enough that I would not have expected this great of a divergence from a sphere.
it appears to be two oblong asteroids closely orbiting each other, with a bridge of dust and rubble connecting them. A close flyby past a planet would seem likely to tear the thing apart. Kleopatra is spinning fast enough that the far ends are probably experiencing “negative” gravity due to centrifugal forces. Kleopatra also has two small moons, the details of which remain murky due to the difficulty of seeing them at this distance.
Sep 072021
Sonofa…
L. Neil Smith (1946-2021)
Author L. Neil Smith, 75, died on August 27, 2021 in Fort Collins, CO.
Lester Neil Smith III was born May 12, 1946 in Denver, CO. He was a former state candidate for the US Libertarian Party, ex-police reserve officer, and a gunsmith. Smith created the Prometheus Awards in 1979 to honor libertarian science fiction.
Smith began publishing science fiction with “Grimm’s Law” for Stellar 5 (1980). He wrote 31 books, including 29 novels, and a number of essays and short stories. Titles include The Probability Broach (1980), which won him his first Prometheus Award in 1984. He won twice more, in 1994 for Pallas (1993) and in 2001 for Forge of the Elders (2000). He has been nominated 17 times for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel. Nominations include Their Majesties’ Bucketeers (1981), The Venus Belt (1981), The Nagasaki Vector (1983), The Gallatin Divergence (1985), The Crystal Empire (1986), Brightsuit MacBear (1988), Bretta Martyn (1997), The American Zone (2001), Roswell, Texas (2008), Ceres (2010), and Blade of P’Na (2016). He also wrote a trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels, all published in 1983. In 2016, Smith received the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement for his contributions to libertarian science fiction.
Smith is survived by daughter Rylla Smith and wife Cathy Smith. Full obituary and appreciations will run in the October issue of Locus.
Smith was something that would not be allowed today: a science fiction author who skewed distinctly Libertarian, and included libertarian messages in his novels. The Message was usually about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but he was also usually just about correct, at least when describing the nastiness of leftists and other collectivist monsters. His characters tended towards the Competent Man, and did not waste a second listening to anyone who would deny them the right to keep and bear arms.
“The Probability Broach” was certainly entertaining. The US public educational system could do well to include it in high school English courses.
Sep 072021
A one-third scale manned B-17 bomber replica. practical? Seemingly not. Cool as hell? Definitely.
It does not seem to be over-powered. Kinda lumbers reluctantly into the air. Still… I gotta wonder if there might be a market for this sort of thing.
Sep 062021
Here we go again…
New ‘mu’ COVID variant now found in 49 U.S. states
Health officials believe mu is even more transmissible than the delta variant and has the potential to resist vaccines.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
She said it lol pic.twitter.com/Z2DwKkgS8U
— Art TakingBack 🇺🇸 (@ArtValley818_) September 6, 2021
Sep 052021
First, for context, here’s the original piece from @RollingStone and the follow up from the actual hospital saying the story was BS and that the one (one!) person the story quotes doesn’t work at that hospital anymore (and hasn’t in months). pic.twitter.com/6k4FjaQWD3
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) September 5, 2021
The whole thread – and it’s extensive – can be seen here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1434591443855753220.html
In short, someone made up a story, Rolling Stone ran with it without checking it, a whole bunch of other media outlets picked that up and also ran with it also without checking it, and then the people actually involved spoke up and called BS.
This is the same press that spent years yapping about Russian Collusion, and went on about the Covington Blood Libel, and told us that violent arson-riddled riots are “mostly peaceful protests” while people milling around in the halls of Government were a violent armed insurrection, that “the pink tax” is a thing, that the 1619 slanders are valid history, that “the Wage Gap” is a thing, that Biden was of sound mind. The press has a *long* way to go to rebuild any sort of trust
Sep 052021
In exciting news out of Germany…
Afghan man, 29, repeatedly stabs female gardener in the neck in park ‘because he didn’t like the fact she was a working woman’
Yeah, yeah, mental illness, blah, blah, blah. No nation has a duty to harbor the nutjobs from elsewhere. Now that Afghanistan has been taken over by the Taliban, it’s time to start paradropping the “refugees” and “asylum seekers” that have been unwisely welcomed into first-world nations to their detriment. Heck, we can drop in out own native-born whackaloons straight into Kandahar,
Sep 052021
A 1942 US Army Air Force artists concept of a “battleglider” depicts a troop transport glider with an unusual means for propulsion. Rather than being towed into the air, this aircraft relied on the powerplants of two bell P-39’s attached to substantial under-wing pylons. The pylons encompassed the cockpits of the fighters, necessitating large windows in the pylons for the pilots to see through.
I am *made* of questions when I look at this. During powered flight… who’s the pilot? I would assume the pilot of the glider, somehow having access to the controls of the fighters… at least the fighters engines. Do the pylons drop off after the fighter separate? Does landing gear deploy down through the pylons? You’re certainly not going to land safely with those pylons hanging down there. Who does the fighter-jettison? Again, presumably the glider pilot has control, but do the fighters have independent control? Are their aerosurfaces locked during attached flight? Can the fighter pilots force the glider to maneuver? The glider fuselage actually looks a little small; what’s the troop/cargo complement? Do the fighters promptly return to base after releasing the glider, or do they continue to provide cover and perhaps serve in the ground attack role?
Sep 052021