I don’t watch soccer, but I understand that a lot of games end with scores easily counted on one junior high shop teachers hand. So “12” seems like a lot, especially when it’s twelve to zero.
Anyway, we need more sportsball games pitting professional men vs professional women. Given that womens sports are being invaded and taken over by males, might as well.
The JWST shows galaxies as far back as 400 million or so years after the Big Bang. Try gaining insight into the universe like this with something, *anything,* other than western science. Suck it, “other ways of knowing.”
The parts I currently have (including a pile of keys, composed of both vintage and newly-cast) together with CAD drawing of parts I’m working on. It all seems to fit correctly, which is promising.
It seems that the issues that caused me to both ramp up use of Twitter and get the “backup blog” continue. It now appears that every weekend the servers at the hosting service get overloaded and I can’t log into the blog until Monday morning when the staff get in and clean things up. Last weekend was a three-day weekend, and the problem persisted until Tuesday. Consequently… no new blog posts on the weekend, it seems. So if you want to make sure to keep up with my thrilling adventures and opinions, this isn’t really the place for it. Instead:
An incident from December 2022:
And another MiG 31 comes in for a landing, spewing fuel at a prodigious rate…
There seems to be something wrong with the Russian Air Force lately, lots of planes seem to be having trouble. I’m sure we can all agree that the best thing would be for the Russian Air Force to ground their aircraft for a bit. Probably put them all on trucks and trains and send them to, say, Germany and Poland and Finland for inspection and disposition.
It’s been long enough that “Dr. House” *could* make a comeback (he *might* be getting out of prison about now…). Saddling him with Dr. Murphy could be entertaining as hell. Will it happen? No, it’s about as likely as Disney making a good Star Wars movie. But it’s fun to think about.
Good news:
This is *many* orders of magnitude away from a practical solar power satellite… but ya gotta start somewhere.
And on the other hand, bad news:
Problem one: bits of the parachute system aren’t as strong as they should be. Bad, but readily solvable.
Problem two: the wiring is flammable. This… is monumentally stupid, a problem that has been well understood since the Apollo 1 fire. this may well require that the capsule be largely disassembled so that *miles* of wiring can be replaced.
Good luck with *that.*
And while Boeing continues to struggle to get a capsule not fundamentally different from Apollo flying SpaceX continues to send crews to the ISS in Dragons.
19 years later… pic.twitter.com/2xead0zqaA
— Rare North American Space Koala (@culpable_mink) June 1, 2023
Today I swung by “The Davenport,” the century-plus old apartment building that partially collapsed a few days ago. Roads were closed off for a radius of a block or two around it so I couldn’t get very close in my car, and I didn’t have the time to find someplace to park and walk. Ehhh, oh well. Anyway, a lot of information has come out about it; the city of Davenport has released a bunch of inspection reports and other documents going back several years showing that it has been falling apart for some time. Bricks have been popping out of the face of the building for years. It looks like the sort of place that your average person would have been able to look at and go “Nope” and run to some other accommodations.
Someone’s gettin’ sued.
The City of Davenport website with the documents:
https://www.davenportiowa.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=6481456&pageId=19580321
In retrospect this sort of thing is not too surprising. A lot of the buildings around here are old brick structures, and The Davenport was only a few blocks from the Mississippi river. “500 year floods” seem to happen every few years now; this had *got* to have an effect. Whether water seeps into the ground that far inland I don;t know, but having tens of thousands of tons of new watery overburden from time to time has got to cause the ground to flex at least some. There are also the occasional earthquake; small by the standards of even Utah, but if you have a brick building not built with earthquakes in mind… that’s not so great.
In all honesty, “The Davenport” looks like a *lot* of buildings in this part of the midwest. Built a century ago, having seen better days. Like our roads and bridges, the infrastructure has not been well looked after. I won’t be surprised if the next few years are filled with increasing tales of buildings and bridges falling. Imagine if the dozens of trillions dumped down the black hole of welfare were instead spent on repairs, maintenance and replacements of structures that needed it.
A recent Mexican TV news piece showed a cartel member wandering about with a shoulder-fired AT-4 anti-tank rocket slung over his shoulder. A number of commenters immediately leaped to one or both of two wrong conclusions:
1: It’s a Javelin missile
2: It’s a missile we gave to Ukraine, which they then turned around and sold on the black market.
Number 1 is easy enough to debunk; it’s simply not a Javelin. Number 2 is more troubling: but then there’s a little detail on the launch tube that makes it clear that wherever the cartel got this thing… it’s not something to fret about too much.