Might have noticed that blogging has been reduced mostly to posting YouTube vids and very brief grumbles of late. It’ll probably be much the same or even less for the next month or two… I’m hard at work on “B-47/B-52” and that takes precedence. Just passed 200 pages of diagrams; a few more left to do, but text is the current priority and I’m a slower writer than draftsman (and I don’t draft that fast).
Side note: Amazon has decided that I might be interested in these. Amazing! How do it know?
The art below is a Boeing concept from the late 70s or early 80’s depicting an almost certainly wholly conceptual “electric commuter jet” based on a rather dubious propulsion system: the ring-shaped aircraft would be equipped with massive counter-rotating flywheels which would be spun up to high speed on the ground (presumably with fixed electric motors). To fly, the flywheels would engage a compressor which would provide the jet thrust to fly. I haven’t done the math on this, but unless those flywheels are made of an adamantium-vibranium-uru alloy spun up to a few hundred thousand RPM, it seems unlikely to me that the wheels would store enough energy to provide for a meaningful flight. I doubt that this existed beyond the artists imagination… but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
The full rez scan of the artwork has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-05 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Younglings are the Life of the party. Well, sort of.
Amazon sent me a link to a book it thought I might like:
Does that Amazon AI know me or what?
FYI: Here’s my other computer screen at the moment…
The Crazy Years accelerate, thanks to the Communist Chinese and their Tik Tok insanity enabling platform:
I honestly don’t know if these people believe their ᛒᚪᛚᛚᛋᚻᛁᛏ or if they’re just having a laugh (I suspect a *lot* of the latter)… but you *know* that a lot of their viewers will buy into it.
Bonus old-man-yells-at-cloud grumbles:
Oh, this looks like it’ll be an endless source of amusement:
This groups website is jam-packed with whackaloonacy.
These racist goobers are trying to build a self-sufficient city of their own. Fine, great, wonderful. At an altitude of 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies. Snerk. I cannot express how much I support them in their efforts and wish them to gather as many of their like-minded ideologues as possible within the confines of their arid, anoxic little gulag. I imagine their ranks are just *filled* with all the talent they’ll need in the areas of high-altitude farming and irrigation and power generation and construction. I bet their first full winter there will be spectacular.
… but this technology is pretty much available *now* and I can see this app hitting the market soon. If something like Google Glass ever makes a return, I can see an app like this running in real time, providing an augmented reality overlay letting the user know the enemy-status of nearly everyone they see on the street. Such an app would be used by extremists on both sides in order to find people to ambush and assault; it would be used by the vast majority in the middle to find those that they should avoid.
The existence and widespread adoption of such a thing would speed the process of people disguising themselves in public. A year ago I thought sure that the pandemic would do it, but instead we’ve got goons beating the tar out of people for wearing/not wearing simple and dubiously useful masks.
Guy was heading to class. I guess he ended up failing.
I’m old enough to remember Ayds being advertised *all* *the* *time.* Then, mysteriously, the product seemed to disappear…
Huh. Who could have seen that coming. A place that became a no-go zone for the police has turned into a lawless hellscape… and the police have no interest in going there. And why should they? I feel sorry for the people who lived there/owned property/businesses before all this happened. But there is a simple fix: BLM and it’s leaders have made *buckets* of money. The locals should sell out to BLM at a fair market price based on the pre-riot value. Then BLM can do with the property whatever they like, safe in the knowledge that the cops won’t get involved.