Spectacular.
Remember how the earlier, *lesser* lockdowns, in cahoots with racists and Marxists sensing an opportunity, led to months of rioting and destruction? Good times.
An architect name of Charles Burton proposed a 1,000 foot tall skyscraper. Nothing newsworthy there, except that the proposal was made in 1851. The idea was to take the iron and glass from the Crystal Palace Exhibition and rebuild it all into what would have been the worlds first skyscraper.
It’s certainly cool and all, but I have serious doubts that Victorian materials and construction technologies could have built a survivable skyscraper a thousand feet tall. It just seems like it would have been an accident waiting to happen. Winds would have caused it to sway; wrought iron already under incredible load doesn’t seem like a good choice here. And the exterior cladding of 1850’s glass seems like it would have come shattering down onto bystanders. And come 1940, the Luftwaffe would have had a hell of a fun time trying to bring it down.
Like the video says, the construction of this thing would have had a major impact on the future of very tall buildings. Had it worked, skyscrapers would have been much more popular far sooner; better structural steels likely would have been invented and commercialized sooner as a result. The world today might be populated with structures that make the Burj Kalifa look like a townhouse. But had it collapsed – perhaps even during construction – it probably would have set back the idea of skyscrapers, so that today cities would have spread out more sideways than upwards. Perhaps vast structures ten stories tall and a mile long would fill the cities instead of fifty and hundred-story towers crammed next to each other.
A single architectural decision could ahve changed the face of the modern world.
A black and white bit of concept art that was sold on ebay a while back showing the Lockheed STAR (Space Transport And Recovery) Clipper space shuttle concept from the late 1960’s. This was a promising concept that used a lifting body orbiter with a wide, flattened rear fuselage that was liberally covered with rocket engines (a large range of engines and layouts were considered, including liner aerospikes). The shuttle was filled with liquid oxygen tanks and some hydrogen tanks; the bulk of the hydrogen was stored in a large V-shaped drop tank. This component would have been larger but reasonably inexpensive, jettisoned after deletion to be destroyed during re-entry or splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The vehicle would have continued on to orbit using the propellant remaining in the internal tanks.
A vast amount of information on the STAR Clipper is available HERE.
The STAR Clipper lasted a lot longer than many contemporary designs and went through a multitude of design revisions. it always seemed like it should have worked reasonably well… and it had the benefit of being aesthetically beautiful.
UPDATE: seems to be back up. Ah, well. Maybe Twitter or Facebook will have a little “accident” next. What a tragedy that would be if those platforms froze up for a few days.
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YouTube is down! Let the conspiracy-ing begin!!!
1: It’s down because pro-Trump forces have begun showing how Biden stole the election, and Big Tech can’t have that.
2: It’s down because Trump wants to shut down the videos showing how there was no fraud.
3: And here’s the really crazy one: something glitched.
The Biden-Harris transition team has announced who is on the NASA agency review team. Here’s the bio for one reviewer, Dave Noble:
For the past two years, he has been consulting with national progressive groups on strategic planning, coalition building, communications, electoral engagement, and leadership development.
Prior to this work, Dave spent eight years in the Obama Administration. He was the Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), where among other responsibilities he oversaw teams building pipelines of diverse candidates for political appointments and teams creating leadership development programming for all 3500 administration appointees. He also helped the First Lady organize mayors committed to ending food deserts and create safer and accessible places for kids to play as part of her “Let’s Move!” campaign, and was the White House Liaison and Deputy Chief of Staff at NASA, where he led the combined federal campaign to raise charitable donations from NASA HQ employees. He served on President Obama’s campaign in 2008 as the Director of the LGBT Vote and was deployed to Michigan to help spur voter turnout.
Yep. Good hands.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
UPDATE: check the comments. It seems that what these folks found were “spoiled” ballots… ballots that had been mis-marked and turned in for replacement. But their disposal seems to have been sloppy at best, providing at the very least bad optics. And this could be due to cherry-picking by the admittedly partisan guy in the video, but it does seem odd that so many were for one candidate, so few for the other.
Euphemisms are to be used in place of “you’re failing” in the New York school system.
Good job!
Bah. I’ve said it before: a better approach would be to split the educational system apart: for student who want to learn and who can learn, educate them to the best level of attainment possible. For those who don’t want to learn, can’t learn, or are so troublesome that they are an educational detriment to the others in class… send them to farms and factories to learn trades.
Heh.
Assembly has begun… and it’s expected to only take a month or two. Woo!
It certainly doesn’t seem like it will belong to NASA:
Satellites looking down on Earth, measuring temperature and atmospheric makeup? Sure, useful. But someone PLEASE explain to me why *NASA* is meant to do this and not the NOAA.
The people who dreamed as children and struggled through college to get science and engineering degrees with the goal of working for NASA did so because they want to send Men to the Moon, Mars and beyond. It must surely be a small minority indeed who were enthralled not with visions of exploration and going out to the frontiers, but with looking at clouds.
So if the new administration does not use regulations to strangle SpaceX (including jacking up taxes so that SpaceX simply can’t afford to work here anymore), I would be utterly unsurprised to see a mass exodus of talent from NASA, heading to SpaceX.