And now, predictably, they want to shut down STEM

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 082020
 

Here’s a thought: measure performance of STEM organizations and labs and companies and such on June 10. See if things such as productivity or morale take a downward turn or not as the woke “scientists” leave on the 10th. If things don’t get worse or in fact get better… then lay off those who left because clearly they’re just not that handy on the job anyway. It certainly seems like a day free of wokescolds and their lackeys would be an improved day on the job.

I went to the “shut down STEM” website to see what all line of  they’re running. And this warning popped up.

 

 Posted by at 11:24 pm

Not what you want to see your average neighborhood doing

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 082020
 

In America we have a problem of uncivilized people burning their neighborhoods down. In Norway, their neighborhoods seem to want to go for a swim.

Landslide in Norway Sweeps 8 Buildings Into the Sea

The slide, which ran more than 2,000 feet along the shore and nearly 500 feet inland, was the largest the area had ever seen. A dog was carried out to sea but swam to safety.

Shocking, not once in the New York Times article do they blame Trump for this incident. Must be slipping (ba-dum-tiss).

 Posted by at 3:44 pm

The coming golden age of toy spaceships that shoulda been made 40 years ago

 art, awesomeness, models, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 082020
 

So here’s some good news for those oldster sci-fi nerds who were/are fans of the original Battlestar Galactica, who wanted spaceships to go along with their toy figures, and who currently have buckets of money:

That’s cool and all, but I have two current concerns, apart from the cost:

1: The 3D printed nature of the things is still really obvious. Of course as printing tech improves, the surfaces will also improve. Eventually these sort of prints will be indistinguishable from injection molded parts. Not there yet, though.

2: Some corporate suit will doubtless fire up the Legion Of Doom Lawyers to drop a ban hammer. “Someone is making a nickel selling something we couldn’t be bothered to sell even though there’s clearly been a market for close to half a century? OUTRAGE!”

So, a bit of games theorizing needed here. Do you shell out big bucks now for things that are – to the right person – pretty cool, yet still rather imperfect… or do you wait for quality to improve and cost to decrease, while risking a Cease and Decist making them vanish altogether?

 Posted by at 2:43 pm

No, it *has* started

 AARRRGH, books, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 082020
 

From PJ Media, a piece from one Stephen Kruiser:

The Morning Briefing: We’ve Reached the Book Burning Phase of 2020 Riot Wokeness

The argument in the piece is that the woke fascists are *approaching* the stage of book burning, due in part to pieces like this blog post on taxpayer-funded NPR:

Your Bookshelf May Be Part Of The Problem

Where white people are castigated for having book shelves filled with authors who wrote, you know, actually *good* books. Why have Shakespeare, when you could have Maya Angelou? Why have books you like when you could instead have books that tell you how evil you and your family members are for being the race you are?

While mr. Kruiser has a point that those who hector others over not having a sufficiently woke reading list are on the road to being book burners, he makes a fundamental factual error at the end:

Obviously, people aren’t literally burning books just yet. The spirit of book burning is upon us, though. With what we have seen in the past ten days from the rage mob, expecting the leftist worst from them really isn’t a stretch.

Ummm… “people aren’t literally burning books just yet?” Allow me to introduce you to the pile of ashes that is Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore. Or DreamHaven Books & Comics, which was ransacked and saved from being burned down solely due to the incompetence of the arsonists. Seven other comic book shops across the country (Illinois and California) ransacked. Hell, even “progressive” newspapers get an entrashening. And of course there’s the winnowing of western literature from universities, social media censoring wrongthink and Amazon withdrawing books for political reasons.

Mobs are generally indiscriminate in their reckless hate, only avoiding those businesses that have Roof Koreans or which display, with adequate clarity, symbols of supplication. But those pushing the chaos often have goals… and wiping out wrongthink and the paper its printed on certainly seems to be at the top of their wishlist.

 

 Posted by at 12:32 pm

Behold your new god

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, religion, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 072020
 

I saw a bit of video a little earlier that was top-of-the-line cringe. It was so awful that I wanted to immediately post and mock it… but it was *SO* awful that it transcended mockability into patheticness. Fortunately, Bearing is on the job:

These people are self-hating clowns. They are not to be hated, they are not to be debated, they are not even to be mocked; they are to be noted, remembered and used as object lessons in what happens when someone allows themselves to be browbeaten into hating themselves. This is sufficiently bizarre that it can be assumed to be a bug, not a feature, and is outside of normal human nature and logic. That it now assumes the trappings of a religion should thus not be surprising.

 Posted by at 11:02 pm

Unintended (?) consequences

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, science, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 072020
 

So some new handrails were installed on the Golden Gate Bridge. They were designed to lower drag on high wind days. Not a bad idea, right? Well… the new railings sing, and apparently sing loudly.

It is apparently *painfully* loud on high wind days, and can at times be heard some miles away. Not only are there no plans to replace these, there are plans to add *more* of these guardrails. So… if you live in the area and are very disturbed by the noise what are your options?

1: Claim that minorities and the alphabet community are disproportionately negatively affected by the noise.

2: Claim that the “singing,” since there is no actual artistic merit to it or talent/skill required for its creation, is cultural appropriation.

3: Claim that your shaman confirms that the singing is actually the audible wailing of the spirits of alt-right white supremacist demons.

4: Claim that the railings are the result of western civilization and/or engineering rigor.

5: Claim that the noise is inherently pro-Trump.

Any one of these, if disseminated widely enough, *should* be adequate to assure either that the San Francisco city government will leap into action *or* that a sufficiency of Peaceful Protestors will arrive and set upon the bridge with fire and bricks. Soon the Golden Gate Bridge can look as gloriously woke as Minneapolis!

 Posted by at 3:13 pm

Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) documents

 history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 062020
 

I thought sure I’d posted this before but… shrug. If’n yer interested in the manned Orbiting Laboratory program of the mid-1960’s, you’ll want to take a gander at the website for the National Reconnaissance Office, which has 825 documents with a total of 20,861 pages on the MOL project:

Index, Declassified Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) Records

 Posted by at 5:09 pm

Boeing Model 167

 aircraft, art, politics  No Responses »
Jun 062020
 

Another Chinook derivative, the Model 167 was substantially further from the original. It was larger and had an additional turboshaft engines… and moved all three of them forward, *presumably* for balance reasons. This was from the era when it seemed like a good idea to operate commercial helicopter “buses” from rooftop heliports in major cities, generally to shuttle passengers either from one city to another nearby one, or from the heart of an urban area to an outlying airport. It’s a little difficult to be sure, but it looks like the Model 167 had retractable landing gear.

 

 Posted by at 4:56 pm
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