As previously illustrated, late Sunday night an electrically interesting cloud floated by leaving a few wildfires in its wake. I stayed up excessively late photographing it and processing photos; by 4:30 AM or so I’d had about enough and went to bed. Before that I checked the progress of the fires and it seemed like the firefighters seemed like they might have had a handle on it. It looked like nothing of much more interest was going to happen.
I wonder how that prediction panned out…
So last night about 11PM a single solitary cloud blew past, about ten miles north of here. What harm could one cloud do? What risk could it possibly pose? Behold:
The latest in replacement news:
Well, there goes another franchise I don’t need to worry about spending any more time or money on.
Shooting for an elevation of 20 meters and a translation. Just a short hop, but it’ll be an untethered flight. Following that will hopefully be a detailed description of the Starship, and within a few Musk-months a flight to 20 kilometers.
When it comes to aircraft diagrams, I’m all set. But ships are outside of my, ahem, wheelhouse. Nevertheless, I’m looking for accurate side-view diagrams of *big*ships, such as the Nimitz-class carrier and the largest oil tankers and container ships. Who can hook a brother up?
UPDATE:
Not perfect, but “shipbucket.com” falls securely into the “good enough” category for what I need for most of what I’m looking for.
A blog reader called my attention to this:
Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear.
And so on and so forth. The point of contention was this:
western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD)
It was pointed out that this could just as easily have been “WIRED” or indeed any of a whole range of other descriptors such as “1st world” or “non-sh!tholes,” etc. But with the current fetish for denigrating western civilization, it’s perhaps unsurprising that less than subtle insults are being inserted even into scientific papers.
But a thought occurs. Rather than being an offenditarian and getting tweaked, I say we run with it. Consider:
1: “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD)” is indeed a rarity on the world stage. Thus technically being a civilized westerner is indeed “weird” compared to the rest of the world which would happily enslave and slaughter their neighbors while worshipping rocks and disdaining science in favor of witch doctory.
2: Anyone devoted to diversity had damned well better accept and celebrate the weird minorities. Therefore anyone who is opposed to western civilization is anti-weird, and thus a fascist and deserves to be punched, milkshaked, deplatformed, debanked, depersoned, driven from society.
The slogans write themselves:
Keep America WEIRD
Make America WEIRD Again
America: WEIRD It Or Leave It
Build the WEIRD
…
I *might* suggest a minor modification: “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic and scientific (WEIRD AS).”
A scan of a vintage photo of the cockpit of one of the North American XB-70 bombers. It looks like it’s probably during assembly.
I have uploaded the full resolution scan (12X9.3 at 300dpi) of the photo to the 2019-07 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Three possibilities, comparing the initial relatively dinky (dainty at less than 12 km in length) initial NASA SPS concept to Manhattan island (in a simple line drawing), to San Francisco and to the the regions around Manhattan. What looks best?
UPDATE: pretty universally the far right option was the most popular one (insert political joke HERE). A suggestion was made to rotate the SPS to align it with the island, which I’ve done below and… meh. It doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve blown up the thickness of the dimension lines. The somewhat faint ellipse at far right in the new image below is the receiver array at 45 degrees latitude. Clearly it is just about as big as the SPS itself, which at first blush might make one wonder “why go to the bother, then?” But there are a few points:
1) Size is determined by the dispersion of the microwave beam coming from a 1-km diameter emitter array in geosynchronous, *not* on the max power density it could handle. So you could potentially have a couple SPS’s beaming down to a single array.
2) Unlike a PV array the microwave receiver lets the bulk of regular light come through. it could be roughly as dense as chickenwire, meaning that you could suspend the net-like receiver over crop land, park land or water.
3) The receiver, like the SPS, works 24 hours, day and night, good weather and bad, with no need to track the sun. A ground-based PV array with the same footprint would cost a lot more than the receiver and produce much less total energy averaged out over the year.
Not a whole lot of detail here, but the story is that Netflix will in a few years have an anime-style show set in the “world of Norse mythology.” That *could* be incredibly awesome, but this being Hollywood, I can already feel the cringe.
It’s unknown whether the main characters will be the Norse gods or, potentially, just regular schmoes. It could even be set in any time period from “ancient” to “far future,” because “world of the Norse gods” could just as easily be “today.” Heck, it could be a “Seinfeld” style sitcom where every now and then someone drops a reference to some god or other. Other possibilities:
1) Set more or less today, featuring a military/X-files type organization dealing with a rising tide of weirdness that they slowly come to realize is the forthcoming of Ragnarok.
2) Set more or less today, starring a US Army soldier killed in Afghanistan fighting Surt worshipers who is modestly surprised to find himself waking up in Asgard assigned to Valhalla with the Einherjar to fight and train and die every day, resurrect at evening and partying every night (could be an adjunct to #1)
3) Vikings in the Viking age, out doing Viking stuff, with semi-random supernatural weirdness
4) Tales of the Norse gods themselves, in ancient times
5) Tales of the Norse gods *since* ancient times. Thor in the Old West. Loki at the Stonewall riots
6) Space adventurers in the future, occasionally interacting with beings of Norse myths out among the stars
Many possibilities. But this being Hollywood, one thing seems likely: Thor, who was described quite explicitly as being a redhead, will be a victim of the Gingeradication (Redheadmageddon? Gingenocide? Gingereplacement?).
It’s interesting to watch how different locations deal with domestic terrorism In Portland, Oregon, Antifa essentially has free reign to do what they like and harm whom they wish; the mayor is on their side – or is at least cowed by them – and makes sure the cops give them a pass. But over the past few days the news here in Utah has covered a somewhat similar protest In Salt Lake City where the mayor (Jackie Biskupski… remember, she’s not just a Democract, she’s a *gay* Democrat) wasn’t having it. The response by the cops was less “let them do what they want” and more “Oy, what’s all this then?”
The source of the trouble is a little hard to suss out. In short, an “inland port” is in the early stages of being built in an undeveloped area of Salt Lake County. What’s controversial about that? Nothing that I can see, but then, this is Current Year and there are people who freakin’ *live* to find things to be offended by. Consequently, a place to unload cargo is now, somehow, racist. And so a pack of feral hipstery Antifa-wannabees came out and “occupied” the Chamber of Commerce. In true Klantifa fashion, they used violence to try to shut down the news media, attakign a few cameramen. The local government let them protest and bang their drums and make a nuisance of themselves for a while until they started getting rowdy, then the local PD said “enough” and cleaned them out.
Some news coverage is here. Watch the video, it’s interesting… especially Budget Hermione Grainger, somehow the organizer of this little shindig, explaining how they’re all innocence and light. It’s clearly a foreign conspiracy, likely the Queen trying to sow dissent so that her forces can reclaim the Colonies for the Crown. But of great importance is that the local government, including the Governor of the state of Utah, aren’t shying away from the truth:
“Borderline terrorism,” Gov. Herbert called the protest.
In contrast, check out this video from the always mellow and entirely safe for work Razorfist, describing and showing some of the more egregious nonsense the Portland government did in allowing Klantifa to run wild in their streets: