Further panoramas. All taken in Thatcher, Utah.
Jun 272019
Jun 272019
NASA has announced that the next planetary mission will be a flying drone probe for Titan. This should prove interesting, thought it would b best if instead of sending one helicopter, they put the things into mass production and sent a *lot* of them to Titan. Given how much cheaper Falcon 9 Heavy is than the likes of Delta IV, to say nothing of the *possibility* of BFR/starship. Imagine sending a *fleet* of these things to Titan in one shot…
Also good news: it’s nuclear powered. So instead of slapping down into the methane mud and promptly running out of battery life, it could potentially function for *years.* Even if it’s just sitting on a hilltop motionless, if it has a decent camera angle on the surroundings it could provide years of interesting observations.
Jun 272019
First bilingual presidential debate as three candidates and a moderator speak in Spanish
Here ends the great American experiment. Let’s start divvying the place up.
As soon as it is established that Presidential candidates are openly courting the votes of people who refuse to speak the language of the United States, that’s a good sign that we have failed as a nation. The US is, like Britain, just a geographical region, with nothing binding the inhabitants together anymore. Every man, woman, family, tribe, ethnicity, identity group for themselves.
Jun 262019
Second in the series. Read after the break…
Jun 262019
If you want to hop in a chopper and get somewhere lickety-split and you don’t care how LOUD you are, Sikorsky has you covered:
~180-190 kts pass, north to south. pic.twitter.com/zZBrDhGKjD
— Dan Parsons (@SharkParsons) June 25, 2019
And it can throw on the brakes:
Using reverse thrust on the propeller, Raider can break without flaring the nose, can hang in the air to increase time on target during a dive. This is deceleration from 160 to ~60 knots. pic.twitter.com/y1YZiNgpsf
— Dan Parsons (@SharkParsons) June 25, 2019
Jun 262019
This looks promising:
It is a common sneer that “those guys” are mired in a culture that is a millenium out of date. But it is worth remembering that it is entirely possible, if you are an adult, that you may well have known someone who remembers an America or a Britain or a France that, at night, was Fricken Dark. And while it is another common sneer that the “Gilded Age” of robber barons and unfettered capitalism was just Terribly Awful And Not At All Progressive… that culture of greed, massive egos and rampaging, unflinching and often cruel progress lit up the world. In a remarkably short time, due to the grasping desire of a few men for knowledge, power and money, the West went from streets filled with horse crap, water filled with cholera and the night filled with the dim squint of a few gas lamps to cities where the streets were clear, the water clean (-ish) and the night brightly lit and the superstitions of the dark largely swept away. The comparison between, say, 1870 and 1910 makes the advances of 1980 to 2020 look like garbage. Yay, now we have social media. Whoopadeedoo.
The closest to the “Current War” we have today *might* be something like the vague competition between SpaceX and Blue origin. I hope that that race to colonize the universe is as fruitful as the fight among Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.
And on that subject…
Jun 252019
A year and a half ago I made a single post describing the “interstitial tales” that I wrote for “War With The Deep Ones.” WWTDO is a book filled with short-ish stories about the first day of an invasion of H.P. Lovecrafts “Deep Ones,” waging a war to wipe out humanity. These stories, set all over the globe, were to be separated by little-bitty sub-stories set in the more than a century from the time of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” to the start of WWTDO. These little tales string together to give a basic history of one organizations efforts to understand and prepare for the threat.
As I said, I made one post, and promptly didn’t make another. Because follow-through is for suckers, I guess. But what the heck, I’ll try again. I’ll post one a day till I’m through them. They will be in simple blog-text after the break, not EPUB or PDF or any such. As always, comments, critiques and large sums of cash welcomed.
Jun 252019
Why not. Two very wide panoramas shot early one morning on the road in Wyoming a while back. Remember there’s that “upvote” button now.
Jun 252019
And behold what a well-spoken dignified future it is:
G😳😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Why This Lil Boy Treat This Lady Like That😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/tdJmOmyRyQ
— BEAT THE ODDS💎🐍❤️.® (@SollyBandz_) June 18, 2019
Jun 252019
Google has, of course, an “autocomplete” function. You type a portion of a phrase to search for and it produces a series of possible responses. Google’s ideas are… a little bit interesting. Behold:
How much of this is just because that’s what people look up, and how much of it is because of Google’d official positions on political matters filtering down to search suggestions, I dunno. But how many people actually look up “Women can do anything” or “boys can be bugs” or “men can have periods?”