January 28, 1986. One of the few school days that I remember clearly.
Manly tears are appropriate.
Jan 282023
Jan 282023
The hardware has been modified to “print” up to the full six feet in length (actually a little more, maybe 6’8″). I continue to crank out test prints, with about a 50/40/10 mix of “awesome”/”disappointing”/”dismal.” Now it seems the production part of the project is largely dialed in; it seems that *chemistry* is responsible for much of the trouble. There is a window in which the fluid can be properly used:
- When the two chemicals are first mixed, they produce a liquid that is mud-brown. When used right off, it doesn’t seem to stick to the paper very well, or doesn’t react adequately. In any event, the result is massively faded. Wholly unusable. It seems to take about 24 hours from mixing to reliable usability. After 24 hours, the fluid has turned from brown to dark-ish green. Seems to work great at about that point. After another day, it turns a *dark* green, then trends towards blue. As it goes, it becomes increasingly useless. So there is a 24-48 hour window, it seems. I can work with that, now that I got it more or less figgered.
While the hardware is set up for in excess of 6 feet, so far the biggest print I’ve done is 56 inches, a *spectacular* pair of isometric interior structure views of the B-2A. yeah, I’m a bit surprised that the original was declassified, but it was, so there it is (and it was sent to me by a Russian feller, so it’s out there). I’ve done 2 so far… one is as close to perfect as I can hope for; one is *slightly* flawed via faded bits.
When I left Utah, my cyanotyping hardware got trashed. But I had the foresight to roll up all the transparencies I had. And wow, I have a lot of them. And WOW are they dirty. Utah is great and all, but it *is* the desert and full of dust… it’s coarse, rough, irritating, and it gets everywhere. All of the transparencies will have to be washed and windexed. And I’ve washed, but not yet windexed, the first of the six-footers I plan on printing: a CAD diagram of my own, the SLS in 1/72 scale. A good businessman would have had this ready for the Artemis mission a little while ago but… shrug.
These test prints will probably go up on ebay to get some sense of the interest in them. I suspect an Etsy store would be the best next step. There are a *lot* of crappy digitally printed aerospace “blueprints” there… one of the very first ones to pop up is a digitally printed 12″x72″ Saturn V that almost certainly was derived from Space Drawing 4. I previously sold actual cyanotypes of this at the exact same size… for $50 compared to the digital print at $75. I feel rather like a chump. There are actual cyanotype prints available as well, but the one’s I’ve seen all look rather bland and low-effort. Bah.
Jan 282023
Urgent public health warning issued over lost radioactive capsule in Western Australia
The capsule fell off a truck somewhere along a 1,400 kilometer trip. What they’re hoping to find:
Any motorists who have travelled along the Great Northern Highway between Newman and Perth since January 10 should check their tyres, in case the capsule has become lodged in them.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Jan 272023
Granted, there are people who actually *work* at shopping malls. But these “tours” of the Google offices in LA really don;t seem like tours of work sites. There are not a whole lot of people in evidence, and the vast majority of those seen doing something are shown relaxing, playing, eating, drinking.
I’m sure hiring a large percentage of the workforce to simply tick quota boxes seemed like a good idea to *somebody.*
One might wonder why I’m suddenly yammering on about this. I think it’s because this sort of thing offends me… it’s not that “work” should be an oppressive, dreary existence (been there), but because works should be about The Work. Granted I used to be an aerospace engineer, not a software worker; if Google’s latest update is a little wonky, who cares. If the latest jetliner is a little wonky, people *die.* So industries that actually matter should take themselves seriously. No goofy TikTok dance videos, no on-site clowns or cry-closets. The things that made our society successful have in recent years been not only neglected but denigrated. This has included objectivity, being on time, having a good work ethic, recognition of cause and effect and so on. I see these adult daycare centers as part and parcel of this. The people who work there seem to *not* actually work there. Granted *somebody* has to be doing the job; Price’s Law suggest that the square root of the number of employees are doing half the actual work. Regardless of how true that is, any place where *anything* gets done has to have some people who are actually working. And surrounding hard workers by slackers who are getting paid just as well as them and who are visibly being coddled… that has *got* to be a morale-killer among the productive. And doubtless many of the slackers would have turned into hard workers who would derive great and substantive meaning from being productive… but they’re being indoctrinated into a culture of bland excess and sloth.
Jan 262023
Yesterday Project Veritas released footage of a Pfizer employee on a “date” talking about how his company is “mutating” the Covid virus. I’ve seen a lot of people losing their minds over this, seeing it as evidence of the virus being weaponized. But I can honestly see it the other way: If you are in the business of producing vaccines, you want to stay ahead of the diseases out there. Figure out where things might be going so you can produce vaccines *before* nature does its thing. If the employee is a bit drunk, or not exactly scientifically versed in what’s going on (this is a marketing guy, after all), then a basic, valid explanation can be described poorly and come off like supervillainy. I don’t know, and since there’s legitimate room for doubt, I didn’t think much of the story. Seemed like a nothingburger to me.
But then today. As Project Veritas generally does, they released a second video where they confront the subject openly. Typically the subject does the only thing they can and scuttle away, saying little. But this guy… boy, he’s *special.* I think he’s borked both his career *and* his dating prospects.
What we seem to have here is someone who has lived a fairly sheltered and entitled life, and the moment things don’t go his way he loses his little mind. One minor decision different in his life a year ago and I suspect instead of a PV video, we’d be watching him on an Adult Daycare video showing all the snacks he eats in a day, then pissing about how unfair it is that he just got laid off from his six-figure, zero-effort job.
Jan 262023
Because in present Day, everything has to be All About Me…
Several years before I left Utah I was contacted by an aerospace historian/ museum feller about a potential project. It seemed that a big tech company was purchasing an old Hughes Aircraft hangar with the intention of turning it into office space; I was asked if I might be interested in building a large (IIRC, wingspan in excess of twenty feet) replica of the Hughes H4 Hercules “Spruce Goose” to be hung in the large open space. My response was something along the lines of “hell yes,” but it didn’t go much further than that original discussion; like a lot of things it just faded away. Still, I’d dug out what plans I had of the Hercules and started dreaming up how I was going to do it… I’d model it in 3D CAD, lay out the internal structure and have ribs and longerons and frames and all cut out of quality plywood, clad probably in *really* good, really thin plywood, sanded baby-ass smooth and painted appropriately. I had discussions with a local wood shop about getting the many, many parts CNC milled. Woulda been a thing of beauty… and something I could have built several of and presumably made bank on. But it was not to be, and in the years since I’ve not given the project a second thought. Until yesterday…
So there was this TikTok video by some vapid person yapping about her day of meaningless food consumption and unproductivity at the Google LA office, built into a former Hughes hangar. Lo and behold, on display is a “sculpture” of the Hercules hanging from the ceiling, visible about 8 seconds in:
New adult daycare video just dropped, and this may possibly be the most horrifying one yet. These are the people who ban you from tech pic.twitter.com/kceLEkiRrN
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 22, 2023
My old brain fired up and I contacted my acquaintance who had originally presented me with the idea years ago… and, yup, that’s the place, and that sculpture is what they went with rather than my planned subscale replica. More info and a decent photo of it is here:
HistoricHangarBecomesHistory-MakingWorkplace
There are a number of things that jump right out at me. First, the volume of space available in the hangar is vast… and it *seems* like the volume of space actually used for offices and such is *small.* It appears to be horribly inefficiently utilized. And second, here’s the description of the Hercules sculpture:
Comprised of 2,800 individually hung chrome spheres, this perceptual sculpture by Michael Murphy appears to be an amorphous silver cloud until seen from the sole viewpoint where it reveals itself as the “ghost” of the Spruce Goose.
It’s a “perceptual sculpture,” only visible correctly from a single vantage point. Basically, it’s not “real” as such, it’s kinda like a hologram made of ball bearings. That’s… interesting, I guess. but I can’t help draw some analogies: What I had suggested was a real, tangible Hercules, visible as such from all aspects and viewpoints. What they went with was smoke and mirrors. What I had believed the place was going to be was a workplace where people got stuff done. What it ended up being was, apparently a holding facility for people who did nothing of value all day.
Would have been a nice project though. Oh well.
Jan 242023
Up first:
U.S. Poised to Provide Abrams Tanks to Ukraine
Of note here is that this will, theoretically, spur the Germans to send their Leopard 2 tanks. The Leopard 2’s would likely be more advanced than the M-1s; and while there are more M-1’s in the world, the Leopards are closer to Ukraine and there are a number of countries willing to send Leopards. This is of course not pure altruism; they’ll likely be sending the older tanks that were about to be mothballed or scrapped; and if not, these donations will leave tank-shaped holes that will need to be filled with the latest and greatest. “You don;t need new tanks, we’ve got enough at home” no longer works as an excuse if you don’t actually have enough at home.
Additionally: the Russians might finally, rather overdue, be getting their crap in gear. So if they are faced with modern western MBTs, they’ll almost certainly launch their best anti-tank weapons at them. And sad though it may be for Ukrainians to hear, I’d rather modern NATO tanks get battlefield tested now, with Ukrainian crews, than later with NATO crews, on NATO territory. Losing these tanks to Russian weapons now will allow western designers to produce counter systems for when we need to fight Russian forces in Poland or Finland or Estonia or Wales.
Also:
McCarthy formally blocks Schiff, Swalwell from Intel panel
Never forget: Swalwell was the one who banged a Chinese spy and threatened to nuke American cities. He should *really* be the center of FBI attention, not sitting on the House Intelligence Committee. As for Schiff, he tried and failed to tie Trump to Russian collusion. Lots of people tried that, including some who should have known better at the FBI. Speaking of which…
Retired FBI counterintel agent reportedly involved in Trump-Russia probe arrested for ties to Russian oligarch
Also also: In recent years the NRA has become pretty much worthless in the fight to maintain Constitutional rights, even as they remain one of the Democrats primary boogeymen in *their* never-ending quest to render the citizens of the US into helpless subjects. But they’re finally stepping up a bit:
NRA sues over Illinois ban on semiautomatic weapons
Jan 242023
So Musk bought Twitter and laid off something like half the workforce… and Twitter *promptly* failed to implode. It seems to be functioning just fine, indicating that the bulk of those canned were not vital to the operation of the company. Now Google and Meta and a bunch of other tech companies are going through massive rounds of layoffs. Will this bring those companies low? There is no reason to assume that Twitter was uniquely loaded with dead weight. In fact, the “influencers” who work at the various tech companies and produce videos of their days certainly indicate that those companies can certainly afford to shed a lot of useless employees and not suffer in the slightest.
Behold Yet Another “day in the life” video that revolved not around actually accomplishing anything, but luxury and eating and eating and eating…
What it’s like to work at Google, watch until the end. pic.twitter.com/9g9N6PeEy6
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 24, 2023
Now, it’s always possible that she was a diligent hard worker who daily added value. But it’s interesting that that aspect of her day got less attention than one snack.
Also of potential interest: here’s her TikTik page. Description: “life, outfits & personal growth journey.” Nothing about actually *accomplishing* anything. Lots of videos of her trying on new bits of clothes or lounging somewhere. Vapid, empty, soulless. The amount of money spent on new outfits seems likely to be immense. Does the TikTok thing bringing in income? I dunno, maybe. Perhaps she’s making buckets of cash through these meaningless videos; if so, good for her. But the skills and abilities needed for that – being an adequate clothes horse – seem wholly unrelated to doing a job at a technology company. Scrolling down and glancing at the videos, none of them seem to display any interest or enthusiasm for coding.
Jan 242023
So California, Gun Free State, has it’s second mass shooting in a handfull of days. And… it’s another old Asian guy.
7 Dead, 1 Injured in Half Moon Bay Mass Shooting; Suspect in Custody
Authorities identified the suspect as 67-year-old Half Moon Bay resident Chunli Zhao.
Also, (apparently) not an Evil Black Rifle:
A semi-automatic handgun was found in his car.
Jan 242023
A 1950’s film describing the “Lobber” rocket from Convair. This was a small battlefield cargo delivery system… rations, medical supplies, ammo, that sort of thing. Kind of a neat idea, but obviously it didn’t go into service. The ability to launch 50 pounds of stuff eight miles just wasn’t that spectacular when cargo planes could para-drop tons of stuff hundreds of miles away, when choppers could zip in and out in the time it would take to pack stuff into the rocket. Today i imagine drones would take on the task… not as fast, but less harsh on the cargo and much more precise.
Note that it is also described as a system capable of delivering *nukes.* Well, any rocket that you can swap out the payload could be a nuclear delivery system if it’s got the capability. Fifty pounds just barely covers it. It would be safer for the launch crew than a Davy Crockett with a range of only a couple miles, but 8 miles is still pretty close. The W54 warhead weighed right about 50 pounds and could yield up to about one kiloton. Eight miles would be a safe distance… so long as the fallout didn’t rain down on your head.