Oct 202022
 

So some European protestors – never mind what they’re protesting or why, because it hardly matters – decided that the thing to do was glue themselves to the floor of a VW dealership in Germany. The dealerships response? Close the doors, turn off the lights, turn off the furnace.

That’s a good response. I imagine their maintenance and cleaning staff will be able to clean up the inevitable yellow and brown stains and freshen the air. Keep the doors locked. Don’t let anyone in to provide the protestors food or drink or solvents; let them peel themselves up and seek their own medical attention.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 6:05 pm
Oct 202022
 

Seems unlikely, but…

Deranged Putin has ALREADY tried to detonate nuclear bomb but was scuppered in last-minute ‘sabotage’, insider claims

The article seems distinctly lean on actual details and evidence. Claim is made that *two* attempts to test nuclear weapons – including an underwater test in the Barents Sea –  were aborted due to emergencies of some kind, actually caused by people somewhere in the chain realizing that the whole idea was nuts. How the quoted “expert” would know this is unclear.

I can see Putin deciding to set off nukes as a show of force. I can see his own people sabotaging the effort, because they don’t want their families to be evaporated. But while such events are plausible, I’d need evidence before I believed they actually happened. And the thing is, incidents like this will almost certainly never have adequate evidence… until an actual bomb actually goes off.

In any event, I’m glad that some time back I got me a functional radiation detector.

 Posted by at 12:59 pm
Oct 192022
 

Ronald Reagan chats with a Nazi in “Desperate Journey:”

 

The dialog from IMDB:

 

 Posted by at 2:36 pm
Oct 182022
 

From the long irrelevant ACLU, dated June 11, 2020:

Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer

So how’s that going? Let’s check in with CNN (September 25, 2022):

Once nicknamed ‘Murderapolis,’ the city that became the center of the ‘Defund the Police’ movement is grappling with heightened violent crime

Shocking. Who, I ask you, who could have possibly foreseen that defunding, abusing, disparaging the police would embolden the criminals?

 Posted by at 8:52 pm
Oct 182022
 

Ukrainian police use AK-47s (or maybe AK-74s, I can’t tell) to try to take out Russian anti-civilian buzz bombs. The *claim* is that they shot one down, but that’s hard to determine form the footage… it could well be that the thing just crashed where it did because that’s where it was aimed. They really need to get Tom Selleck on the case.

The Ukrainians, as unlucky as they’ve been, are lucky that they didn’t defund the police and replace them with social workers. I’m not sure that clipboards and unearned moral smugness would de-escalate an incoming raid of kamikaze drones.

 Posted by at 8:39 pm
Oct 182022
 

A rotary cell phone where a lot of the functionality is mechanical. It’s a real device that is available for pre-order as a kit, for a price that seems remarkably reasonable ($390). Since it is not manufactured by a major phone or electronics company, I imagine that you’ll be SOL if anything goes wrong with it, especially electronically or with the software… customer support and repair seem like they’d be a challenge. But as a neato knickknack, it seems… neato.

 

Rotary Un-Smartphone Kit

 

 Posted by at 6:47 pm
Oct 182022
 

Here’s a look at Book 4. Some of the diagrams I do are completed in just a few hours. Some take considerably longer… several to many man-days, sometimes spread out over months as I dial in details. This one was sort of mid-range. The most complex and time consuming are typically the diagrams of aircraft that were actually built… those have to be accurate, and more details are available. This one is of an unbuilt aircraft that is reasonably well documented, but was a configuration that was in a constant state of design flux.

 Posted by at 1:52 pm
Oct 182022
 

BU researchers create hybrid COVID virus, causing friction with the government

The “new” version is deadlier (at least to mice). Now, I can see value in such work… create a nasty variant so you can *cure* or create a vaccine against said nasty variant before it pops up naturally or is created and weaponized by an antagonistic nation. Still: you might wanna kinda be careful about that sort of thing. If for no other reason than it makes for bad PR. Numerous news stories point out that this hybrid killed 80% of the mice infected with it. That’s bad. Fewer news stories point out that the original natural virus killed 100% of the mice infected with it. So it’s the kind of story that can be turned scary by dropping a bit of context. And science stories *always* lose context, because journalists seem to be a rather dim bunch, resistant to understanding the subjects they report on. So if you are a scientist working on something as touchy as this… maybe take a moment to reflect “Is this the sort of thing I should be doing, and if so, maybe I should have a really clear layman-level explanation ready to go.”

 

 Posted by at 12:20 am