A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
It seems my LPR classmate Jory Taylor had a run-in last week with a Code Pink wacko Holtzman intern.
The Holtzman campaign later “apologized” for the incident, saying “We’re sorry the girls in our campaign beat up the boys in their campaign”. I predict there will be no end of the ribbing at our next meeting…heh.
Oh now, this looks like fun: Inside Two ‘Star Wars’ Projects. Looks like ABL might be obsolete (in that it uses a chemical laser) before it ever flies.
What’s really interesting in this article, though, is not so much the technology as it is the approach that’s being used to develop it. By pursuing reasonable milestones at a measured pace instead of trying to jump to an all-up weapons system from a blank sheet of paper, the Pentagon is having much more success than they did the first time around, and for significantly less money. Granted, the new technology builds on what was developed in the original incarnation of “Star Wars”, and technology in general has progressed dramatically in the past fifteen years, but the development strategy is no less sensible for that — look at what happened with Shuttle, for instance, where a huge all-at-once leap was taken with immature technologies.
And as for applications, it looks like the FEL is already finding potential uses in the chip industry:
The free-electron laser is a special kind of laser with the advantage that its beam can be tuned through a wide range of frequencies in much the same way that you can dial up different frequencies on a radio.
Because the silicon/hydrogen system has been intensively studied, the researchers knew the strength of the bond between the silicon and hydrogen atoms. The bonds between atoms act something like an atomic spring. Like tiny springs, they tend to vibrate at certain frequencies and are most likely to absorb light photons that vibrate at these frequencies. As a result, light tuned to these “resonant” frequencies can force the bond to break.
…and possibly the always-on-the-horizon fusion power industry:
They also tested the system on silicon surfaces covered with a mixture of hydrogen and deuterium. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen: Instead of the single proton that hydrogen has as a nucleus, deuterium has a proton and a neutron. It has the same chemical characteristics as hydrogen but it weighs about twice as much. This weight difference means that the silicon-deuterium bond vibrates more slowly than the silicon-hydrogen bond, so the resonant wavelength is very different than for hydrogen-silicon.
Oh joy. New Orleans reelected Mayor Wonka.
And this in particular just boggles my mind:
The former business executive dismissed threats by some business people who said they would leave if Nagin remained in office.
“Business people are predators, and if the economic opportunities are here, they’re going to stay. If not, they’re going to leave,” said Nagin, in his now famous vernacular style. “I don’t worry about that stuff. I think there’s enough interest around the country that we’re going to attract top businesses. …God bless them. I hope they stay, but if they don’t, I’ll send them a postcard.”
Yeah, great attitude, Ray. Those businesses from around the country are just going to…er…flood in, knowing they’re considered parasites and that the mayor won’t lift a finger to encourage them or to improve the lousy-even-before-Katrina business climate of the city. Nice. I guess he expects the city to be able to suck off the fedgov’s teat indefinitely.
Amusingly, given his attitude towards businesspeople, Nagin actually ran as…the guy with a business background:
But during the run-off campaign, Nagin actively courted conservative white voters by emphasizing his business background in contrast to Landrieu, a longtime politician and a member of Louisiana’s equivalent to the Kennedy family.
(There’s a Chappaquiddick joke there, but I’m not going to make it.)
This is really disappointing, if not unexpected.
UPDATE: Will Collier pretty well sums up my own thinking on this.
Saw this at the local grocery store this morning:
This, in Colorado…home of Jay Bennish and Ward Churchill. The arrogance would be breathtaking, if the assertion weren’t so laughable.
Sorry about the unannounced lack of a Pillory last week — I was busy painting, and there just wasn’t much material to lampoon. In the future the Pillory will be posted on alternate Sundays, unless I find some other reliable sources of space and science moonbattery to mine.
- You know you’re down in the dumps when Bruce Gagnon’s “I hate myself and all the world” cri de coeur actually gives you hope — and you’re not one of his critics;
- Everybody’s got their shtick. For Bruce, everything bad in the world ultimately comes back around to the military, which apparently rivals the “International Joooooish Conspiracy” (booga! booga!) in its ubiquitous and nefarious influence. For Elaine, even a semi-coherent rant about NASA’s workforce demographics comes back around to a call to “Arrest Bush!”.
- You never know what to expect when shopping on Amazon for science fiction DVDs [mildly work-unsafe];
- Let’s hope nobody gets ideas about putting this and this together…The Matrix is about the last art life needs to be imitating. Assuming of course that we’re not already soaking in it…
- Yet another suppressed technology coverup. Yawn. (And what’s that about seeing “the guy’s hand move across”? Huh?) [hat tip: Eric C.]
- At least someone involved has finally fessed up that this was a hoax…and how enjoyably bizarre that it is the original model maker revealing the truth in the context of making a duplicate of the “real” dummy for a new movie about the original film.
Who needs Brad and Angelina’s destined-to-be-wretched hack-job on Atlas Shrugged when one can watch it happening in the real world in real time?
Uh-oh…looks like someone needs to take away Bruce Gagnon’s belt and shoelaces:
We all at times feel like all is lost. Global warming is overwhelming….the dolphins committing suicide by the hundreds by beaching themselves is probably happening because they are telling us the ocean is polluted and they can’t stand it any longer…..humans just rush down to the beach and try to shove them back into the water thinking they are doing something noble….or maybe it is the Navy’s underwater sonar that is literally blowing the minds of the dolphins…..but we need the Navy, right? We’ve got to have the big advanced, high tech Navy to protect us from the Chinese…….
Or how about the polar bears that are now drowning because as the icebergs melt they have to swim farther from one iceberg to the next to find their food? We are all complicit in this destruction of life and yet we just go on like nothing is happening….some feel powerless and some just don’t really care anymore.
Some of us are already dead inside….we’ve given up feeling responsible….oh well we say, it was nice while we were here….let the cockroaches take over. And forget about getting upset that Bush is thinking of using a nuclear weapon to hit Iran….?nothing I can do about that? we say to ourselves.
This is what happens when your culture has become militarized….our minds become colonized by the militarists and we just turn everything over to them…..we just give up, the fight goes out of us, and we turn dead inside…..dead people walking around.
It always comes back to the military for Bruce, the way it’s always the Joooooos for other people.
I think he’s trying to say that this despair over the state of the world is a common and widespread sentiment, but it comes across as a statement of his own mental state:
What does it mean to be human? How can I be a real person again? What do I do now?
So what is the solution to the crises Bruce sees all around himself?
To be alive would require that we feel the hurt….that we actually allow the pain and suffering of drowning polar bears to reach into our insides and rip our hearts out…that it would motivate us to skip the car for just one day and hop on the bike…that we might begin to talk with others about creating community housing where we share a home with others, that we share our washing machines, our vacuum cleaners, our cars….that we begin to try to figure out a new way to live on this very fragile Earth……
Maybe by killing the illusions that we live in a democracy, that America is a free and honest country, that technology will save us from the oil crisis, maybe if we allowed those illusions to die we could live again.
Maybe we would become free again if we killed the American dream that the mental colonizers planted in our hearts and brains from our first days in school.
Kill kill kill! Such violent words from a self-professed pacifist. Must be the residual “mental colonization” from his compulsory military service and military-brat childhood leaking out.
On the other hand, maybe he just doesn’t go far enough — if things are really all that desperate, and America is to blame, why stop at killing illusions or killing the American dream if you can eliminate America itself? If everyone in America simply accepted the despair he feels believes they ought to feel and committed suicide, why…the source of all the world’s ills would disappear overnight. All the citizens of the globe could breathe a sigh of relief, join hands for a round of “Kumbayaa”, and build up from the ruins of the physical, ecological, and spiritual devastation wrought by America’s racist colonialist fascist corporatist capitalist system a shiny new utopia, one powered by solar and wind power, where Hoovers and cars are shared with a smile, where folks gather ’round the communal washing machine for conversation in good cheer, where six billion blossoms of brotherly love bloom, freed from all oppression, inequality, and want by the passing of America and Americans from the scene. This paradise on Earth could be real, if only America weren’t standing in the way — America, the font of all things wicked in the world, which in all its history has brought the world nothing but misery and despair, and has never once done anything to justify its shameful existence.
Of course, mass suicide isn’t going to happen — thankfully, most Americans are not like Bruce’s flock, foolish and persuadable (and self-loathing) enough to accept the existential guilt he preaches. Instead of “conversion” of the Military-Industrial Complex™ to the production of mass trainsit railcars and windmills and whatnot, maybe he should be crusading for its conversion into a giant Kevorkian Machine that could administer a national “assisted suicide” as an act of mercy to Gaia and the rest of humanity.
An article last week in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report (sorry, no link) covered Mike Griffin’s speech at the Inside Aerospace symposium, in which he had some interesting things to say about the industry.
“We, the country, don’t get enough back for what we spend” on space, Griffin told attendees of the Inside Aerospace symposium sponsored by the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Space Foundation. “That means we don’t get enough product for the amount of people’s time invested in these activities. We have too many people doing every job we do.”
Note that the “we” here apparently means the aerospace industry, in the context of the comment, rather than NASA.
Since the country is not likely in the future to be willing to spend much more on space than it does now, “if we want to see the space enterprise survive, it can’t continue to cost what it does for what it produces,” he said.
Huh. I wonder how much of this excessive cost-to-product-value relationship has to do with overhead imposed by the customer on the contractors, constant changes in requirements, inconsistent or conflicting requirements, etc.
Griffin pointed to the space shuttle program, which costs $4.5 billion each year to maintain, not counting launches, due to the standing army of people it employs. The time to safeguard new projects such as the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) against such excesses is now, he said. “We can only fix the new things, and we have one chance, and that’s before we start,” he said.
This, on the other hand, is an excellent point, and one I hope NASA keeps in mind throughout the Constellation program. Many of Shuttle’s problems with cost and complexity are the result of shortsighted compromises in the design, which kept short-term or development costs low in exchange for astronomical (!) operations costs over the life of the program.
This is…surprising:
He also said he had the CEV team go through all the “standard NASA boilerplate” in the CEV request for proposals (RFP) prior to its release and “weed out” contractual requirements for deliverables that NASA didn’t think it would need. This delayed the release of the RFP somewhat. A similar process will take place for the CLV RFP and future procurements, he said.
Good grief — while this may be true, if what they gave us was trimmed down, I’d like to know how many more DRDs there would have been had they not “weeded out” the ones they didn’t think they’d need. It’s also worth noting that there were several DRDs that one might have expected NASA would need that weren’t there, and that the consensus is that NASA didn’t do a similar “weeding out” on the CEV requirements generally and is only now adjusting some of those that conflict.
Monday is the 26th anniversary of Operation Eagle Claw — another high point of the unfortunate Carter presidency.
The Wikipedia article claims that the May issue of The Atlantic will have an article on the failed mission by Mark Bowden, of Black Hawk Down fame. The details of the mission ought to make for some interesting reading, as the Wikipedia description of the plan make it seem incredible, in a “They were going to do what?” way.
It was too nice outside to spend the day painting, so I went for a drive.
An area called “Hidden Valley Ranch” south of Mt. Evans (part of which is visible in the distance).
A feature down the road which is apparently called “Lion’s Head”. From further up the road, it looks like a half-size version of Devil’s Tower.
Of course, the price we pay for living in such picturesque surroundings is the risk of fire. This is either part of the area burned by the 2000 High Meadows Fire or the northern extent of the 2002 Hayman Fire.
Damage from the 2002 Hayman Fire, seen through a haze reminiscent of New Orleans in summer. Along the road in this area, the county has put up ‘Barbasol’ signs, reminding visitors via rhyme that all this damage to a forest they admire was the result of a single fire. (No mention of poor forest management practices or heartbreak-induced arson…but I imagine that kind of thing is difficult to fit onto little signposts.)
A storm was moving in, providing some interesting light details. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really planned to go driving around taking pictures, and left all my camera filters at home — this does poor justice to the real view.
This image does a better job of capturing the shafts of light, thanks to some heavy tweaking of the gammas.
The storm that was moving in produced the usual “thundersleet”, which looks a bit like this image from two weeks ago:
(Click on the image and you’ll actually see the falling sleet. The sleet on the ground accumulated in about three minutes, the time it took me to notice it and grab my camera. This is what I get in lieu of thunderstorms, thanks to the altitude and topography.)
And to think that just three weeks ago, downtown Conifer looked like this:
…and I was commuting in this:
|
|