Just another retired engineer wandering around the cold, cold wilderness trying to find whatever's left of my witless country.
Another good speech, wherein President Trump reiterated that the Second Amendment ain’t going anywhere. (Reconstituted from an earlier post which got lost during a system transfer. Apologies to those who lost their comments.)
(This is a reconstruction. I have not gone to the effort of reformatting it again from its original shape, copied from a commenter under another blog who graciously gave me permission to repost it here.) Once upon a time I met an old man in the old country, formerly a small farmer with a couple […]
This is a repost of an earlier post that got lost in our system. For all those who are watching this kind of thing, SpaceX is launching a cargo F9 to the International Space Station on Wednesday, at the inconvenient time of 3:59 am EDT (1400 GMT), May 1st. They did the standard live fire […]
This is a fascinating look inside a Soviet Typhoon-class submarine. I don’t know whether the evident condition of this tub is because it’s mothballed, or just because that’s how Russians do things (some of the pictures indicate clearly-active equipment, odd). If this is normal, then I have a greater respect for the skill (or stupidity) […]
It’s easy to forget that Sierra Nevada Corporation has been beavering away for quite some time to develop a man-rated spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. However, short of a landing gear failure during a test in 2013, they are progressing along a path that may see them delivering cargo to the […]
That didn’t take long. Architectural expert Tom Wilkinson has called for replacing the spire of Notre Dame with — a minaret. Writing in Domus, he says: …what about the approximately 100 Algerians who were killed by the French police while protesting the Algerian War in 1961, many of them thrown into the Seine at the […]
The Sikorsky-Boeing “Defiant” is one of the entries in a demonstration competition to select a new helicopter with more performance than existing platforms. From InterestingEngineering(do)com: The Defiant is just one entry into the plan to replace the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. Despite its successful career since the 1980s the U.S Army has decided to hunt for […]
…here is a thread on NASASpaceFlight that is built around that topic: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=48003.0 I am too tired to find an appropriate “featured image” for this.
During a test of the crew mission-abort systems today, the Crew Dragon capsule apparently had a major mishap. It is unclear at this time how much damage occurred, but much orange smoke was seen. Commenter billybeer at Ars Technica says: Color of the smoke in those photos is indicative of the dinitrogen tetroxide. Current rumor […]
A command that was uploaded to the lander in an attempt the correct an error with the inertial navigation unit inadvertently shut off the main engine in a way that kept it from being restartable. The probe crashed on the Moon’s surface at 310 miles per hour, unpowered. Image from Beresheet from 15km altitude This […]
A lot of cartoons like this are floating up in the swamps of the internet, after the events of the past week. However, as true as this is, the socialist left isn’t the root cause. We are. We didn’t educate our children. We didn’t ensure that our children educated their children. We got fat and […]
And while we’re at the REO jukebox, here’s a full concert, from 2001:
An excellent column today by Dennis Prager speaks the truth about what is happening to France, Europe, and Western Civilization. It is well worth the read. Excerpt: With the end of World War II, every internal Western intellectual doctrine was secular. God, the Bible and religion were regarded at best as innocuous nonsense and at […]
This post is for those who have acquired the Joe Dan intellectually-acquired taste, here’s a link. YouTube banned him, and the UGETube links don’t embed here as videos (but we do get this little web page summary instead of just a link — interesting, you learn something new every day around here). https://intellectualfroglegs.com/the-tables-turned/ This is […]