Just another retired engineer wandering around the cold, cold wilderness trying to find whatever's left of my witless country.
This is an incredible story, and goes to show that you never know what you can do, until you do it. On purpose, or not. UPDATE: Troy Stephens has this video in a comment below. I thought it deserved to be up here. Beautiful song, beautiful bird.
NASA’s Insight probe landed successfully on Mars on November 26th, 2018, after journeying across space for six and a half months. Its name is yet another horrible mashup of word salad that NASA is famous for, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. There were two main instruments the lander was to […]
Here is another singer who was ubiquitous on the radio in the late-60s/early 70s, and has since been largely forgotten. This is the song she is most remembered for: But, this is the one that bugged me my entire adult life, until the advent of a well-populated YouTube allowed me to finally remember who sang […]
Here is a fascinating video that shows just how advanced Werner von Braun and the German Nazi state were 75 years ago. In some ways, we are still catching up. One thing we have learned, however, is that it isn’t really a good idea to steer the rocket thrust by putting vanes in the exhaust […]
As far as I know, this is the first robot that Boston Dynamics has actually designed to play a useful and salable role in industry. From Boston Dynamics (appears under the YouTube on its native page): Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after […]
I’ve had this floating around in a folder for awhile now, and apparently I had forgotten to post it. Read on to find the true secret of the sky. The estimable xkcd, of course.
I’m just going to steal these directly from HumanMars(dot)net — and I’m desperately anxious to see this in real life. The shape reflected here represents our best estimate of what Starship will look like. The company’s descriptions are settling down into a system with fewer announced changes, which implies that they are moving from design […]
Here is a place to keep an eye on how events are moving towards the next launch of the Falcon Heavy. I’m not certain if the updates will continue all the way to the actual launch. https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/04/01/falcon-heavy-arabsat-6a-preparations/ They have a live video feed, but (like other sites we know) you have to be a paying […]
Patricia McCarthy, writing in American Thinker this morning, asks a very pertinent question: “Why do the least-bright people rise to the top?” She is more generous than I would be, as I would ask, “Why do stupid, loathesome, evil people rise to the top?” — but then again, she has a public forum and probably […]
I’m not certain why, but the most active model rocket clubs seem to be in the Czech Republic, or Russia, or somewhere in Eastern Europe. Perhaps a leftover from the Cold War and ICBMs? Whatever the reason, they make some seriously decent models. Here is a video of a three-stage rocket, with a presentation worthy […]
Steppenwolf was everywhere in the air in the early 70s, but I was never able to put a face to the lead singer, John Kay. This live performance rectifies that. John Kay was born in 1944 as Joachim Fritz Krauledat. Somehow that fits him better. He was too young to appreciate the rather exciting time […]
Last year, in its first flight, the Falcon Heavy three-stick launch vehicle boosted Elon Musk’s personal red Tesla into space (not everybody appreciated the élan that Elon demonstrated in using his car instead of a big block of cement). It went beyond the orbit of Mars (slightly) and will be orbiting the Sun in strange […]
It is sometimes easy to forget that Poland had a bit of a Navy when Hitler invaded them (after faking a Polish attack on a German radio station). This Navy actually fought back for awhile.
American media continue to focus almost exclusively on Mueller, Mueller, Mueller, Trump, Russia, Mueller. While we dither aimlessly, the invasion continues at the Southern border. A new study by the Pew Research Center reveals that the numbers are higher than they’ve ever been. John Binder wrote in Breitbart yesterday [emphasis mine]: The Pew Research Center […]
This is an interesting discussion of (in Levin’s words) “…the greatest political scandal, if not in modern history, in all history, and I’m very much a historian.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKgLgohQYDw