I wish they’d put in some estimate of how fast that satellite is orbiting. An off the cuff estimate is four miles per hour or less, but IANASS (I am not a space scientist) by far.
An environment where orbital mechanics operate at at a walking pace — truly weird.
Lol!
I just got another— IMPACTor…as in, while bending over to get some groceries, I had the door blow shut behind me and a heavy ceramic hit me head! It raised quite a lump!
Todd Lockwood has just started the cover for Peacemaker!
Heard on the news some crazy person sent ricin tainted letters from a Post Office in Spokane. I expect they’ll try to clean it up, but I suppose contamination is possible.
Oh, they got him. We have our own patented crazies. There was a major nest of them over in n. Idaho, 10 years ago, the Aryan Nation compound, til they decided to shoot at a lady driving past their front gate, as I recall…by the time the law was through with them, they lost their land and buildings. Unfortunately it did condense a little collection of bigots and nutcases over there; in Oregon, you have the tag ends of the Maharesh Yogi’s little coerced utopia. Down in Oklahoma, we lived next to The Sword and the Arm of the Lord, which is a virulent little barbed wire haven over in the bootheel of Arkansas: that lot spawned Timothy McVay. The one up in Michigan hatched Nichols, his accomplice. And in Tennessee there is a very scary collection of skinheads who get out on I-40 and try to intimidate out of state traffic. These groups are a blight and a lasting problem. The Human Heritage Party has more than one counterpart.
Most honest folk in this country don’t realize that Nazism was not limited to Europe: there was a very lively branch over here that, unlike the one in Europe, was not rooted out. We’ve still got it, and it hides in little rural compounds, still gives the Nazi salute, wears the swastika or the white hoods, venerates Hitler, and arms itself to the teeth, and unfortunately they claim the constitutional right to do so: they dream of a day of disorder in which they will be the only game in town. I don’t think an armed and hostile group has a constitutional right to set up a barbed wire compound, restrict access by state and federal authorities, intimidate their neighbors from political or judicial action opposing them, and salute an enemy flag, but hey, the theory is they have the right to do that. In much of the south there is real and constant fear of these guys. Write a letter to the editor in many towns and you fear vandalism, or worse, accidents on the highway. That’s how it works. Nasty, nasty stuff.
Yeah, I remember when that crowd was in Hayden Lake.
I attribute it to ignorance of, hence a mistaken imagining of, what this country is “about.” Americans tend to imagine they are each of them individually soverign–that’s what “freedom” means. The preamble of the Constitution begins “We the people”, not “I” or “Each of us” or some such thing. Absent The Bible(1), the Constitution is probably one of the most misquoted (“A well regulated militia being necessary for the protection of a free state,…”) and misinterpretted documents known to man.
Last year I had to write one of my cousins and ask if she really believes in Democracy. In part, “If you believe in democracy, ACCEPT the results of elections! That’s what democracy is all about. We’ve had our say. It’s over.”
—–
(1) I’ve never understood how someone professing monotheism can present a claim that there is one true God and all others are “false Gods”. OK, the new DSM5 says I’m ASD, maybe that’s why.
Blitzing the spammers again: some of these are getting to be old acquaintances. They try 3x a day. I confess I worry about some of these guys. I hope they’re not paying somebody a penny a hit, because they’re getting ripped off if that’s the case. I do wish one of my buttons was “nuke the user’s server and carry off its livestock,” but I suppose that could have bad uses, so I’ll just do it by hand.
We encourage you to go ‘Conan the Barbarian’ on their okoles. 😀
Ach du lieber mein Gott im Himmel… The bathroom sink faucet began dripping from a worn seat. I found a replacement part and ordered it, only to get a frantic call this morning after I had left for work. The faucet handle broke off, and water started spewing until DH turned off the valve under the sink. Between replacing that and the repairs I will need to do to my car’s bumper (someone backed into it and shattered the 20 year old plastic cover) I have a full weekend. And that doesn’t include the quilt I need to finish for a baby shower at the end of the month. Oy.
Really does she have a book by that title? You can’t copyright titles (Rob Sawyer and I have bumped titles before, on Foreigner) but I thought I knew most of Rowling’s titles.
You can’t trademark a word except in a specific application, as for instance, a trademark on Hell would apply only to the specific vision of it in a literary work or game board, and while Marauder’s Map could be trademarked, marauder couldn’t, except in contexst. Marauder is a word that’s been in the English language since the 1700’s, from the French ‘maraud,’ bad fellow or rascal, and was often applied to pirates.
Yeah, I think people tend to associate uncommon words like “marauder” with the only or first context in which they heard them. “Marauder” puts ME in mind of killer robots in a late-1980’s novel by Gregory Benford…
Different topic, but:
I’ve recently started work on a science fiction story, and visited a local group that’s involved in model rocketry to do a little background research. I’ve had a small interest in it for years, but never quite enough to do anything about it. I had started looking at beginner kits, and I let them enter me for a door prize; a model rocket kit. To my complete surprise, I won. Now, they all want to see me build and launch the thing. What have I done to myself?
SUper neat! Good luck!
My parents only prevented me from two projects in my life: making my own lead soldiers with at about Cajeiri’s age…and model rocketry when I was in high school. Their word was that they drew the line at molten metal and explosives.
“The asteroid belt has a billion times more platinum than is found on Earth. There is literally a billion times the metal that is on the Earth, and all the water you could ever need.”
“The idea is you start with resources out of Earth’s gravity well in the vicinity of the Earth… But what we argued is that you can establish industry in space for a surprisingly low cost, much less than anybody previously thought.”
“We showed you can get it down to launching 12 tons of hardware, which is incredibly small.”
The precious metals investors aren’t going to like this!
As a child, I was interested in Jules Verne, Heinlein’s juveniles, Andre Norton, and Star Trek. Gemini and Apollo were in the news; I was rather put out when my small-town school would neither let us out to watch the Apollo 11 landing nor show it themselves. Over the years I watched with dismay as NASA morphed into a rule-and-paper bound bureaucracy and one promising project after another fell into the rathole of congressional politics and died there. I developed interests in mathematics and the harder sciences, but I couldn’t get over the obstacles between me and an engineering degree.
I never much saw the economic sense of going to the trouble of building immensely powerful and complicated rocket engines, and then dumping them into the ocean. I started following reusable launch vehicles and private development efforts, and have ideas along those lines, but alas, not the resources to put them into practice. My dad did model building as a hobby, but he was never much interested in space; he drifted in the direction of miniatures, rather than vehicles. I’m sort of slowly ambling along behind my characters (who are richer, better educated, handier, and more socially connected than I am.)
I think if we had given NASA budget enough, we would definitely be better off—we assembled some of the best talent in the world, and then the beancounters like Proxmire started gnawing away at the program because Proxmire, who was no genius, could not understand that geniuses need to play—outrageously need to—in order to create: their ‘toys’ and ‘jokes’ are worth more than a hundred Proxmires, in the long run, unless you give a single Proxmire news coverage and a constituency who doesn’t ‘get it’…
I wish we had gone with the ground-to-orbit winged vehicle.
My almost first job out of college was working at North American Aviation’s Space Division as a Materials and Processes Engineer. We made the Apollo Command Module. Mostly we analyzed test results for adhesives and wrote specifications for using them, strength’s at various temperatures, etc.
I was/am disgusted with those like Proxmire (yes, I do remember) who spoke as though the astronauts took the money with them in a suitcase and set fire to it on the moon. No, it paid my rent and vittles, thank you very much.
In 7th grade Social Studies, each of us had to do a federal spending budget — I think the teacher must have said, “this is what the government spent this year on these major categories: how would you do it?” I remember halving the military and then funding NASA and social services to my heart’s content, no problem. Wouldn’t work in reality then (~1972) and alas not now either but I still remember the lesson. That and the “aha” moment I got when I realized Nixon (I think it was, which really dates me) saying he had brought down the rate of inflation (from ~7%), which everyone was very concerned about, didn’t actually mean that prices were dropping but rather that they weren’t rising as fast. That seemed to me an important distinction which the media and politicians weren’t making.
I wish they’d put in some estimate of how fast that satellite is orbiting. An off the cuff estimate is four miles per hour or less, but IANASS (I am not a space scientist) by far.
An environment where orbital mechanics operate at at a walking pace — truly weird.
OT confounder
Lol!
I just got another— IMPACTor…as in, while bending over to get some groceries, I had the door blow shut behind me and a heavy ceramic hit me head! It raised quite a lump!
Todd Lockwood has just started the cover for Peacemaker!
earthshaker, heartbreaker, dreammaker, penetrator, descriminator, demarcator, deliniater, mapmaker
Heard on the news some crazy person sent ricin tainted letters from a Post Office in Spokane. I expect they’ll try to clean it up, but I suppose contamination is possible.
Oh, they got him. We have our own patented crazies. There was a major nest of them over in n. Idaho, 10 years ago, the Aryan Nation compound, til they decided to shoot at a lady driving past their front gate, as I recall…by the time the law was through with them, they lost their land and buildings. Unfortunately it did condense a little collection of bigots and nutcases over there; in Oregon, you have the tag ends of the Maharesh Yogi’s little coerced utopia. Down in Oklahoma, we lived next to The Sword and the Arm of the Lord, which is a virulent little barbed wire haven over in the bootheel of Arkansas: that lot spawned Timothy McVay. The one up in Michigan hatched Nichols, his accomplice. And in Tennessee there is a very scary collection of skinheads who get out on I-40 and try to intimidate out of state traffic. These groups are a blight and a lasting problem. The Human Heritage Party has more than one counterpart.
Most honest folk in this country don’t realize that Nazism was not limited to Europe: there was a very lively branch over here that, unlike the one in Europe, was not rooted out. We’ve still got it, and it hides in little rural compounds, still gives the Nazi salute, wears the swastika or the white hoods, venerates Hitler, and arms itself to the teeth, and unfortunately they claim the constitutional right to do so: they dream of a day of disorder in which they will be the only game in town. I don’t think an armed and hostile group has a constitutional right to set up a barbed wire compound, restrict access by state and federal authorities, intimidate their neighbors from political or judicial action opposing them, and salute an enemy flag, but hey, the theory is they have the right to do that. In much of the south there is real and constant fear of these guys. Write a letter to the editor in many towns and you fear vandalism, or worse, accidents on the highway. That’s how it works. Nasty, nasty stuff.
Yeah, I remember when that crowd was in Hayden Lake.
I attribute it to ignorance of, hence a mistaken imagining of, what this country is “about.” Americans tend to imagine they are each of them individually soverign–that’s what “freedom” means. The preamble of the Constitution begins “We the people”, not “I” or “Each of us” or some such thing. Absent The Bible(1), the Constitution is probably one of the most misquoted (“A well regulated militia being necessary for the protection of a free state,…”) and misinterpretted documents known to man.
Last year I had to write one of my cousins and ask if she really believes in Democracy. In part, “If you believe in democracy, ACCEPT the results of elections! That’s what democracy is all about. We’ve had our say. It’s over.”
—–
(1) I’ve never understood how someone professing monotheism can present a claim that there is one true God and all others are “false Gods”. OK, the new DSM5 says I’m ASD, maybe that’s why.
On a more OT note:
http://news.yahoo.com/photos/mars-rat-taking-internet-storm-photo-232339443.html?format=embed#mediaphotosbobaspotlightgallery=%2Flightbox%2Fmars-rat-taking-internet-storm-photo-232339443.html
I wonder what the actual size of that rock is?
(Do the crazies have any clue what conditions on Mars are?)
The tiny version of the Face on Mars?
“Paredolia” is the word, I believe.
Blitzing the spammers again: some of these are getting to be old acquaintances. They try 3x a day. I confess I worry about some of these guys. I hope they’re not paying somebody a penny a hit, because they’re getting ripped off if that’s the case. I do wish one of my buttons was “nuke the user’s server and carry off its livestock,” but I suppose that could have bad uses, so I’ll just do it by hand.
We encourage you to go ‘Conan the Barbarian’ on their okoles. 😀
Ach du lieber mein Gott im Himmel… The bathroom sink faucet began dripping from a worn seat. I found a replacement part and ordered it, only to get a frantic call this morning after I had left for work. The faucet handle broke off, and water started spewing until DH turned off the valve under the sink. Between replacing that and the repairs I will need to do to my car’s bumper (someone backed into it and shattered the 20 year old plastic cover) I have a full weekend. And that doesn’t include the quilt I need to finish for a baby shower at the end of the month. Oy.
OTOH, I’ve just found some plugins that will enable a lasting ban on my return spammers. I’m investigating this notion.
Earthshaker and Marauder are neat titles… 😉
Only if JK Rowling hasn’t copyrighted the word Marauder? I suppose she wouldn’t have as it is a word in normal English use.
Really does she have a book by that title? You can’t copyright titles (Rob Sawyer and I have bumped titles before, on Foreigner) but I thought I knew most of Rowling’s titles.
I think they are thinking about the Marauder’s Map that belonged to Harry’s dad and his friends. But surely she didn’t even trademark that, did she?
You can’t trademark a word except in a specific application, as for instance, a trademark on Hell would apply only to the specific vision of it in a literary work or game board, and while Marauder’s Map could be trademarked, marauder couldn’t, except in contexst. Marauder is a word that’s been in the English language since the 1700’s, from the French ‘maraud,’ bad fellow or rascal, and was often applied to pirates.
Yeah, I think people tend to associate uncommon words like “marauder” with the only or first context in which they heard them. “Marauder” puts ME in mind of killer robots in a late-1980’s novel by Gregory Benford…
Different topic, but:
I’ve recently started work on a science fiction story, and visited a local group that’s involved in model rocketry to do a little background research. I’ve had a small interest in it for years, but never quite enough to do anything about it. I had started looking at beginner kits, and I let them enter me for a door prize; a model rocket kit. To my complete surprise, I won. Now, they all want to see me build and launch the thing. What have I done to myself?
SUper neat! Good luck!
My parents only prevented me from two projects in my life: making my own lead soldiers with at about Cajeiri’s age…and model rocketry when I was in high school. Their word was that they drew the line at molten metal and explosives.
“Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of the Space Industry and Solar System Civilization”:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130530144807.htm
“The asteroid belt has a billion times more platinum than is found on Earth. There is literally a billion times the metal that is on the Earth, and all the water you could ever need.”
“The idea is you start with resources out of Earth’s gravity well in the vicinity of the Earth… But what we argued is that you can establish industry in space for a surprisingly low cost, much less than anybody previously thought.”
“We showed you can get it down to launching 12 tons of hardware, which is incredibly small.”
The precious metals investors aren’t going to like this!
Heck, I saw something recently about a “carbon dwarf” star. “Like a diamond in the sky…”
Lucy in the sky with diamonds?
They certainly wouldn’t.
As a child, I was interested in Jules Verne, Heinlein’s juveniles, Andre Norton, and Star Trek. Gemini and Apollo were in the news; I was rather put out when my small-town school would neither let us out to watch the Apollo 11 landing nor show it themselves. Over the years I watched with dismay as NASA morphed into a rule-and-paper bound bureaucracy and one promising project after another fell into the rathole of congressional politics and died there. I developed interests in mathematics and the harder sciences, but I couldn’t get over the obstacles between me and an engineering degree.
I never much saw the economic sense of going to the trouble of building immensely powerful and complicated rocket engines, and then dumping them into the ocean. I started following reusable launch vehicles and private development efforts, and have ideas along those lines, but alas, not the resources to put them into practice. My dad did model building as a hobby, but he was never much interested in space; he drifted in the direction of miniatures, rather than vehicles. I’m sort of slowly ambling along behind my characters (who are richer, better educated, handier, and more socially connected than I am.)
I think if we had given NASA budget enough, we would definitely be better off—we assembled some of the best talent in the world, and then the beancounters like Proxmire started gnawing away at the program because Proxmire, who was no genius, could not understand that geniuses need to play—outrageously need to—in order to create: their ‘toys’ and ‘jokes’ are worth more than a hundred Proxmires, in the long run, unless you give a single Proxmire news coverage and a constituency who doesn’t ‘get it’…
I wish we had gone with the ground-to-orbit winged vehicle.
My almost first job out of college was working at North American Aviation’s Space Division as a Materials and Processes Engineer. We made the Apollo Command Module. Mostly we analyzed test results for adhesives and wrote specifications for using them, strength’s at various temperatures, etc.
I was/am disgusted with those like Proxmire (yes, I do remember) who spoke as though the astronauts took the money with them in a suitcase and set fire to it on the moon. No, it paid my rent and vittles, thank you very much.
In 7th grade Social Studies, each of us had to do a federal spending budget — I think the teacher must have said, “this is what the government spent this year on these major categories: how would you do it?” I remember halving the military and then funding NASA and social services to my heart’s content, no problem. Wouldn’t work in reality then (~1972) and alas not now either but I still remember the lesson. That and the “aha” moment I got when I realized Nixon (I think it was, which really dates me) saying he had brought down the rate of inflation (from ~7%), which everyone was very concerned about, didn’t actually mean that prices were dropping but rather that they weren’t rising as fast. That seemed to me an important distinction which the media and politicians weren’t making.