The Blue Marble

The Blue Marble
Yet another Rube Goldberg type marble race track. This one uses some tricks I haven't seen before. As time goes by it seems that people are devising ever more complex arrangements. I wonder what we will see in ten years.

Automation & Big Government

The Hunger Games Society

I had a revelation: automation lead to big government. Automation has lead to a few people making large amounts of money while putting large numbers of other people out of work. Naturally, people wondered what to about this largess, and simultaneously they wondered what are we going to do with all these unemployed people? I know! We'll form a committee to study the issue. And that's how the government grew so big that it took over our lives.

P.S. I dunno nothing about David Icke (the pic and link), but I needed a pic and this one sufficed, so here it is.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

Left: The Malaysian lawyer and activist Grace Subathirai Nathan, whose mother was on board MH370. Right: Blaine Gibson, an American who has mounted a search for debris from the airplane. (William Langewiesche)

William Langewiesche has a story in The Atlantic that summarizes what we know about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which isn't much. He also relates some theories about what happened, all of which he dismisses, except for one, which is pretty grizzly.

The most interesting part is about Blaine Gibson, who had no connection with the flight or the investigation, but took it upon himself to go searching for bits of wreckage washing up on Indian Ocean beaches. Surprisingly he found a bunch. Well, several pieces anyway.

William has nothing good to say about the government of Malaysia, unless you consider, corrupt, incompetent, morons as 'good'.

Via Posthip Scott

DMV

California Bob reports:

So now I'm apparently one of those feeble guys who can barely navigate the DMV to get a driver's license.
My license expired in February. Now they have these "Real ID" licenses that are supposed to be de rigeur for air travel, so I figured I'd get one of those. But they require a trip to DMV. But when I got online to make a DMV appt, the nearest appts were 3 months out.
Long story short my license expired, and I forestalled, but finally got an appt and went to DMV today.  I filled out the app online, collected all my paperwork (passport, SS card, 2 proofs of address, etc), put it in a folder and went to DMV.
When I got there, found I had to read a vision chart.  I should have anticipated this, but didn't, and only had my crappy glasses with me.  Fortunately I passed the eye test.
Then there was a mysterious problem with the computer. Lady called her associate over, and it was determined that the problem was my license was expired for so many months. That means I have to take the written exams -- car + motorcycle.  Ah jeez.
I go to the terminal and take the exams.  Pass the car exam but the MC exam has inscrutable questions about towing trailers and "slow, tight turns" and I fail.  Lady at desk tells me I can take it again (or come back).  I sit down and read the DMV MC primer on my phone.  Back to the terminal, more weirdo questions about "if your throttle sticks..."  Anyway I pass this time.
Something at the end of the test indicates to me that I could have skipped a few questions with no penalty, which I wish I had figured out the first time.
At the end, a victory, my license is being processed and should be here soon.  However I am now depressed, b/c I thought I had prepared pretty well, but only defeated the DMV by the skin of my teeth. Could easily have gone the other way.

some useless information supposed to fire my imagination

The Rolling Stones Satisfaction (I Cant Get No)
Organized retail crime costs retailers nearly $778,000 per $1 billion in sales . . . (don't follow the link, it's crap).

That is less than one-tenth of one percent. The stores could save more by renegotiating the rate that the credit card companies suck off the top.

Note they are talking about organized retail crime, which I suspect means traveling gangs who swoop in and grab a bunch of high dollar items before heading off to the next town. They aren't talking about shoplifting.

Typical mass media, babbling about a small problem that it going to get people stirred up, but isn't going to have a big effect, other than fuck up the lives of people who get stirred up and decide to do something about it and end up getting arrested for assault or worse.

There have always been thieves, and if they are stealing from big box stores, then at least they are not breaking into people's houses. Mostly it's a matter of belief / religion. On one side you have the good citizens who believe theft is bad and who have enough money that they can buy what they need. On the other, we have those don't feel like they are part of society and are going to ignore social conventions in order to get what they feel they deserve. If might be that they have been expelled from society, and it wouldn't have to be for bad behavior, it could be something as common as getting laid off. Or it could be that they have rejected the position that society has offered them. Could be a good reason, or it could be a personality defect.

Via Iaman

P.S. I always thought the line from the song was 'fry my imagination', but I suppose that's what you would get from firing it.

By ? Large

Sailboat

Reading a post about the possible coming attack on Taiwan by Communist China, I notice the phrase 'by in large' which gets my attention because I have always thought of it as 'by and large' but when I say it, it comes out sounding like 'by en large' which could easily be interpreted as 'by in large' even though that's not what I meant. Anyway, it's an old sailing term and means 'generally'.

US Aircraft Carriers

USS Shangri-La Aboard the Aircraft Carrier USS Shangri-La, circa 1962, somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. From the film - Flying Clipper, (1962). With narration by Burl Ives.
The USA has been flying supersonic aircraft from carriers consistently for over 60 years. No one else's record comes anywhere close.

The Grumman F-11 Tiger was the first supersonic jet fighter to operate from an aircraft carrier. They started in 1956. Of the aircraft in the video, the Skyhawk is notable (in my mind) because Argentina had a bunch of them. The other jet fighter in the video is the F-8 Crusader. I seem to recall having a model of one when I was a kid. It wasn't a particularly good-looking aircraft, but it was certainly capable. John Glenn made the first super-sonic cross country flight in a Crusader in 1957. Along the way he refueled from propeller driven AJ Savage tankers. He would have had to slow down to hook up with the tankers since they weren't able to go that fast. I suspect no one has tried to perform in-flight refueling at super-sonic speeds.

The photo reconnaissance version of the Crusader was sent to take some pictures of the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis. The F-101 Voodoo was also sent. The Voodoo was a land based airplane and was not designed to work with aircraft carriers.

The Crusader had 'variable-incidence' wings, which means the wing was mounted on a pivot so that the angle of attack could be changed to make it possible for the pilot to see where he was going and allow the aircraft to fly slow enough to land on a carrier.

Watching the video, I noticed that right at the beginning of the catapult launch, a flap across the big air inlet under the nose opens up. Didn't find any explanation for it.


US Aircraft Carriers
At the start of WW2, we had eight aircraft carriers. During the course of the war, we built another 26. After the war, construction slowed down for a few years, but then in 1955 it picked up again and we've been building them pretty consistently ever since. We currently have eleven aircraft carriers. At a million dollars a day each, it's costing the average American family of four about a dollar a week to keep them all running.

I haven't figured out how to get the date to display across the bottom of the above chart, so I made up a little table to show the corresponding dates.


Correspondence of Days & Dates


Via daily timewaster

More aircraft carrier posts here.