CAPT Robert Truax, USN-ret., RIP

From an obituary in The New York Times:

A contrarian theory of Mr. Truax’s that still captivates rocket experts was his idea that the cost of a rocket had little to with how big a rocket was. He did calculations showing that complexity, not size, drove costs. Hence, his proposed “space truck,” two football fields long but relatively simple in design.

Engineers are always focused on costs, but the focus is usually on operating costs, either materially or financially. How efficient can we make it? This kind of thinking can pay off big time if you are going to make a zillion of whatever it is, but if you are only making one, the cost of doing all the engineering to make something efficient can out-weigh the cost of actually building it.

Via Just An Earth Bound Misfit, who has a video of JATO assisted Hercules takeoff. Title stolen directly from her as well.

MTV 50 Years Ago

50 years ago there was Scopitone, a video jukebox that played 16mm films.


Scopitone ST-36 jukebox
This is what you get from my reading Dustbury.

Update February 2017 replaced missing video. No idea if this is the same one or not. Many more Scopitone videos on YouTube these days featuring beaucoup de jiggling and wiggling.

Pun of the Century

Pun of the last century, that is. Penned by Paul Desmond of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

There was a boy of Italian parentage named Carbaggio, born in Germany. Feeling himself a misfit, with his dark curly hair among all those blond Nordic types, he tries to be even more German than the Germans. In late adolescence he flees to Paris, where he steals one of those brass miniatures of the Eiffel Tower. Arrested by the police, he is given a choice of going to jail or leaving the country. He boards the first outbound ship and arrives in New York. Thinking he would like a career in communications, he goes to the RCA building in Rockefeller Plaza, takes an elevator and walks into the office of General Sarnoff. Sarnoff tells him that the only job available is as a strikebreaker. The boy takes it. When the strike ends, he finds himself on a union blacklist. He goes to work making sonar equipment for a company owned by a man named Harris. After several years, his English has improved to the point where he gets a job as a disk jockey. His show is called Rock Time. He has fulfilled his destiny: he’s a routine Teuton, Eiffel-lootin’, Sarnoff goon from Harris Sonar, Rock Time Carbaggio.

Paul also penned Take Five, a tune I remember from the name. I cannot recall the tune itself, though I would probably remember it if I heard it.

Anyway, I stole this from Dustbury, mostly because it took me a long time to decipher it. I'll put the answer in the comments so as not to spoil it for all you pun fans.

Quote of the Day

This came in response to a complaint I made about a web forum (URL not disclosed to protect the guilty).

There are some issues regarding this new forum, unfortunately, which are either not being looked at, cannot be solved or have yet to be addressed. There's also a general census about the forum layout but however unfortunate[,] it appears that it is hard coded and the layout will not change.

Issues that cannot be solved! I love it! One part of me wants to argue that this is ridiculous, it's a stupid web page, of course it can be bent to our will! It's just a little programming problem. The other part of me realizes that the web page in question is just part of someone's empire and solving the problem may be more of a people problem than a technical one, and in that case, my respondent may very well be correct.

Challenger Puzzle, Part 2

I wasn't real happy with the brute force solution I came up with earlier. I mean, it's a tiny little little puzzle, it shouldn't take hours to solve it with a computer. So I finally sat down and started working on a more workman-like solution. This one solves the puzzle instantly, or as near to no time at all that it makes no difference.

This program starts by filling all the unknown spaces with a median value (5) and then adjusting each one up or down by one depending on the totals it is concerned with. It took 8 iterations to solve the puzzle I was using as a sample, and I think it will probably not need any more for just about any Challenger puzzle.

It is not an elegant solution. It just sort of creeps up on the answer, it doesn't analyze the situation and then compute the answer in one fell swoop. If I start wandering down that road I hope somebody will stop me.

It did take several hours to debug the program. You would think something this small and simple would be a piece of cake, but for some reason keeping rows and columns straight is exceedingly difficult for me. But I finally got it done and posted it on another Code Snippets website. I am not sure whether it's the one for me, but I was able to sign up and post my code quite easily. Their focus seems to be on Mac's, but Mac's are related to Linux, so maybe they will be okay. Their code formatting sucks, as is typical. They use 8 spaces for tabs instead of four, and they chose some gawd-awful gold color for comments, which makes them durn near unreadable. It does not eat backslashes, like some other sites do. This is a good thing.

Anyway the name of the site is Snipplr and you can find the source code for my improved program for solving Challenger puzzles here.

Vorkosigan's Game

Vorkosigan's Gameby Lose McMaster Bujold

Beset by demons, I felt the need for some escapist fantasy, so I ordered up a couple of books from the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. (Does she really need all three names? I would think that any two of them would be enough to identify her.) I ordered them from Amazon. One (Mirror Dance) is a new paperback, $8, and since we have a Prime membership (!?!?), no shipping. The other (Vorkosigan's Game) was a used hardback for $4 plus $4 for shipping. So $8 each, or $16 all told, which is rather more than I like to pay, but I was desperate, and I didn't want to drive anywhere.

Vorkosigan's Game looks like a Book-Of-The-Month-Club edition. It's a hardback, but printed on cheap paper, and it seems to be a combination of parts of two other books. The bigger first half holds The Vor Game, and the smaller second half contains Borders of Infinity, which is really three separate stories:

• The Mountains of Mourning
• Labyrinth
• The Borders of Infinity

joined together by being part of an extended interview of Miles (the protagonist) by his boss. Funny how the title of the third story is surrounded by quote marks, but the other two titles are not (which is just how they appear in the book).

I read this one straight through, but when I started on the second one I lost interest. Demon's pacified, I returned to beating me head against the wall.

Great stuff.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.

King Tut

Steve Martin in his prime. Hulu has a clip of the original SNL skit, preceded by an ad.

How did we get here, you ask? Vell, I tell you. First I ran into The Cleverlys singing I Kissed A Girl on Just An Earthbound Misfit, which was the first time I ever heard of The Cleverlys. I run into them again on Snigs Spot and this leads to Dad's Deadpool Blog where they're singing Walk Like An Egyptian, which is what put me in mind of Senor Martin, even though that line does not appear anywhere in King Tut.