Everest

Joint indo-nepal army team summits mount everest: 20 may 2013

A Joint Expedition of the Indian and Nepal Armies was flagged off from New Delhi by General Bikram Singh, Chief of the Army Staff, on 3rd April 2013 to summit the formidable peak. 20 mountaineers finally stood on the summit of Mount Everest during the early hours of 19th and 20th May 2013 and unfurled the flags of the two nations. 

This achievement came just nine days short of the Diamond Jubilee of the first ascent Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. The two teams began their final push for the summit at around 7 PM on 18th and 19th May 2013 from Camp IV, also known as the South Col, and took about 12 hours to reach the summit. 

This expedition has a special significance, as it has not only summited the highest peak, but also made a contribution towards cleaning it. More than a ton of non-biodegradable waste left on the mountain by generations of climbers has been brought down, making the mountain somewhat cleaner. 

Five Indian Army personnel will also participate in the “Everest Marathon 2013” from GOREKSHEP (17,000 feet) to NAMCHE BAZAAR(11300 Feet) on 29/ 30 May 2013. This is the highest marathon in the world in which participants will cover a distance of 42 KM.

See the little red dots along the ridge line? That's them. Makes me wonder how they got this photo. Helicopters can't go this high. Airplanes yes, but who's going to fly that close? Or hold a telephoto lens that still? I suppose with it's easier with digital cameras, but still, getting this shot was a bit of a trick. Pretty cool. Don't think I've ever heard of any natives climbing the mountain, except as porters for Westerners, which is really kind of dumb, isn't it? From Military Photos dot net

Dentist

They had a new toy at the dentist office this morning: a blood pressure cuff you wear on your wrist. They started taking my blood pressure there last year, or maybe the year before, I don't remember, but this was the first time for a cuff that you wear on your wrist. Fully automatic, put it on, put your arm across your chest and it goes about it's business. Came back with "good" numbers, so I guess I'll live for another day.
    The chair has a built in back massager. It kind of feels like a cat slowly kneading your lower back. A big cat. Best part of my visit.
    After many years, and after talking it over with my friend Jack, I have come to realize dental hygienists come in all flavors. Some are aggressive and will leave you feeling like your jaw has gone ten rounds with Rocky Balboa. Some are slow. A few are really good, quick, efficient and don't expend any more force than necessary. Or maybe I've just gotten better at brushing my teeth. Yeah, right.

The Lone Ranger Rides Again

Disney catches a lot of flak for some of their business practices, and for their hippy-dippy view of life, but dang, they make some fine movies. I used to watch The Lone Ranger religiously when I was a kid, and I've been watching Johnny Depp for years. Depp seems to embody the antithesis of everything Disney stands for. I mean, he is never the character that I expect in a role. OK, I'm shallow, I like the good guys to win, I like shoot-em-ups. This looks likely to be a really great movie.
    P.S. Gratuitous Lone Ranger joke: the Lone Ranger and Tonto are riding across the plains when they are suddenly confronted by an Indian war party. The Lone Ranger looks around and sees Indians to the left, Indians to the right and Indians behind them. He turns to Tonto and says "this doesn't look good, Tonto, we're surrounded by Indians", and Tonto replies "what do you mean 'we' white man?"

Sixto Rodriguez - Sugar Man

Read about this guy in a magazine at the doctor's office. Such a weird story:

Sixto Díaz Rodríguez (...) is an American folk musician based in Detroit, Michigan. His career initially proved short-lived with two little-sold albums in the early 1970s and some brief touring in Australia. Unbeknownst to him, however, his work became extremely successful and influential in South Africa; although, he was mistakenly rumored in that country to have committed suicide.
In the 1990s, determined South African fans managed to seek out and contact him, which led to an unexpected revival of his musical career. 

Update June 2014: Original video clip has disappeared from YouTube. If I recall correctly, the original clip used video from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! This clip also uses video from that same film, though the scenes are different.

Bloodhound SSC

This car was in the news last week. When I first saw it, I thought "ho hum, another jet powered car built only to set a new speed record". Yes, it's basically cool, but what a waste of time and money. Then I read that it has three (3!) engines:

1. A jet engine,
2. a rocket engine, and
3. a conventional automotive internal combustion engine.

Now I'm thinking these guys are just geeking out because, well, someone gave them some money and said "build a really exotic car", and they just went nuts. I mean I can see having a jet or a rocket engine if you are going to attempt these kind of speeds, but why would you need both? And then I thought about it for a bit because they must have some kind of reason for doing this. I mean nobody puts up that much money ($10 million, more or less) just so some guys can geek out. Okay, nobody besides the military anyway. This is what I came up with.

    They want to go 1,000 Miles Per Hour. You aren't going to do that with a wheel driven machine, too many problems with traction and the drive train, so you need a jet or a rocket. Pound for pound, rockets are much more powerful than jet engines, so I figure they are going to use the jet to get somewhere around the speed of sound and then kick in the rocket to get the last few hundred MPH. The rocket engine is a hybrid, which means it uses a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. The benefits here are that you only need one pump for the oxidizer, (conventional liquid fuel rockets have two pumps) and you can turn it off, which could be important if things go haywire. Conventional solid fuel rockets can't be turned off. They burn until they burn out. Pretty much unstoppable.

    The third engine, the automobile engine is used only to drive the oxidizer pump for the rocket engine. Rockets consume a great deal of fuel very quickly, and when you are pumping fuel into the combustion chamber you need to overcome the pressure of the combustion that is trying to force it's way out. The only reason you can succeed in this endeavor is that the volume you are forcing in is very small compared to the volume of gas that is trying to escape. Regular rocket engines using turbines to drive the pumps, but turbine engines are very expensive. They are also very light weight and weight isn't so important for this project, so a conventional, relatively inexpensive engine is the ticket here.

    The reason they are using a jet for the initial acceleration is that rockets consume a great deal of fuel, so by using a jet they are able to reduce the size of the rocket engine and it's associated fuel tank.

    That leaves the question of why they are using a rocket at all. I mean jet fighter aircraft routinely reach speeds well in excess of 1,000 MPH, so why not just use the jet engine and dispense with the rocket? I can think of two possible reasons for this. One is aerodynamics. Jet aircraft are operating far from the ground. Being this close to the ground and trying to go this fast could be problematic. The other is that in order to get the thrust they need, they might need an afterburner, and afterburners are big and inefficient. Including an afterburner would probably double the length of the car. Take that and combine it with additional jet fuel you would need to carry and it might be that a rocket engine is more efficient.

Forces Spéciales

I'm not too sure about this movie. On one hand I want to say the French Special Forces were very well done. On the other hand the story might be a bit far fetched. We (and by "we" I mean Western civilization, in this case the French) drop a squad into Pakistan to rescue a kidnapped (blond, beautiful, female) reporter from the evil Taliban. One of the bad guys takes it personally that his captive has been rescued and he sends a hundred gun men in pursuit. The good guy's radios get busted, they get cut off from their pickup point, and end up having to hoof it over the mountains into Afghanistan. It takes them 12 days, 12 days of running gun battles. I lost track of how many bad guys they shot. It's 82 miles from Peshawar to Jalalabad. I know walking over the mountains can be slow going, but how did the bad guys get ahead of them?
    There were several scenes where the camera is moving in a circle around the people which gives kind of a whirling effect to the background. Once or twice is more than enough. They kind of overdid it here. A few more long distance landscape shots would not have been out of place. Afghanistan is some of most hostile terrain on Earth.

Microwave Bacon

I like bacon, and I really like the giant Costco economy pack of precooked bacon. Just throw a couple three strips on a plate in the microwave and 15 seconds later, presto! Bacon, ready to eat. Not only is it quick, it's doesn't make a huge mess, and the best part is I am not stuck wondering what to do with the left over grease. My mom used to save it in a can. Presumably she did something with it, but I never found out what. All I knew is that she saved it. Everybody warns you not to pour grease down the drain, but I figure if you run enough hot water afterwards it will get flushed away, especially since we have those new fangled plastic drain pipes that aren't going to suck the heat out of the water like the old cast iron ones would. But here Kirkland/Costco is taking care of that problem for me. Presumably, being an economy minded business they would find some use for all that bacon grease, so I am not being just a self-centered piggish consumer, I am also helping to save the environment, er, bacon grease. I wonder what they do with it.
    I have been using a regular ceramic plate to heat the bacon on, and fifteen seconds would be enough to get it hot. Our dishwasher broke down a couple of days ago so today I used a paper plate and I had to heat the bacon for 25 seconds to get it hot. I would think that a paper plate would not have that kind of effect. The ceramic plate is Corelle, a glass plate from Corning, and they get as hot or hotter than the food placed on them. This generally is okay as it helps keep the food warm. A regular, microwave safe plate that does not get hot will suck the heat out of the food making your meal cold quicker. I have seen paper plates catch fire in the microwave, so I suppose the paper could be absorbing more energy than the ceramic, but I have never noticed them getting that hot, except when they actually catch on fire.