Snow in Crete

Souda Bay, Greece, January 28, 2015. A Hellenic air force F-16 fighter aircraft on the flightline. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Joe W. McFadden.

Guess it's not that unusual. There's always snow on the mountain peaks, it's just a matter of how low it goes during the winter.

Girls with Guns

Colombo, Sri Lanka, February 4, 2015. Sri Lanka's women police officers march during Independence Day celebrations.

US Navy's got Wormholes!

Aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis transits through a rainbow. U.S. Navy Photo by Ignacio D. Perez.

Cristina goes to China

Beijing, (Red) China, February. 4, 2015. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez waves as she walks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

The USA's Foreign Policy doesn't make much sense to me. I will admit the world is complicated and there are many forces at play, so there could be good reasons for doing some of things that at first glance appear to be completely boneheaded.
    However, the way it looks to me is that the imperialist Running Dogs [tm] have been running the show and they have made a complete mess of it. Which is why China, tyrannical, evil, China, is making so many friends these days. It helps that their pockets are full of good old Western style loot, loot which they have obtained through slave-like exploitation of their people. But slavery is traditional and world wide. People in the USA, at least those who have jobs, may be better paid, but there is a reason they are called wage slaves. If you are broke and you want to survive, you work. On the other hand, we do have the freedom to complain about the government, and that is no small thing.

Mysterious Island

A U.S. Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler conducts electronic air defense over Afghanistan. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman James Richardson / AFCENT

Afghanistan? That doesn't look anything like the Afghanistan I know and love. An inquiry provided an answer.

Qarnayn Island

Qarnayn Island in the Persian Gulf, near the UAE. It's a small island, about a mile and half long and half a mile wide, so you have to zoom way in to see it. An oil company has a private airport there.

Blue Roofed Compound

 There are a few buildings adjacent to the airstrip, and then there is this fancy looking, blue roofed compound at the north end of the island. I suppose that's where the mad scientist performs his dangerous experiments.

Now I'm wondering if it is possible to gauge the size of the island just from the photograph. Pretend we don't know how big the island really is. If we assume the plane is in level flight, we should be able to get a pretty good idea of the angle of elevation. And since there is a limit to how high the plane can fly, we should be able to put some bounds on this island's size. It's certainly not 1,000 miles long, and probably not 100, but could it be 10 or 20? How about in the other direction? How small could it be? Could it be a mere 100 yards long? We could assume that the square harbor is artificial and built to accommodate good size barges if not actual ships, so the island is probably  several hundred yards long at least. Maybe one of you will have an idea. Stu, I'm looking at you.

China, for one, welcomes their new robot overlords.

Washington, D.C., Jan. 26, 2015. Drone that crashed onto the White House grounds. AP Photo/US Secret Service.

The Chinese company that builds these drones is updating their firmware to prevent the craft from flying over the capital. They can do this because the drone is equipped with GPS. I wonder if they have all the other restricted airspaces, like airports, stored in the machines memory? How long before that becomes a requirement? And will it include little airports as well as big ones? And how much memory will that take? And will it be US only, or cover the whole world? And what if the parameters change? Who's gonna update the drone's list?
    I can see this becoming a real digital nightmare, like something Microsoft and their DRM (Digital Rights Management). Drone won't fly unless it has cell phone service so it can verify if it's current list of operating parameters is valid, which means you need cell phone service to fly your drone, and it won't be cheap service because the update will be a couple of gigabytes of data and there is a charge for transmitting that. There will always be those who are able to figure out ways around these kind of annoying bureaucratic restrictions, but  you can bet that the bureaucrats are going to be working to make it hard to do.
   Eventually a small, hobby drone, either accidentally or on purpose, is going to bring down an airliner. And it won't be long after that that a multibillion dollar contract is issued to a big defense contractor to build anti-drone laser weapons which will be installed on all commercial airliners.
   The future's so bright, I gotta wear laser-proof shades.

Iran launched a satellite, or did they?

Imam Khomeini Space Center - Iran
A couple of days ago Iran supposedly launched a satellite. Being a suspicious kind of guy I went looking for confirmation and couldn't find any. I checked again this morning and still nothing. Digging a little deeper I started finding stuff related to Iran developing ICBM-s (Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles). This is understandable. If you can put something into orbit around the Earth, you can certainly hurl a similar sized chunk of metal halfway around the world. The requirements for both kinds of rockets are very similar.

Iran's Space Launch Center. Zoom out to see nearby associated sites. I think Point 9 was used for the Monday's launch, it's the only one without any tall buildings.

Working from an Israeli news video, I was able to locate Iran's space center. It would have been easier if I had found NTI's video (top) sooner.
    Meanwhile, REAL TIME SATELLITE TRACKING AND PREDICTIONS told me about Space-Track dot org, which is US Government website which is the font of all active satellite tracking data. It requires signing up, which entails agreeing to their terms, and since it's the US Government, you probably should read what you are agreeing to. I looked at it and decided I didn't want to know all that, so I didn't sign. Besides, if automatic posting services like NASA's can't get the info, am I going to have any better luck?

P.S. Embedding a Google map requires more hand work these days. This forum post explains the magic codes you need to make it work. I did this one by trial and error and it took a while. If I had been able to find the latitude and longitude, it would have gone much quicker. That's a medium size 'if'. Besides, I wanted to see if I could do it. Kind of like playing solitaire, but with a purpose.