Firefighting with a Bell 205A

Bell 205A works Cottonwood Valley Fire on BLM land June 14, 2021

Looks like wildfire season is getting an early start this year. The Cottonwood Valley Fire is in the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area (map), which is just west of Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Bell 205A is the civilian version of the Vietnam War era Huey.

Possum Kingdom

The Toadies - Possum Kingdom (Official Music Video)
TheToadiesVEVO

I don't quite understand how my mind works. I'l find a tune on YouTube and I'll play the shit out it for days or weeks and then I'll be tired of it and can't stand to listen to it one more time, so I go looking for something different. This is this week's hot pick.

When I fire it up, I see bits of the video and it looks like maybe they stole a clip from some movie, so I go looking and I find this story in the Texas Monthly. Seems the lead guy, who wrote the song, is something of a story teller. He concocted a story about a murder at Possum Kingdom Lake and it was such a good story that it has taken on a life of its own. Never mind that it's entirely fiction, it now has a bit of a cult following.

Possum Kingdom Lake (map) is in north central Texas, roughly midway between Dallas, Abilene and Witchita Falls. Looking at some pictures, it reminds me of Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, setting for the TV series Ozark.

Possum Kingdom Lake was the site of the 2018 Red Bull Cliff Diving Championship:

Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series 2018 - Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas (USA) - Trailer from World of Freesports on Vimeo.

It took some time to find just where in the lake the cliff diving competition was held. Hell's Gate is the place.

Red Bull is kind of nuts. They have made a fortune selling soda pop for $5 a can and then they are using that fortune to promote all kinds of sports that don't fit in the mainstream, like mountain biking, air racing, high altitude balloon jumping and cliff diving. Makes me happy.

Booster

This rocket booster from the Shenzhou-12 launch landed on a civilian road in China.

Parachute for booster, from above

China's launch sites are far inland so the boosters don't fall into the ocean.

1942 Boeing A75N1 Stearman

1942 Boeing A75N1 Stearman

Over 10,000 of these airplanes were built during the 1930s & 1940s. They were the mainstay of flight training for the US Military through WW2. The Stearman has appeared here a couple of times.

The Death Penalty & Politics

Scene of the Boston Marathon Bombing

Crime & Consequences has a good post up about the upcoming Boston Marathon Bomber case at the Supreme Court.

I am ambivalent about the death penalty. On one hand I think it is a suitable punishment for violent crimes. On the other, the trial system is not always a reliable arbiter of justice, as we have seen from the numerous stories of people unjustly convicted. My other objection to the death penalty is how appeals to death sentences go on seemingly interminably, consuming the court's time and resources while more run of the mill cases get short-shrift.

Our prisons are another disaster. I would like to see prisoners put to work on farms or road building. The current system seems to be hamstrung by the prison guard unions, prison building contractors, state budgets, and angry people who just want all the criminals locked up.

Then there is the whole problem of what is the purpose of incarceration. Is it to punish the criminal? Reform him? Educate him? If he can be reformed, reforming would be good. Some of those are too far gone and cannot be reformed, but how do you tell?

Indoctrination

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about how the methods society uses to indoctrinate itself are changing. The biggest prediction in there is that the higher education universe is about to collapse. That might not be a bad thing.

Jordan B. Peterson - Rene Johnston / Toronto Star / Getty

That post links a couple of other stories. One story at The Atlantic dissects an interviewer's technique for  distorting the guests views. 

Hammurabi

The other talks about the age old war between the red ants and the black ants.

P.S. The last linked story mentions the Nash Equilibrium, which rings a bell, so I check. It is named for John Forbes Nash Jr., a famous mathematician. He was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind a few years ago.

Mighty Servant 1

Drone ship OCISLY (Of course I still love you) being loaded onto transport ship MS1 (Mighty Servant 1) in the Bahamas

OCISLY (Of course I still love you) is a barge that SpaceX uses as a landing platform to recover boosters from their Falcon 9 rockets. 

The drone ship (essentially a barge) is floating in the center of the picture. The bow section of MS1 (Mighty Servant 1) is on the left and the stern portion is on the right. The body of the ship that joins these two sections has been submerged to allow the OCISLY to float right over it. When it is in position, the MS1 will pump the water out of the ballast tanks and the whole ship will rise until the deck is above the surface, lifting the barge with it. Then they will drive to Vandenberg AFB in California via the Panama Canal.

Via Silicon Greybeard, who has a post with the whole story.