It's not rocket science
Two of my favorite guitarists, Jeff Beck and Billy Gibbons, covering a classic Hendrix tune:
His bass player is no slouch either, a true prodigy.
P.S. I modded my ’73 Les Paul maybe 20 years ago with Seymour Duncan JB and Pearly Gates pickups, which were designed for the above-mentioned gentlemen. That thing might feel like a cinder block hung around my neck but it’s got tone to die for.
All shall wonder and despair, for the One Ring has been found!
The ring is believed to be linked to a curse tablet found separately at the site of a Roman temple dedicated to a god named Nodens in Gloucestershire, western England. The tablet says a man called Silvianus had lost a ring, and it asks Nodens to place a curse of ill health on Senicianus until he returned it to the temple.
An archaeologist who looked into the connection between the ring and the curse tablet asked Tolkien, who was an Anglo-Saxon professor at Oxford University, to work on the etymology of the name Nodens in 1929.
And upon dolphins’ backs was balanced a vast crenelate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss… Then hoary Nodens reached forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell.—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Strange High House in the Mist”
Just found this piece on NASA’s research into faster-than-light propulsion at Popular Science (yeah, I know: often not much better than the Weekly Reader from grade school, but such is today’s media) so I’ll only link. Deep thoughts later. Or not.
Having said that, at least someone at NASA gets it:
In the wake of the shuttle program’s termination and given the increasing role of private industry in low-Earth orbit flights, NASA has said it will refocus on far-flung, audacious exploration, reaching far beyond the rather provincial boundary of the moon. But it can only reach those goals if it develops new propulsion systems—the faster the better. A few days after the 100 Year Starship gathering, the head of NASA, Charles Bolden, echoed White’s remarks. “One of these days, we want to get to warp speed,” he said. “We want to go faster than the speed of light, and we don’t want to stop at Mars.”
If that “someone” happens to be the Administrator, then so much the better. Investigating advanced propulsion concepts and hands-on work like the Asteroid Capture Mission are precisely what a government space agency should be doing. Leave earth-orbit access to private business while helping us figure out how to go even farther.
In the 1920’s, when the U.S. Post Office needed to move large amounts of mail across the country quickly, they didn’t design, build, and operate their own airplanes: they hired out the job to a number of companies that eventually became household names. In particular, you know them as United, American, and the late-great Pan Am. These carriers gave us pioneering aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Elrey Jeppesen.
In other words: a space industry, not a space program.
Today is the day we celebrate Christ’s resurrection. I don’t typically flog my religious views much here, but today is different. It doesn’t take much to look around this world and see how mankind has fallen and cannot be redeemed by our own actions. We are imperfect and to think we can each somehow achieve perfection by even our own standards – much less the Creator’s – is wishful thinking.
God knew this, because he knows us. Much better than we know ourselves, I might add. Our Creator became human to take on our failings, in order that we could be redeemed into His glory.
How? Like this:
Thomas Sowell poses an interesting question: could a Cypriot-style money grab happen here?
This is what happens when nations run up too big of a bar tab and have run out of options as the taps run dry and the bartender shouts “last call”: they start scrounging for dropped change, steal the waitresses’ tips when she’s not looking, and then eventually start lifting other patron’s wallets.
Of course, now that tiny little Cyprus has decided to brazenly steal from its depositors, the other EU zombie-states are starting to fall in line. If the citizens of Spain, Italy, and Greece wish to remain “citizens” (before they finally blow right past being “subjects” and become “serfs”), they’d better be paying close attention and getting their cash out of the banks now.
Think that’ll go well? Me neither. But once a state has removed that crucial psychological pillar – that is, your money’s safe here – then there is nothing to stop a good old-fashioned bank run. And that’s bad for everybody:
The economic repercussions of having people feel that their money is not safe in banks can be catastrophic. Banks are not just warehouses where money can be stored. They are crucial institutions for gathering individually modest amounts of money from millions of people and transferring that money to strangers whom those people would not directly entrust it to.
That means no loans for new cars, new homes, or new businesses.
Once the dust settles, they’re likely to treat their elected “betters” the same way they’d treat the proverbial drunk trying to stick them with his bill. Of course, there’s one little problem in that they all have a share of the National Bar Tab.
EVENING UPDATE: Zero Hedge on the eventual endgame.
WHAT HE SAID: Dr. Krauthammer explains why this could be the EU’s Archduke Ferdinand moment. And we all know how that turned out.
The Atlantic has a conversation with Eric Anderson of Space Adventures: The Coming Age of Space Colonization.
I remember this stuff being a big deal in the late 70’s; you couldn’t pick up a fanboy magazine without slogging through a lot of fanciful stories about how we by gosh were going to have a huge, impossibly advanced space colony within the next decade or so (Spin up the wayback machine: remember Omni and “L5 by ’95”? Admit it, already).
And in the “how to get there” category: CalTech Assigns Students to Design a Mars Mission, or at least to one of its moons.
Finally, closer to home: SpaceX Dragon Splashes Down, Completing CRS-2 Mission. This is becoming less and less newsworthy, which is a good thing.
I don’t say much about TV shows, but man if The Walking Dead hasn’t been sharks-with-frickin-lasers awesome lately. One episode left until next fall and I’m already missing it.
But hey, Mad Men comes back after that…yawn. Sorry, but perpetually-drunk businessmen in skinny ties screwing each other’s wives just won’t fill that void. So unless Don Draper starts feasting on brains (it’s cable, you never know), I will be very very sad. Probably have to just settle for reading a book or something.
Which reminds me, if you haven’t checked out Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series then get thee to Amazon and start downloading. I picked up the three-volume anthology direct from Bain’s website a couple of months ago and it was the best six bucks I’ve ever spent. Best way I can describe it is urban fantasy that doesn’t take itself – or anything else – too seriously. Like a mashup of The Expendables, Grimm, and Ghostbusters.
With guns. Lots of guns. Which are always nice.
In which a gullible civilian reporter gets rolled by the Bin Laden “shooter”.
Last month, Esquire magazine published a long story about the post-SEAL life of the trigger man of the Bin Laden raid. The guy has not had it easy by this account, and now I’m very glad I didn’t rush to link to it when it first came out last month.
And boy, it was tempting. But something just didn’t ring true, not to mention that it’s hard to get too broken up about someone voluntarily giving up their benefits by checking out early. Sixteen years is a serious commitment to a very dangerous job that very few people can do. It’s certainly long enough to understand the ramifications of mustering out just four years shy of retirement. Really, dude?
I just had a really hard time getting my head around that story. Not having been Special Ops, their psyche is beyond my comprehension in just about every way imaginable. Perhaps being a SEAL was so important to him that finishing out his 20 in a different field was out of the question.
Yeah, yeah: everyone’s different. You can’t (and shouldn’t) pass judgment. But as I said, something just didn’t sound right. And sure enough, something wasn’t. SOFREP has done their own background work and describes how this writer got played:
Esquire Is Screwed: Duped by Fake UBL Shooter
One story coming out of Joint Special Operations Command is that the Esquire “shooter” isn’t the shooter after all. To be clear, he wasn’t the point man that put the well placed rounds into UBL’s head that ended the terrorist leaders life. Sure he was there, and deserves credit but he wasn’t the man who shot UBL, and ended his life. And this is an important fact that must be clarified.
The actual shooter at Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSW DEVGRU or SEAL TEAM 6) has continued to maintain his professional integrity and has not come forward with the story, and most likely never will. Looks like Esquire and Bronstein are the ones who are really screwed, not their interviewee; our sources say he’s off cashing large checks from unsuspecting donors who bought the Esquire pity piece.
Been a while since I’ve updated the blog (I’m largely staying away from the internet ’cause it keeps getting in the way of actually, you know, writing), but as promised here’s some links to interesting stuff:
Christian Science Monitor explores the pychological aspects of the Inspiration Mars effort. Short version: “Survivor” in space. Though I can think of a lot of “reality” TV stars that ought to be sent on a possible one-way mission to deep space. Like pretty much all of them. Buh-bye, media whores…
So how would they get there, anyway? Popular Mechanics has a nice overview of where things stand with commercial spaceflight: The Race to Cash in on Earth Orbit
And in not-unrelated news: Number of “City Killer” Asteroids “Very Large”, House Panel Told. As Professor Reynolds often quotes, “Asteroids are nature’s way of asking, ‘How’s that space program coming along?'”
UPDATE: Almost forgot, the brains behind Inspiration Mars have posted a response to Dennis Wingo’s analysis of their plan. Unfortunately it’s about what I expected: everybody loves the idea of a Venus-Mars flyby, but they’d have to be prepared to leave a good year ahead of the current schedule, which is ambitious enough already. An awful lot of tech currently in development would have to go just right for that to happen, and it sounds like they don’t want to bank on it.
So this little snippet of world-shattering news slipped under the old e-mail door yesterday:
Wright Brothers Not First to Fly
As determined by Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. I doubt they’d put their considerable reputation on the line for a crank theory, so read and discuss.
I predict the hardest hit will be North Carolina and their insufferable “first in flight” license plates. Because we all know Dayton is just a suburb of Cape Hatteras…though one could be forgiven for thinking the Outer Banks and Grand Strand have been annexed by Ohio during certain parts of the year.
The Chiles Files 