SLS Explainer

Just in time for tomorrow's planned launch, here're the basics, over at youtube:

Bonus video: Full-up booster core test at Stennis in March 2021.  Skip to the 56 minute mark to get to the actual eight minute (!!!) full duration test.

As usual, click to embiggen.  Big rockets are better that way.

JWST, WASP-39b, and CO2

Article at the Bad Astronomy blog.  Go read, not a lot I can add (beyond my jaw dropping in amazement once again).  Be sure to watch the embedded twitter video half-way down, there's a lot of key information there.  With error bars!

Obligatory swiped image.  Be sure to go to linked article for full discussion.

Pretty Much How It Is

xkcd 2662.  You should go there now to read the mouse-over text.

Pics from weekend adventures coming soon, but I'm too lazy to post just now.  Stay tuned.

My Week So Far

False start, crunchy sounds, up-front bass, amazing result: Alex Chilton (Alt Version)  

Hell no I didn't get up this early to post; I dropped it in the hopper Sunday for 5am on Monday.

Just Say "No" to Tape Measure Antennas

Article at Hackaday, with link to a deeper analysis.  TLDR: Springy steel tape measures and the like make miserable antennas, because physics.

Also worth watching (if you're into antennas), Keven Loughin does a two-part test and destructive tear-down on a commercially available steel tape antenna at his vlog.  TLDW: About the same performance as the rubber duck antenna that comes with most handheld radios.

So, what does work?  If you want something professionally made, there are any number of aftermarket whips that give somewhere from 3 to 6 dB gain.  For next to nothing and five minutes at the bench, a tiger tail will give you perhaps 3 dB gain.  If you have handy trees around, a roll-up slim jim works well, in either a DIY or ready-made version.  If you want full-on performance, the DIY cool(?)-factor, and don't mind its eight foot size, the Jurassic Duck Mk. II does really well.

But tape measures?  No, just no.

Science WITH the Gobbledygook

A fifteen minute video over at Sabine Hossenfelder's blog, turning the usual "without" to "with."  I'm just putting up a link; any more would be redundant.  Both funny and worrisome, it's very much worth your time.

A Quiet Week

With the relative quiet, I've actually had time to read through a couple of papers, re-consider a research path, read a few hundred more pages into a somewhat depressing book on global economics, ride the gravel bike, and enjoy a little late-night rum.  However, here's the quiet I'm most pleased about:

Considering how things are going these days...

... this seems about right for the times.  Ramones live in '78.  Probably works better if you embiggen it

Whisky Tango Foxtrot, Part 2

The Georgia Guidestones are explained – inasmuch as such things are explicable at all – in a recent blog post by Greer, The Great Rehash, Part Two: The Future's Cold Eyes.

I'd been wondering about this whole thing.  I was vaguely aware of this... site? for some time now, but it was pretty far down on my list of subjects for contemplation or car trips.  Greer's article puts its construction and subsequent destruction in the larger context of our times, and makes the whole thing much less mysterious.

Rest in Pieces.  Kind of wish I'd made that road trip now.  Nah.

BTW, the "Part Two" in the title begs the question, where is Part One?  Here you go, The Great Rehash, Part One: The Best and The Brightest.  Greer does the work for us and reads Klaus Schwab's Covid-19: The Great Reset, then explains why it's a bunch of recycled 1970s-era eco-doom drivel (hence the connection with the Guidestones) and not worth your valuable reading hours.  I had downloaded it in pdf a while back, but somehow never quite found the time....  Anyway, there it is in a 15 minute nutshell.

As with yesterdays WTF?, this gets the tag inner coyote, but there's actually some there there so it gets a big ideas as well.

Whisky Tango Foxtrot, Part 1

While I was aware of this project from over at Jim Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month, I hadn't seen the full on pre-marketing web brochure until today.  Here, browse at it for a few minutes and wonder at the fresh batch of WTF involved in trying to sell people on "zero-gravity living" "in a natural setting" in the middle of a damn desert.

Yes, yes, dream big.  Please.  But just not after taking a load of hallucinogens.

As far as tags, only inner coyote seems to cover the whatcouldpossiblygowrong avenues this could take.  It surely doesn't qualify for a scifi tag, as that needs to be at least somewhat constrained to physical reality. 

Antennas to Test, however...

I can't wait for October and the cool, bug-free breezes of fall.

Dog Days

Still here, just in the dog days doldrums.  Looking forward to October.  Why can't we jump from, say, July 10th to October 1st, and bypass this whole tail-end of summer thing?

Nothing blogworthy just now.  Stay tuned.