Just Because I Feel Like It

And because I can:

It's Friday after a month like I've had.  Time to kick back.

Two more days of proposal writing...

As seen over at SMBC:

Two more days of proposal writing.  And then I get a week of meetings, yay!

Timeline of Bicycle Design

From over at xkcd.

Things got weird during the Cambrian Explosion of suspension mountain bike design back in the '90s, so Randall left that decade out.

y'all're

... is a perfectly cromulent word.  Says so right over here at Wiktionary.

Why Internet Voting is an Awful Idea

In a 21 minute talk, as explained by a computer science professor who knows what the hell he is talking about (as opposed to the politicians pushing for this very bad idea):

Really, if you give a hoot about such things – not to mention your country – it's worth your time.

Too Tough to Die

Even though they called it quits 20 years ago and currently a bunch of 'em are dead, The Ramones keep showing up in the news.

Linda Ramone gives a guided tour of a new museum exhibit at Vanity Fair
The museum exhibit's web page
The Enduring Appeal of The Ramones at the Sidney Morning Herald

Not bad at all for a bunch of (mostly) dead musicians who's heyday was... well it's not over yet.

EM Drive... maybe?

Here's a raft of links relating recent developments revolving around this thrustless space drive concept.  At least there are some independent measurements and some theory backing things up now, so it is sort of comprehensible.  Anyway, on to the links.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601299/the-curious-link-between-the-fly-by-anomaly-and-the-impossible-emdrive-thruster/

http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03449

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03449v1.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

http://emdrive.com

Please don't ask me to explain any of this to you.  I'm as befuddled as the next guy.  At first look, it is as if someone has added up a very long column of zeroes and arrived at a non-zero answer.  But it now seems that there is more to the story.

It's a small effect, if indeed it is there at all, in these testbed machines.  It may yet turn out to be a minuscule measurement error, it may turn out to be for real.  Or it may turn out to be real but such a small effect as to be of no practical importance, akin to muon catalyzed fusion.  Which is certainly a real thing, but a net energy-negative process.

Anyway, the way things are progressing, we'll know in a very few years.