Archive for the ‘Around the Blogs’ Category

Putin’s “Mafia in Space” Episode

Thursday, October 29th, 2015

Did Russia’s boss of bosses just bully his way through space? Reports of Russian FSB-owned spacecraft Luch/Olymp-K1 being moved to Intelsat 901’s 18.1-deg. West orbital location came to light earlier this month in a detailed report by Brian Weeden in The Space Review. Since Putin owns them, the Russian story — typically full of lies — was parroted by the BBC as “U.S. anxiety.”

Not true.

Was the old KGB club looking to intercept the Palestine Al Yawm feed? Probably not.

The spacecraft is being portrayed as a data-relay Luch payload, but it has much more — including special laser capabilities. It is a military spacecraft with multiple missions, including RPO, destroying space assets and providing satcom links to the Russian navy.

If the Luch/Olymp spacecraft came with 10 km of Intelsat’s, that’s cause for concern. Putin and his criminal state doesn’t care about anyone or any entity, and the Russians are testing the world order to see whether anyone’s able to respond with force.

I Fink You Freaky, Teletubbies

Monday, October 5th, 2015

Hendo Hoverboard

Wednesday, June 17th, 2015

Nice work by Hendo Hover, which people got to try at Smithsonian’s “The Future is Here 2015” festival last month.

Here’s Tony Hawk’s go at it…


A Message to Space

Wednesday, April 15th, 2015

This is absolutely brilliant.

An astronaut’s daughter sends her father a message — physically, in writing — while he’s orbiting in the ISS.

It’s emotional, social and very cool. Good marketing on Hyundai’s part, too.

Hyundai made a little girl’s wish come true for the whole world to see.
A team of eleven Genesis cars united to create “the largest tire track image” on the Delamar Dry Lake in the Nevada desert, United States. (Image size : 5.55 sq. km.) This extraordinary message has made it to the Guinness World Records® 2015.

I hope they sell a bunch of cars to rocket scientists!


Russian Lie of the Week: Putin T-shirt Business in NYC

Thursday, October 9th, 2014

There’s a guy from New Jersey with Lithuanian roots selling Putin t-shirts on East 20th Street in New York City, who came up with the idea and financing himself.

So how does an office manager for Goetz Firzpatrick LLP come up with the financing to pay rent, print shirts and still have enough left over to pay for two bodyguards?

Retail space in that neighborhood goes for $400 per square foot. You can buy plain shirts for $6 each, then print them yourself. Selling them at $25 each, he probably needs to sell 2,000 shirts per month for any hope of breaking even.

Besides one piece in The Atlantic, the only media reporting this bullshit is RT, RIA Novosti and ITAR-TASS. All direct outlets for Putin and chief liar Kisilev.

However, the best Putin T-shirt ever seen in New York was ФАК ПУТІН (transliterated cyrillic for “fuck putin”), at a demonstration at the Russian Consulate in September, which was notably commented upon by the diplomatic guards (Russian FSB).


“2001: A Space Odyssey” in 60 seconds

Monday, September 22nd, 2014

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Big Bang Monday: The White Hole

Monday, August 11th, 2014

Check out this abstract

While most of the singularities of General Relativity are expected to be safely hidden behind event horizons by the cosmic censorship conjecture, we happen to live in the causal future of the classical big bang singularity, whose resolution constitutes the active field of early universe cosmology. Could the big bang be also hidden behind a causal horizon, making us immune to the decadent impacts of a naked singularity? We describe a braneworld description of cosmology with both 4d induced and 5d bulk gravity (otherwise known as Dvali-Gabadadze-Porati, or DGP model), which exhibits this feature: The universe emerges as a spherical 3-brane out of the formation of a 5d Schwarzschild black hole. In particular, we show that a pressure singularity of the holographic fluid, discovered earlier, happens inside the white hole horizon, and thus need not be real or imply any pathology. Furthermore, we outline a novel mechanism through which any thermal atmosphere for the brane, with comoving temperature of 20% of the 5D Planck mass can induce scale-invariant primordial curvature perturbations on the brane, circumventing the need for a separate process (such as cosmic inflation) to explain current cosmological observations. Finally, we note that 5D space-time is asymptotically flat, and thus potentially allows an S-matrix or (after minor modifications) AdS/CFT description of the cosmological big bang.

Got your head wrapped around it yet? Probably not. Our friends at Science Daily explain it a little more…

What we perceive as the big bang, they argue, could be the three-dimensional “mirage” of a collapsing star in a universe profoundly different than our own.

“Cosmology’s greatest challenge is understanding the big bang itself,” write Perimeter Institute Associate Faculty member Niayesh Afshordi, Affiliate Faculty member and University of Waterloo professor Robert Mann, and PhD student Razieh Pourhasan.

Conventional understanding holds that the big bang began with a singularity — an unfathomably hot and dense phenomenon of spacetime where the standard laws of physics break down. Singularities are bizarre, and our understanding of them is limited.

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” Afshordi says in an interview with Nature.

The problem, as the authors see it, is that the big bang hypothesis has our relatively comprehensible, uniform, and predictable universe arising from the physics-destroying insanity of a singularity. It seems unlikely.

So perhaps something else happened. Perhaps our universe was never singular in the first place.

Their suggestion: our known universe could be the three-dimensional “wrapping” around a four-dimensional black hole’s event horizon. In this scenario, our universe burst into being when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed into a black hole.

In our three-dimensional universe, black holes have two-dimensional event horizons — that is, they are surrounded by a two-dimensional boundary that marks the “point of no return.” In the case of a four-dimensional universe, a black hole would have a three-dimensional event horizon.

In their proposed scenario, our universe was never inside the singularity; rather, it came into being outside an event horizon, protected from the singularity. It originated as — and remains — just one feature in the imploded wreck of a four-dimensional star.

The researchers emphasize that this idea, though it may sound “absurd,” is grounded firmly in the best modern mathematics describing space and time. Specifically, they’ve used the tools of holography to “turn the big bang into a cosmic mirage.” Along the way, their model appears to address long-standing cosmological puzzles and — crucially — produce testable predictions.

Of course, our intuition tends to recoil at the idea that everything and everyone we know emerged from the event horizon of a single four-dimensional black hole. We have no concept of what a four-dimensional universe might look like. We don’t know how a four-dimensional “parent” universe itself came to be.

But our fallible human intuitions, the researchers argue, evolved in a three-dimensional world that may only reveal shadows of reality.

They draw a parallel to Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which prisoners spend their lives seeing only the flickering shadows cast by a fire on a cavern wall.

“Their shackles have prevented them from perceiving the true world, a realm with one additional dimension,” they write. “Plato’s prisoners didn’t understand the powers behind the sun, just as we don’t understand the four-dimensional bulk universe. But at least they knew where to look for answers.”

Still interested? I bet you are! Read more here. Relax: there’s a video on the Perimeter Institute site.


Lost in Space: Fruit Flies, Mushrooms and Geckos

Friday, July 25th, 2014

Too bad Geico doesn’t offer spacecraft insurance. The Russians could use some help, as they hold a large share of both launch and in-orbit failures.

I feel bad for the researchers suffering the latest Russian space program setback, the in-orbit loss-of-control for the Foton M-4 spacecraft, carrying a payload of geckos, fruit flies and mushrooms.

Russia’s Progress space firm confirmed Thursday that the Foton-M4 satellite was not responding to commands from the ground to start its onboard engine and lift it to a higher orbit.

However the company said in a statement that all other systems on the satellite, which was launched on July 19, were operating normally and information from the scientific experiments was being transmitted to the ground.

“The equipment which is working in automatic mode, and in particular the experiment with the geckos is working according to the programme,” said Oleg Voloshin, a spokesman of Russia’s Institute of Medico-Biological Problems, which is running the experiment.

The two-month mission is monitoring by video how well the geckos sexually reproduce in space, according to the Institute’s website.

Progress said the design of the Foton-M4 “allows for the functioning of the satellite in automatic mode for a long time.”

A space expert cited by Interfax said that in its current orbit the satellite could stay up in space as long as three or four months.

OK, so maybe they can’t control the thrusters, but all else is working.

Perhaps the resulting “Russian lizard sex in space” video will compete with the popularity of Russian dash cam videos.


Russian Pizza Delivery by Drone

Friday, June 27th, 2014

This is pretty awesome: pizza delivered by drone in Russia. Dodo Pizza got together with Copter Express and the results are impressive.

Although it may not deliver directly to your home or concrete Soviet-style apartment, taking it out to where a sales agent is taking orders is the next best thing.

Opinions vary, yet I think this is brilliant!

The video is excellent, too. However, I doubt you can use your Visa card due to international sanctions imposed on a couple of Russian banks. One of the interesting pizza combos includes bacon, red onion, fresh Bulgarian pepper, ham and corn.

Corn.

Putin had nothing to do with this. He’s an idiot.


FCC & Net Neutrality: Comments

Tuesday, June 24th, 2014

Comments to FCC rule changes can be dry and lawyerish. Not this one

Dear FCC;

Regarding recent proposed rules that implicitly endorse “internet fast lanes”,
allowing Internet providers to offer an option for web companies to pay to connect
to users at faster speeds, I would like to make the following comments:

You swines. You vulgar little maggots. You worthless bags of filth. As we say in
Texas, you couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel.
You are a canker, an open wound. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You took your last vacation in the Islets of Langerhans.

You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are spineless little worms deserving
nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are jerks, cads, and weasels. I take that
back; you are a festering pustule on a weasel’s rump. Your life is a monument to
stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You
are monsters, ogres, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all
the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than
nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. You are a technicolor
yawn. And did I mention that you smell?

You are squeaking rats, a mistake of nature and heavy-metal bagpipe players. You
were not born. You were hatched into an unwilling world that rejects the likes of
you. You didn’t crawl out of a normal egg, either, but rather a mutant maggot egg
rejected by an evil scientist as being below his low standards. Your alleged parents
abandoned you at birth and then died of shame in recognition of what they had done
to an unsuspecting world. They were a bit late. If cluelessness were crude oil, your
scalp would be crawling with caribou.

You are thick-headed trogs. I have seen skeet with more sense than you have. You are
a few bricks short of a full load, a few cards short of a full deck, a few bytes
short of a full core dump, and a few chromosomes short of a full human. Worse than
that, you top-post. God created houseflies, cockroaches, maggots, mosquitos, fleas,
ticks, slugs, leeches, and intestinal parasites, then he lowered his standards and
made you. I take it back; God didn’t make you. You are Satan’s spawn. You are Evil
beyond comprehension, half-living in the slough of despair. You are the entropy
which will claim us all. You are a green-nostriled, crossed eyed, hairy-livered,
goisher kopf, inbred trout-defiler. You make Ebola look good.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and
profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re fools, ignoramuses. Monkeys look down
on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved
for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. You are not ANSI compliant
and your markup doesn’t validate. You have a couple of address lines shorted
together. You should be promoted to Engineering Manager.

Your life is one big W.O.M.B.A.T., and your future doesn’t look promising either. We
need to trace your bloodline and terminate all siblings and cousins in order to
cleanse humanity of your polluted genes. The good news is that no normal human would
ever mate with you, so we won’t have to go into the sewers in search of your git.
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You
are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void.

You are sour and senile. You are a loathsome disease, a drooling inbred cross-eyed
toesucker. You make Quakers shout and strike Pentecostals silent. You have a version
1.0 mind in a version 6.13 world. Your mother had to tie a pork chop around your
neck just to get your dog to play with you. You think that

http://www.GuyMacon.com/flame.html is the name of a rock band. You believe that
P.D.Q. Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived. You prefer L. Ron Hubbard to
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Hee-Haw is too deep for you. You would watch test
patterns all day if the other inmates would let you.

On a good day you’re half-wits. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all
that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and
filthy. You are asinine and benighted. Spammers look down on you. Phone sex
operators hang up on you. Telemarketers refuse to be seen in public with you. You
are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
May you choke on your own foolish opinions. You are a Pusillanimous galactophage and
you wear your sister’s training bra. Don’t bother opening the door when you leave –
you should be able to slime your way out underneath. I hope that when you get home
your mother runs out from under the porch and bites you.

You smarmy lagerlout gits. You bloody woofter sods. Bugger off, pillocks. You grotty
wanking oik artless base-court apple-johns. You clouted boggish foot-licking
half-twits. You dankish clack-dish plonkers. You gormless crook-pated tossers. You
bloody churlish boil-brained clotpole ponces. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup
pratting naffs. You cockered bum-bailey poofters. You gob-kissing gleeking
flap-mouthed coxcombs. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed
flirt-gills. You jetere steatopygous pilgarlick hircine whigmaleerious rhadamanthine
lintlickers. I refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

You are so clueless that if you dressed in a clue skin, doused yourself in clue
musk, and did the clue dance in the middle of a field of horny clues at the height
of clue mating season, you still would not have a clue. If you were a movie you
would be a double feature; _Battlefield_Earth_ and _Moron_Movies_II_. You would be
out of focus.

You are fiends and sniveling cowards, and you have bad breath. You are the unholy
spawn of a bandy-legged hobo and a syphilitic camel. You wear strangely mismatched
clothing with oddly placed stains. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel
debased just knowing that you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you
would go away. You are jetsam who dreams of becoming flotsam. You won’t make it. I
beg for sweet death to come and remove me from a world which became unbearable when
the bioterrorists designed you.

It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid you are. Stupid as a stone that the
other stones make fun of. So stupid that you have traveled far beyond stupid as we
know it and into a new dimension of stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid
stupid. Stupid collapsed to a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into
stuponium. Stupid so dense that no intelligence can escape. Singularity stupid.

Blazing hot summer day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one minute than
our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. It cannot be possible that
anything in our universe can really be this stupid. This is a primordial fragment
from the original big stupid bang. A pure extract of stupid with absolute stupid
purity. Stupid beyond the laws of nature. I must apologize. I can’t go on. This is
my epiphany of stupid. After this experience, you may not hear from me for a while.
I don’t think that I can summon the strength left to mock your moronic opinions and
malformed comments about boring trivia or your other drivel. Duh.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. Your attempt at regulating the Internet was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of plattitudes
among a load of babbling was hardly effective… Maybe later in life, after you have
learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these
are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that
everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are
“challenged” persons in this world who find these things to be difficult. If I had
known that this was true in your case then I would have never have exposed myself to
your prposed regulations. It just wouldn’t have been “right.” Sort of like parking
in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social
struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly,
mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic,
barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious,
tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented,
lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous,
bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, EDLINoid, illegitimate, harmful,
destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow,
manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical,
cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim,
crazy, weird, dyspeptic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic,
jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive,
poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, pinguid,
and Generally Not Good.

Please read [ https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality ].