Category Archives: Science/Engineering

All your air are belong to us

Posted on July 30, 2013 | 4 comments

Forget trying to shoot down drones over your own property, says the FAA, adding that they control our airspace. Not that it has impressed the author of a Colorado city ordinance to encourage drone hunting:

“‘I don’t want to live in a surveillance society. I don’t feel like being in a virtual prison,’ Steel said. ‘This is a pre-emptive strike.’

“He dismissed the FAA’s warning. ‘The FAA doesn’t have the power to make a law,’ he said.”

True. At least, not legally. But the feds grow more contemptuous of the law every day. Witness the DOJ’s gun-running to Mexico and the IRS scandal.

But, for that matter, legality has never stopped outraged citizens from fighting back and sure as hell won’t this time as they watch their federal government grow increasingly corrupt. Good luck finding out who fired the shot(s) that crashes the first federal drone.

Via Drudge.

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Posted in Obamalot, Science/Engineering, The War

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Bye, bye Goodyear blimp

Posted on July 25, 2013 | 2 comments

The familiar blimp is destined to become a dirigible airship, in fact a $21 million Zeppelin, by this time next year.

I rode the old blimp (a helium-filled gas bag) back in my professional (such as it was)  journalistic infancy (1973 or thereabouts) and was thoroughly impressed with the notion of hanging in one spot, stationary, above, in my case, the Ohio River.

The other thing that sticks in memory was the absolute quiet when the motors were shut off. You could slide back the glass window beside your seat and listen to dogs bark a few hundred feet below. The landscape hardly moved an inch.

That, I thought, was the way to travel. Maybe someday, even the transatlantic flights of the rigid Zeppelins will resume. Thanks to carbon-fiber girders, non-explosive helium and improved weather forecasting.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering

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The Tail of the Dragon

Posted on July 22, 2013 | 2 comments

Many years ago, grasshopper, I drove winding U.S. Route 129, near Deals Gap, North Carolina, entirely by chance. I just happened to have included it on my route for visiting a cousin I hadn’t seen in a decade or so.

Fortunately I didn’t have an accident in the rental car, which I recall was a “floaty” land-yacht of a Buick sedan. I didn’t know I was in for 318 blind curves in 11 miles. I’d driven a series of hairpin turns on mountain roads before, in West Virginia, for instance, but this was really excessive.

Maybe motorcyclers didn’t ride it then, because I don’t recall meeting any.

But they do it now, in droves, and some of them wind up on the Tree of Shame.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Genealogy, Science/Engineering

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Warming lies continue in face of cooling

Posted on July 17, 2013 | 4 comments

“…temperatures have stopped warming in all the data bases going back as far as 1997. All are showing a cooling since 2002 even as CO2 continues to rise.”

So reminds Weather Bell meterologist Joe D’Aleo, as he dissects the Weather Channel’s and NBC’s determination to continue propagandizing global warming in the face of polls showing fewer and fewer Americans believe in it. As well they shouldn’t.

Meanwhile, it’s coming clear that those climate models the “scientist” hoaxers have relied on to forecast future doom for the planet are failing to accurately predict five years into the future, never mind a century.

I still wonder if we aren’t in danger of an imminent Ice Age, re scifi author Larry Niven’s Fallen Angels, now that the Greens he imagined forcing huge reductions in CO2 (bringing on the Glaciers moving south) are actually in power. And their servant Wormtongue is flirting with our economic disaster in his zeal to reduce CO2.

But I’m probably just infected with the gloom-and-doom we’re all been hammered with for the last decade. Pols need distractions to facilitate their ongoing thefts and bribes and this end-of-the-world stuff works nicely.

UPDATE: The hoaxers and their media cronies have the proof! Proof, they tell you. That’s because they’ve manipulated the numbers, cooling the past, so they can keep claiming “this year” is the hottest ever, etc.

4 Comments

Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Weather/Climate

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Supermarine Spitfire 1938

Posted on July 13, 2013 | 2 comments

Been rereading Brit author Alexander Fullerton’s World War II convoy novels in which German submarines sank more than actually got through. And if the subs didn’t get them, the Stuka dive bombers did.

The most reliable aerial weapon the Brits had to protect the convoys was the Supermarine version of the Spitfire, with its four-blade prop. Always have liked the look of those wide wings. They mounted eight machine guns. They needed so many against malfunctions, such as the freezing of the outer ones at high altitude.

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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering

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Did NSA surveillance start with Bush?

Posted on July 11, 2013 | Comments Off on Did NSA surveillance start with Bush?

In a way, yes. But not in the main way, according to Charlie Martin at PJMedia. Martin, a government intelligence consultant in his day job, says:

“Everything we know about the program under Bush says they needed suspicion about an individual, and then collected information about that individual’s calls only. If they saw a connection, they had to make a separate request for that person’s metadata.

“In the Obama administration program, they just collect all the data from everybody in case they want to look at it later.”

So the American surveillance state really is a Leftist creation. No surprise. Who else tries constantly to control what we buy, say, drive and so forth? Martin’s primer on what the NSA is doing—which is here—is worth a read.

UPDATE:  Meanwhile, Wormtongue’s education bureaucracy is snooping on kindergartners, gathering info about their families, supposedly to target the kiddies (like Amazon or Google) for more effective education (i.e. sales) but which could also be used to punish their parents for political transgressions.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, The War

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Reprise: Obsolescence

Posted on July 9, 2013 | Comments Off on Reprise: Obsolescence

This is from 2007, back when the Scribbler was just a year old.

“The Seablogger, writing about his first PC, a desktop model, in 1986, reminded me of my first one, a bulky, more or less portable, Kaypro II, in 1983. Like the Seablogger, I bought the computer to write on, enchanted by the habit, acquired at my newspaper job, of writing on a screen instead of typing on paper. The main advantage, of course, was being able to quickly and simply backspace through the stuff I decided I didn’t want. No more carbon paper or Whiteout. There were other keyings for “erasing,” of course, but backspacing was my initial favorite. It took weeks to learn all the commands, but it was worth it, even as the commands have changed over the years. I still have some printouts from those days, a short story or two, and the start of a diary.

“The Kaypro’s builder, Non-Linear Systems, was the world’s 5th largest personal computer maker in 1983 when it changed its name to Kaypro Corp. Seven years later it was bankrupt. Shortly before that, the green-on-black screen died. Couldn’t get it fixed. So one night, after buying one of the first laptops, made by Radio Shack, I deposited the bulky Kaypro in a dumpster. I should have kept it. Might be worth something today. But it was the start, and I’ve never looked back–except to marvel that I ever wrote on a typewriter.”

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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Scribbles

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