Category Archives: Humor

A Novel Means Of Cooking A Steak

Not a very effective one, though:

To break the sound barrier, you’ll need to drop the steak from about 50 kilometers. But this isn’t enough to cook it.

We need to go higher.

If dropped from 70 kilometers, the steak will go fast enough to be briefly blasted by 350°F air. Unfortunately, this blast of thin, wispy air barely lasts a minute—and anyone with some basic kitchen experience can tell you that a steak placed in the oven at 350 for 60 seconds isn’t going to be cooked.

From 100 kilometers—the formally defined edge of space—the picture’s not much better. The steak spends a minute and a half over Mach 2, and the outer surface will likely be singed, but the heat is too quickly replaced by the icy stratospheric blast for it to actually be cooked.

I think I’ll stick to my IR grill. Though it might be fun to apply for a NASA grant as a suborbital research payload.

Pretend Gun Control

Frank J. has a great idea that should make everyone happy, ignorant and knowledgeable alike:

…What we can do is pass a law banning a bunch of made-up things that sound scary, and many gun control proponents already have great ideas along this line. For instance, I read a column in which Howard Kurtz mentioned a ban on high-magazine clips — we can certainly do without something that nonsensical. And I’ve heard the press before mention armor-piercing hollow points and plastic guns (actually, I think we already banned that made-up weapon in the ’80s). And as long as the NRA and Wayne LaPierre go apoplectic about it (“This ban on sorcerer-enchanted guns is just a slippery slope toward eliminating all witch-hexed weaponry!”), gun control proponents won’t know the difference between this and actual gun control. And this will help protect our most vulnerable people out there: politicians. Because long after the gun control advocates move on to other things, like who they want to tax next, gun owners will still be annoyed by any actual gun control legislation. One of the greatest fears politicians have is seeing an angry guy with lots of guns charging down the street, because they know he’s probably on his way to commit an act of voting.

Of course, with this idea, absolutely nothing will be done to keep criminals and madmen from obtaining guns, but that’s the effect of every other gun control law, so we’re just reaching this end in a much cheaper and less messy fashion.

I think you could probably even get it through the House. And the enforcement costs would be zero.

Like God, Like Acolyte

This is amusing.

Charles Radley subscribed me to the Space-Based Solar Power Facebook group some time ago (not at my request, but there’s not enough traffic on it that I really care). Apparently, like his climate “scientist” heroes, he will brook no dissent from the creed — he seems to have banned me. Here are the screen shots of the exchange, in case he decides to delete my posts as well.

SBSP screenshot 1

SBSP screenshot 2