Sharper Image has filed for Chapter 11. I wonder if they’ll be able to reorganize?
I always thought their stuff was overpriced, and apparently a lot of people agreed with me. They also spent a lot on sending out all the catalogs. I wonder if their business model even works any more, what with Amazon and all.
Here’s a fun interview with the Mythbusters. I don’t get this, though:
My favorite episode, that I think the science is the most right, is ”Bullets Fired Up”: Will a bullet that you fire directly into the air kill you when it comes back down? We tried it in several different ways, and every single way we tried it — from a shop experiment, to a scaled outdoor experiment, to a full-size outdoor experiment where we fired a full clip of 9mm rounds into the air out in the desert — confirmed the same results. If it’s coming straight down, it won’t kill you. But if you fire it on an angle of even two degrees, it stays on a ballistic trajectory and it will kill you. So when you see someone in a movie fire their automatic rifle on kind of a spray up into the sky, probably all of those bullets are actually deadly. The amount of data we collected on it was more than anybody up to that point had ever achieved on firing bullets into the air.
I don’t get what they’re saying here. Why would it come down any harder if it’s at a slight angle? How did they determine whether or not “it would kill you”? If it’s in a vacuum, it should come down with exactly the same vertical velocity component it had when it left the gun (except reversed), but the atmosphere complicates things. It seems to me that any bullet fired in the air is going to be coming down at terminal velocity, unless the potential energy is so high that it doesn’t have time to get to terminal velocity before it hits the ground, but that’s pretty hard to believe. When it leaves the muzzle of the gun, it’s supersonic, but I would think that it won’t be able to be going that fast when it falls back down, because of air drag. This seems like something that should be simulatable with CFD (it might even be possible to do it analytically, if the bullet was round).
Alan Boyle has a comprehensive write up of the “debate” between the Clinton and Obama science advisors at the AAAS meeting. I can’t say that I’m thrilled about either of their proposed policies. But I don’t expect much better from McCain, particularly given that he’s drunk deeply of the global warming koolaid.
An interesting discussion of the current economics.
Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:
There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out – I’d be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone’s ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.
Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:
There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out – I’d be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone’s ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.
Lileks has some thoughts on Obama, and his acolytes:
There is tremendous faith in his ability to just wave a love-wand and get things done. I remember the same zeitgeist afoot in the land in 1992; change was the mantra then, too. Odd how things turn out – I’d be happier with Hillary as President than Obama, simply because she seems a bit more seasoned and realistic. And I do find it interesting that people who have decried the shallow, theatrical, emotion-based nature of contemporary politics are now so effusive in their praise for someone’s ability to move crowds. Perhaps they don’t mind a fellow on a white horse if he promises to nationalize the stables.
The Communist News Network (aka CNN) has issued instructions to its reporters as to how to report the Great Fidel’s stepping down from power, after only fifty years. And they call Fox News biased?
Nick Gillespie has un-Christian thoughts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
There will always be more sheep than wolves. There will also be a lot more sheep than sheep dogs.
I was never a big fan of Cosmos, though I think that it did a lot of good in interesting people in space. I’m listening to a rerun on the SCIHD channel, and I recall why.
Sagan’s voice is too pompous, too arrogant, and the ubiquitous sonorous tone, and pauses, which lent themselves to parody (“billions and billions”) are really arrogant. I wish that he had written it, and someone else narrated.