Over at Winds of Change my favorite member of the WoC crew has decided to drop the pseudonym and let us know that Armed Liberal is Marc Danziger. He’s the new C.O.O. of Spirit of America, a charity that’s working to make life better for Iraqis and in doing so portray America in a more favorable light. I’ve said before that the current conflict is all about perceptions. Spirit of America is on track to make us all safer by making it harder for the enemy to recruit. I believe that efforts like this will have a greater effect in the long run than any purely military operation (which is not to suggest that military operations are unneccessary in the short term). Check out the site and see if you can help out.
Latest Armadillo Update
…is here. Two movies of flights, including a minor prang.
Nice Introduction To Airfoils
I came across a rather nice little page on aerodynamics for nonspecialists today. I’ve been slowly teaching myself the basics needed to understand the design of aircraft, and this page provided some good simple background. Plenty of pictures, and clear text.
AT&T Bites
I’ve run into a little bit of a problem with my wireless service that I thought I’d share with y’all. I signed up with AT&T for a one year contract, with free phone thrown in. All good so far. I added a second phone for my wife, at $79.99 for the phone, and ten bucks a month extra for the service. Come billing time, we find that contrary to what we were told over the phone when we signed up, the second phone requires a two year contract, not a one year contract. OK. So let’s just eat our little sh*t sandwich and get on with life. They lied, but the hassle of fixing the problem outweighs the hassle of just dealing with it. Trying to sort out an unrelated billing issue, I’m informed that actually, we’re now obligated to a two year contract on *both* phones. Needless to say, there was no mention of this when we talked to them, despite explicitly asking about modifications to the original contract. F*ck that! cancel both contracts, have your damn phones back, and here’s a nice idea for where exactly you can put them… “We’d be happy to cancel the contracts, at a fee of $175. Per line. ”
Ma Bell, meet Mr Tenacious Bastard, Attorney at Law. I’ll update as things develop. In the meantime, I suggest you avoid doing business with mendacious *ssholes. Just a suggestion.
Victor Graham MacBurney
The title of this post is the name of my maternal grandfather, known to his friends as ‘Mac’. He was a tobacconist and newsagent, a quiet, intelligent man who raised his daughter to think for herself and to delight in words and ideas. It is from him that I get my love of language and music.
This being Memorial Day weekend I thought I’d mention him in honor of his service to King and Country. He fought in the RAF as a navigator on a Mosquito nightfighter, escorting bombers on raids against Nazi Germany. For a few months he was acting squadron leader after the man who had held the position was shot down. He never talked about his experiences during the war. When it was all over he returned home to the little apartment above the shop in Southend-on-Sea, and set about the business of raising my mum and uncle.
There can be no doubt that but for the courage and sacrifice of men like Mac, the world would be a much worse place today. I doubt that any are reading this blog, but if you are, thank you.
Creative Commons License 2.0
The latest revision of the Creative Commons License has been released. Creative Commons is an attempt to deal with some of the messiness of intellectual property law by making it simple to create a roll-your-own license permitting certain kinds of use and forbidding others. If you create IP, take a look. Creative commons provides a way for you to encourage creative people to build on your work while retaining some measure of control.
Hat tip: Joi Ito
ICC conference, day 3
This was the last day of scientific presentations, and it ended on a high note with a banquet, about which more later. L. J. Perkins did an excellent overview of fusion physics, and mentioned a couple of things in passing that caught my attention. The most significant is that p-B11 is viable as a fuel in fast ignition ICF. In ICF a fuel pellet is compressed by depositing energy symmetrically on a spherical capsule, blowing off the outer layer. The resulting reaction force collapses the pellet to fusion relevant densities, heating in the process. Fast ignition is a scheme where you hit the compressed pellet at or just before the moment of maximum compression with an additional energy source (ion beam or laser) focused on a small spot. Ignition of the fusion fuel is initiated at the spot, and this serves as a spark plug which sends a shock front through the high density fuel, triggering fusion throughout the volume. The nice thing about ICF is that the fuel density is really high, so the mean free path for photons is really short, smaller than the size of the pellet. This means that bremstrahlung, the traditional enemy of p-B11, is less of a problem, since bremstrahlung photons are captured within the pellet, rather than escaping as they do with the lower density plasmas used in magnetic confinement.
Busy
Probably no posts for a few days. I’m meeting some work deadlines today, and flying to Florida tomorrow morning to unpack the moving van, which will probably consume the weekend. But keep checking back–Andrew can probably tell you all about the fusion conference.
The Sky Was Falling
It turns out that, for the expedition that lost so many people on Everest eight years ago, Chicken Little was right.
An analysis of weather patterns in May 1996 suggests the mountaineers died when the stratosphere sank to the level of the summit, 29,000ft above sea level.
The freak weather caused pressure and oxygen levels to plunge within the “death zone” – the area above 26,000ft where the oxygen is extremely thin.
Feline Infinitum
Now here’s someone with too much time (and too many cats) on his hands.
[via (who else?) Paul Hsieh]