parking




This parking lot seems to use a weird numbering scheme.
..., 16, 06, 68, 88, ?, 98, ...
What do you think is the number under the car?


via: Spiegel Online

inNOvation

1969: Astrounauts walking on the Moon.
1976: Supersonic commercial flights.
1980: Hawker Harrier jump jet.

None of the above technologies is available today.
The Space Shuttle is in a museum and NASA is slowly developing a new launch vehicle to transport humans into space - to regain the capabilities of the 1960s several years from now.
Supersonic commercial flights are not even available to very wealthy people.
The F-35 fighter jet was supposed to implement some capabilities of the jump jet, but is becoming a billion dollar debacle instead.
What happened? Why did progress in aerospace not only stall but actually reverse?
A few months ago an Antares rocket exploded, probably due to malfunctioning engines. Those engines were built in Russia in the 1960s. Not developed. Built.
Yes, there is SpaceX, but as far as I can see, the capabilities of a Falcon launch vehicle are not that advanced compared to a 1960s rocket.
Perhaps leaders a la von Braun and JFK are what is missing today or maybe technology simply does not progress along a straight path, but I would really like to understand what went wrong in aerospace over the years.

no comment

I just noticed that TBFKACIP laments "the loss of smart guys like Wolfgang and Arun" as commentators on his blog.
Thanks for the flowers, but actually it is not very smart to wrestle with pigs (x) and it is also not very smart to repeat myself; but unfortunately I feel that I have to set the record straight one more time.

The link in his post points to the "wrong" comments. Yes, I did argue with TBFKACIP several times about his idiotic stance on the Israel/Palestine issue, but his tasteless remarks about Austria, Hitler and Herzel were not the reason I decided to stop commenting at his place.
This came a bit later, after one of his regular commenters wrote that "Jews are even more heavily represented in the upper echelons of Wall Street, banking, and the media.
The media circus over the murder of three Jewish teenagers in Israel perfectly reflects their distorted priorities."
This type of comment is indistinguishable from Goebbels propaganda and I pointed that out, but TBFKACIP felt the need to support the commenter and her remarks (*).

And at this point I decided that this was finally far beyond wasting my time and that I don't want any part of this.


added later: (x) Not very witty, but it is the name he chose for his blog; his choice, not mine.

(*) Just for the record of what was written (because some seem to have problems remembering the details): His response was " Insults are pretty cheap. You might want to do the actual work of seeing whether what [..] claims is actually true - and whether that's relevant even if it is true.
Those who have looked carefully at the Israel lobby in the US have concluded that it is really an alliance between what is really a pretty small minority - American Jews and the much larger group of Christian conservatives ..."

Actually I don't want "to do the actual work" of checking the truth of antisemitic nonsense and discuss the "alliance" of American Jews and Christian conservatives to better understand "the media circus over the murder of three Jewish teenagers".
And I don't want to have a discussion with people who do.


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