Quotulatiousness

December 26, 2019

“Make Gas Cans Great Again”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton offers a simple, yet fiendishly clever policy for Donald Trump to secure millions of votes in the next election:

If Donald Trump wants to ensure he recaptures the 2020 electoral votes in the Great Lakes states he won in 2016 — and possibly add Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine — there is one simple thing he could do that would make him a hero to every snow-blowing American — issue an executive order to restore functioning gas cans.

To be clear, this would also make him a hero to tens of millions of other Americans throughout the country who use lawn mowers, power tools, etc around their homes or in their jobs. In 2009 the EPA banned the sale of gas cans that functionally pour gas. To be specific, the scientifically illiterate bureaucrats at the EPA outlawed gas cans with vents, mandating that all new gas cans must have crazy contraptions that require three hands to operate. Unlike the old gas cans, the new ones spill gas all over the user and onto the ground. The result of the EPA’s incompetence is a new gas can that is much worse for the environment than the one it replaced. The incompetent regulators at the EPA are so scientifically illiterate that they honestly believed that the vents on gas cans were there to allow gas fumes to escape, rather than the actual purpose of allowing air to flow in to the can so that gas can be poured out. Having received their “science” education in Oppression Studies classes at Grievance State University, these morons making rules for how we gas up our power tools have likely never handled a tool more powerful than their own personal groomers.

The government-mandated non-functioning gas can may be the most unpopular government-imposed regulatory rule since the 55 mile per hour speed limit. If you don’t know someone who mocks and despises these stupid red canisters, then you are living a very sheltered urban or upscale lifestyle. Most all working-class and middle-class Americans deal with these awful containers, and they mock the government for imposing them on us.

December 22, 2019

The North Magnetic Pole … a refugee from Canada’s Arctic

Filed under: Cancon, Russia, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh on the latest refugee to flee from Canada:

On Dec. 10, the World Magnetic Model used to calibrate compasses was officially updated. The “model” can be thought of as a map that you would use, given your location on or near the Earth’s surface, to find out how many degrees your magnetic compass is off from true geographic north (or south). This ordinarily happens every five years, but the wizards in charge of the system decided to update a year early because the north magnetic pole is moving particularly fast right now.

Positions of North Magnetic Pole of the Earth. Poles shown are dip poles, defined as positions where the direction of the magnetic field is vertical. Red circles mark magnetic north pole positions as determined by direct observation, blue circles mark positions modelled using the GUFM model (1590–1890) and the IGRF-12 model (1900–2020) in 1 year increments. For the years 1890–1900, a smooth interpolation between the two models was performed. The modelled locations after 2015 are projections.
Map by Cavit via Wikimedia Commons.

As most Canadians will have heard, magnetic north is, at the moment, fleeing Canadian territory and heading toward Russia. The rate of change is still very high by historic standards, first established in the early 19th century, but it has slowed just a little. In the year 1900 the pole was firmly in the Canadian Arctic, off Somerset Island. It wandered north, broke out of our high Arctic archipelago in about 2000, and has been streaking Siberia-ward across the open sea at more than 50 km a year since. The time component in the new WMM forecasts a slight slowing over the next five-year period, to about 40 km/yr.

This, like everything else involving Earth’s magnetic field, is a bit of a guess. The WMM has to be updated often because it does incorporate guesswork about the magnitude and direction of changes in the short-term future. The model will be most accurate now, and increasingly less so over the five-year term as the magnetic poles do their little dance — independently, by the way; the magnetic poles are not exactly opposite the Earth from one another, and the “south” one is scooting along much more slowly than the “north.” (Also, the magnetic north pole, the one to which the “north” needle of your compass is attracted, is actually a “south” pole to physicists.)

The truth is that the naive inquirer should not research Earth’s magnetism in the expectation that it is as well understood by scientists as, say, oceanic tides. (You can probably detect that I am talking about myself here.) The question “Why is the magnetic pole leaving Canada?” does not really admit of a solid answer. Maybe it’s the investment climate?

Probably most everybody is dimly aware that the magnetic poles flip outright from time to time — every half-million years on average. But the assumptions embedded in your handheld compass run much deeper than that. The Earth itself is only a big dipole magnet generally, rather than locally, and there is no guarantee of only one “north magnetic pole” as the field is measured near the surface. Competing “north poles” can form. (Which would, at least, let Russia and Canada each have their own …)

December 21, 2019

Expanding the definition again: “terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Offensensitivity hits the eggheads:

Labeling super-smart people with terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech, and should be punishable as such, argues lecturer and Harley-Street psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck.

Likewise wonk, smarty-pants, and know-it-all: these terms are “divisive and humiliating,” and the “last taboo,” the University of East London egghead said this week while promoting her new book about brainiacs. Such “anti-IQ” words set society’s Einsteins apart, she claimed, with the result that geeks end up “feeling like they’re a misfit and don’t belong.”

Calling someone a swot, whizkid, brainbox, smart-arse, or dweeb may seem “harmless banter,” but it is equivalent to hate speech, she reckons, and should be recognized as such in British law – with punishments including fines and imprisonment. “It is only with the benefit of hindsight and academic research that we realise how wrong we were,” she added.

That academic research includes her new book titled Extreme Intelligence, for which she interviewed 20 nerds for 90 minutes about when they realized they were so very clever.

She then embarked on a “contextual analysis of literature” and decided that calling someone a boffin was equivalent to the worst racial slurs. “The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s,” she said during her book launch, before noting that “other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently.”

Dr Falck does not have a chip on her shoulder, despite the fact that the whole idea behind the book stemmed from the fact that as a child she was offered a place at a school for gifted children but her mother turned it down because she feared it would result in her becoming socially difficult.

December 19, 2019

QotD: The “fitness club” scam

Filed under: Business, Environment, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As any good cult leader knows, the real money in running a cult doesn’t come from the cultists themselves. It comes from the hangers-on who buy your products and vote for you. Think of it like the gym. Notice how all the gyms these days are called “fitness clubs?” It’s a brilliant marketing move, straight out of the UFO cult playbook. Gyms fitness clubs don’t make their money off the small hard core of people who work out every day. Rather, it’s the people who sign up — who join the club — but never actually go.

Here’s how you talk yourself into a gym fitness club membership: “I need to get in shape. So I’ll buy a club membership. That way, I can go whenever I want.” In Festinger’s taxonomy […] you’re at step 2: You’ve taken a significant action in line with your belief. Gyms fitness clubs add a further refinement of late-20th century marketing, in that they offer you a yuuuuge “discount” off the outrageously-high signup fee, but the underlying psychological process is the same.

And now you’re set up for the disconfirmations — that is, all those times you think about going to the gym, but don’t actually go. Objectively you’re wasting your money, but psychologically you’re committed to the idea of yourself as someone who does “fitness” — you’re in a fitness club, after all! And since everyone you know is doing the same thing — fully 75% of conversations one overhears at Starbucks are soccer moms griping about how they need to work out, but just can’t find the time — you’re in, all the way, […].

The “climate change” scam works the same way. When she’s on the campaign trail pimping the “Green New Deal,” Fauxcahontas Warren knows she doesn’t have to pitch it to the eco-freaks; they’d vote for her no matter what. She has to pitch it to the normies, fitness club-style. That’s where the “climate change” nomenclature really pays off. It’s shockingly easy to get people convinced of a lunatic belief. All you have to do is a) get ’em early, and b) overload them with “evidence.” You know the drill: These days, we’re lectured practically from birth that we must Do Something! for The Environment! … and the “evidence” for this, of course, is the ceaseless, dramatic variation in daily temperature the un-indoctrinated call “weather,” plus all the other dramatic variations in climate that didn’t happen. So long as you pitch it with complete self-righteousness, people with the critical thinking skills of five year olds will fall in line every time.

Then all you have to do is get people to take action … which the government, in all its wonderful helpfulness, has already done: Low-flow toilets, those stupid twisty “light” bulbs, toilet paper that either shreds on contact with skin or sandpapers your asshole off, plastic straw bans, mandatory recycling, you name it. And I’m sure y’all realize by now that the fact that none of this stuff actually works is a feature, not a bug. Since it’s the disconfirmations that get you. That’s the pitch to the normies — you obviously care about “the environment,” in the same way you care about “fitness.” Just as the “fitness club” owners will happily keep cashing your checks while you remain a diabetic lardass, so Fauxcahontas will keep cashing your checks while the weather stubbornly remains the weather …

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

December 17, 2019

“Oh, shut-up. Pound sand, you scowling urchin”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t often find myself nodding along with Kurt Schlicter‘s writings, but I have to agree that Greta Thunberg’s fifteen minutes must surely be up by now?

Clearly Greta Thunberg is being exploited by her cynical puppetmasters, but equally clearly she’s a tiresome, bizarre Marxist scold whose exploitation of the hapless dummies who buy into the climate change hoax is part of what is an increasingly violent plot to undermine capitalism and freedom. Recently, the cretins at TIME, which shockingly still exists in 2019, named her “Person of the Year.” That’s appropriate, since 2019 has been a very annoying year.

In 2029, after the world hasn’t ended but her usefulness has, she’ll be a Jeopardy question and probably shacked up with an unemployed performance artist named Björn in an Oslo suburb. Fun fact: “Greta Thunberg” is Swedish for “Cindy Sheenhan.”

But today, we’re all supposed to fall over ourselves over Pippi Longnagging – at least that’s what our betters command – yet it’s unclear why. Teenagers are notoriously ignorant, and ones spewing recycled Marxism are the worst of all. But the idea is not that this tiresome truant is some visionary thinker. The idea is to leverage her youth and awkwardness to keep you from speaking the indisputable truth that she’s a weird brat who presses for an ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. And now, she is hinting she wants to run up that score.

Trump mocked her and a zillion pearls were clutched. How dare you … criticize the Luddite pest who presumes to tell you how to live, leveraging the full benefit of her nearly 17 years of experience to explain to you how stuff should be. How dare you!

Oh, shut-up. Pound sand, you scowling urchin.

The kid is a fanatic, and though that’s no fault of her own – she’s a victim of her pinko exploiters – she is still spewing bloodstained poison.

Bloodstained poison, really? Isn’t she just a nice Eastern Norwegian who wants a better world with love and hugging? Or is she yet another aspiring fanatic ready to kill for the kreepy kommie climate kult?

The other day, this malignant muppet “told cheering protesters … ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.” Now, maybe her English is bad, or maybe she’s just ignorant, but then again the murder of opponents is the Marxist way.

December 16, 2019

QotD: The Great Pestilence of 1348

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Long I have been curious about the Great Pestilence that trimmed the population of Britain and Europe by a third or more, in the fourteenth century. I make too much of it; the plague was a recurring event for centuries before and after. I notice from the tabloids that it is returning, through Africa this time. I know there will be pestilence to come, when we will all think it terribly important. It rivetted attention, I’m sure, in the autumn of 1348, and through the summer of 1349. And yet within a generation it is hardly mentioned.

England, below the Ribble and Tees, is special, thanks to the Domesday Book of the invading, tax-loving Normans, and their general propensity to good record-keeping. The towns and villages ennumerated in 1086 can be traced to the present day; nineteen in twenty are still there. Having figures to start, and through the parish books later, we can track an economic and demographic history with an accuracy possible in no other country. We can know, for instance, of the population boom through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which had slackened well before the “Black Death.” And with that boom, impressive advances in farming, technology, and building, as today. Nothing conduces to technical improvement, as a bit of crowding.

This proportion I cited — the nineteen-in-twenty (or more) — which I have from reading in economic history mostly years ago, fascinates my attention. We know large tracts were depopulated, we find the archaeological evidence easily enough. They were planting rye within the walls of Winchester, and many other towns. Everywhere, they had elbow-room again. Our deep ecologists would have been pleased — those who think life on this planet would be better had a few billion souls not been born. As Christianity, and environmentalism, are mortally opposed, and the fourteenth century was overwhelmingly Christian, I expect complaints of overpopulation were differently expressed at the time. Mostly it would have been moaning from younger brothers about the distribution of inherited land.

Always, there have been younger brothers. Always, there have been survivors. What delighted me was the speed with which all the vacant places were filled. As we’ve seen, too, after ghastly wars, demography abhors a vacuum.

David Warren, “Death the real illusion”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-11-04.

December 15, 2019

From “mascupathy” to “toxic masculinity”

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Suzanne Venker on the well-aired notion that males are suffering from “toxic masculinity”, and must be “cured” by being more like females:

“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ve always been fascinated at the ease with which specious ideas spread. One day you’re living your life, and unbeknownst to you, someone who holds a reasonable measure of power has an idea based on his or her “research.” That person tells someone else, and then that person tells someone else, and the next thing you know, this new idea has spread like wildfire and people everywhere who are clamoring for answers to complex problems jump on board and say, “Yes, that’s it! That must be it!” All of a sudden, you start reading and hearing about it in the news. An idea has been born. It is now a fact.

That’s how I imagine we arrived at the bogus concept known as “toxic masculinity,” which was apparently deemed “mascupathy” 10 years go by psychotherapist Randy Flood. Mascupathy, Flood and his colleagues decided, is the failure of a man to shed his traditional manly ways. At that point, he officially has a disease.

“We just believe,” writes Flood in Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing The Malaise of American Manhood, “that there is a disease process that goes on when we raise boys to cut off half of their humanity in order to pursue the pinnacle of masculinity.”

This is the conclusion some, such as Flood, have come to for why men and boys are struggling:

    Women are graduating from college at higher levels. the male suicide rate is four times that of women, men have a harder time moving out of their parents’ homes than women. There are so many statistics that are telling us that men are struggling. Ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are men, but when there is a shooting we don’t talk about men’s mental health.

Actually, many people have addressed men’s mental health. We simply didn’t arrive at the same conclusion. Men and boys aren’t suffering from an overdose of masculinity; they’re suffering from a dearth of masculinity.

How could it be the former when millions of boys come from fatherless homes and when most boys are products of public schools, where only 23% of teachers are male? Single motherhood has skyrocketed over the last five decades — a whopping 40% increase. Who do we suppose is encouraging boys to “pursue the pinnacle of masculinity”? Their mothers and their female teachers?

Hardly. In schools, girls have the upper hand while boys go along for the ride. Their interests and their innate aggression were stifled the moment we got rid of recess and told boys to sit still and read books centered on women and girls. At home, boys of single mothers are largely responsible for themselves, which is why so many get into trouble. To the extent that single mothers are home, they may be very good at mothering. But they can’t be a father.

December 14, 2019

History of Space Travel – Guided by Starlight – Extra History – #6

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published 12 Dec 2019

What happened after we touched down on the moon? And where are we going in the future? While we may have lost the glitz and glamor of the Space Race, we have continued to make incredible progress in reaching the stars. We’ve come together to build space stations while in space, create the international space station, and started developing new technologies that could take us to Mars and beyond.

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

December 9, 2019

Why do Mosquitoes Prefer some people to others? | James May’s Q&A | Head Squeeze

Filed under: Environment, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 26 Apr 2013

James May imparts some very interesting facts on mosquitoes. So why do they prefer some people to others?
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December 8, 2019

Political evolution in action – “The predator approaching is a Donald Trumptruck”

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Essays in Idleness, David Warren explores the notion of a “no-brainer”:

The definition of a “no-brainer,” is a decision that requires no brains. Gentle reader will imagine what happens when decisions are made in that way. Or maybe he can’t, in which case I will imagine it for him. The results will be unforeseeable, if prompt; except by those using their brains to foresee them.

This is a problem with the zombie, or collective method of governing a country, or governing anything. It relies on luck. Sometimes, very rarely, it will get lucky. But the luck never lasts.

Perhaps one might observe there is no such thing as a “no-brainer,” even among fish swimming in a school. It is physiologically impossible, even for a human, to act without engaging his grey matter.

Let us take a decision that might be made by either — say, fish in the ocean, or a school of liberal-progressives. It is the principle, “Whenever encountering an obstacle, turn Left.” (Or the alternative no-brainer is possible: “Turn Right.”) No turning signal is necessary, for the rest of the school has been programmed the same way. Still, they must see the obstacle, and turn. This involves a dim intellectual process. It need not be applauded, however.

Let us posit our obstacle is a whale; and that we are its diet. It is large, so we can see it from a distance, or were equipped to detect it in some other way. Instinct kicks in, and we turn. “Left, left!” goes the collective signal. The whale’s advantage is that, with even less thought, he can make his own adjustment of course. It’s easy, because experience has taught him which way we will turn. We do so, and in a moment, we are all gobbled down.

The life of a sprat may be hard, perhaps; but it is mercifully brief.

Or let’s say we are Democrats, in caucus. The predator approaching is a Donald Trumptruck. We can see it coming a mile away; there is no subtlety at all in the creature. And yet we always get run over.

December 7, 2019

History of Space Travel – One Small Step – Extra History – #5

Filed under: History, Russia, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 5 Dec 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

The United States was losing the space race. A number of unfortunate missteps and mistakes had hindered their progress. But the United States had also structured its space program entirely differently from the USSR. Instead of being helmed by the military, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration was created by Eisenhower with an emphasis on exploration and research. And in the end, the later but more advanced satellites will collect the data required a dream firmly placed in the American consciousness by JFK. A dream to place a man on the moon.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
19 hours ago
The plaque still gives me goosebumps in the best way possible. Hopefully one day we can live up to its promise of peace. Be good to one another. ❤️

And thanks to Rebecca Ford (the voice of Lotus) for voicing space mom at the end of each of these episodes. They’ve been a blast to make and we hope that you all have enjoyed this trip to the stars.

December 5, 2019

QotD: [Literal] Health Nazis

Filed under: Germany, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[T]he Nazis’ focus on the threats that risky habits pose to “public health” makes perfect sense in light of their collectivist ideology. “Brother national socialist,” said one bit of Nazi propaganda, “do you know that your Führer is against smoking and thinks that every German is responsible to the whole people for all his deeds and missions, and does not have the right to damage his body with drugs?”

Smith adds: “Clearly there were considerable links between the promotion of particular lifestyles and the racial hygiene movement. Tobacco and alcohol were seen as ‘genetic poisons,’ leading to degeneration of the German people.”

The point, I hasten to add, is not that today’s “public health” paternalists are Nazis. I am not suggesting that everyone who hates smoking is just like Hitler. But there is an unmistakable totalitarian logic to the notion that the government has a responsibility to promote “public health” by preventing us from engaging in activities that might lead to disease or injury. The implication is that we all have a duty to the collective to be as healthy as we can be, an idea the Nazis embraced but one that Americans ought to find troubling.

Jacob Sullum, “So What If Hitler Was an Anti-Smoker?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2004-12-17.

December 2, 2019

A bad IDEA for classroom peace

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Max Eden discusses the rise of “room clears” as teachers resort to evacuating classrooms to prevent harm to students from one disruptive one:

Last month, NBC Nightly News aired a segment on the latest classroom-management technique to sweep America’s schools: “room clears”: When a child throws a tantrum that could physically endanger his peers, teachers evacuate all of the other students from the classroom until the troublemaker has vented his rage upon empty desks, tables and chairs. The technique was virtually unheard of five years ago. But 56 percent of surveyed teachers and parents in Oregon now report having experienced a room clear in their or their child’s classroom over the last year.

Surrendering the classroom to a single student: The average reader might well ask why anyone thinks this would be a good idea. Yet the policies that make this approach inevitable have been applauded by a wide range of authorities, from the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Trump-administration’s Department of Education.

The emergence of room clears is a product of several fashionable education-policy trends designed to protect the rights of troubled students, often with little regard for the rights of their classmates. These include the provisions contained in the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which mandates that special-education students be subject to the “least restrictive environment” possible. When it comes to students who are hard of hearing, dyslexic or developmentally delayed, this policy likely has done a great deal of good. But many schools also label disruptive or violent students as having an “Emotional and Behavioral Disability” (EBD). Rather than provide these students specialized attention in separate settings, schools often funnel them into traditional classrooms.

In a national poll, two thirds of surveyed teachers at high-poverty schools reported that there is a student in their classroom who they believed shouldn’t be there; and 77 percent of surveyed teachers report that a small number of disruptive students cause other students to suffer. Unfortunately, IDEA’s provisions don’t adequately account for the rights and interests of general-education students, and teachers typically have little say over who is in their classroom.

Once they are assigned to a traditional class, EBD students can become virtually untouchable as far as discipline goes. Schools are discouraged by federal policy and activist groups alike from disproportionately disciplining students with disabilities — the effect of which is that principals are required to overlook many otherwise unacceptable transgressions. (Two thirds of teachers say that special-education students are treated more leniently than general-education students for the same offenses.) The worst-behaved students effectively are taught that the rules don’t apply to them in the same way they apply to others. Even when misbehavior edges toward violence, EBD students are becoming physically untouchable.

November 29, 2019

History of Space Travel – Red Star – Extra History – #4

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 28 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

While rockets had been proven to be indispensable to the Second World War, the idea to send people up into orbit was still seen as fantasy. Space was important only as a method to further the range of missiles meant to land oceans away from their original launch point. But a man named Korolev will change all of that, with work so secretive, he will be referred to as Chief Designer for nearly his entire life. But we all know the name of his first project into space: Sputnik.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
1 day ago
We weren’t able to fit her into the episode, but the other famous first cosmonaut in space is Laika, the Soviet space dog. She was a stray who was taken in by the program to test the Sputnik 2 and some of its life support features (like a coolant fan). Unfortunately, Laika did not return from her mission alive but she’s still regarded highly in the history of space flight and has become a symbol for the space race and animal testing in general. Look her up!

I remember reading in Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe of the day on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1960 when he and his wife were told by a group of Red Army cadets of a Soviet rocket launch carrying a human into orbit for the first time. The story was officially denied and the capsule was said to be unmanned after all. Wikipedia says:

According to Gagarin’s biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies (Ivan Ivanovich) and human voice tape recordings (to test if the radio worked) that were made just prior to Gagarin’s flight.

In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, colonel Barney Oldfield revealed that an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok launch vehicles. The onboard TDU (Braking Engine Unit) had ordered the retrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of the attitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heat shield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel’s telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.

November 25, 2019

Why Can We See Through Glass? | Earth Lab

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 24 Jan 2013

Why can we see through glass, but not other solid objects? James May explains.

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