Chaos Manor View, Thursday, November 26, 2015
Thanksgiving Day
Spent the day with Roberta and Alex. Mass, brunch, movie The Martian at the Arclight, dinner at Dupar’s. We didn’t have a traditional Thanksgiving because neither I nor Roberta is up to it, and Alex is the only family member in town anyway. It all worked out well.
Tomorrow Alex and I go down to LOSCON, where they have loaded me up with panels, and we also have dinner with the Writers of the Future judges who are there and whomever else they invite. I’ll be there all day, and then Saturday they have me on three more panels, all interesting with interesting people. I expect to be exhausted, so you will probably not hear from me until Monday.
Russia is angry with Turkey. There is a dispute over how long the Russian fighter-bomber was over Turkish territory – which is a jutting spur less than ten miles wide. The Turks insist they sent warning after warning that the Russians were approaching their territory, but did not fire until the Russian plane was over Turkey. The Russians claim that it never was over Turkey at all; but even by the Turkish account any rational flight plan would put the Russians over Turkey no more than a minute at longest, and actually the time over Turkey would have been no more than a few seconds. They had to be ready to fire. They claim they were defending their air space; from what is not clear.
See the map references links below.
Putin will not let go of this, and we have not heard the last of the incident.
If Turkey is trying to get the Russians to stop attacking the Turkmen rebels in Syria in hopes of stemming the flow of Turkmen refugees into Turkey, this is not going to accomplish that. If this is jihad against Russia it is likely to trigger countermeasures. I expect the Armenians have their own grievances and would welcome Russian help…
Subj: Russia vs. Turkey: Dueling Maps of shot-down Russian jet’s flight track
http://www.businessinsider.com/turkey-russia-maps-jet-shot-down-2015-11
We need to remove our tactical nuclear weapons from Incirlik.
We’ve about 60 nuclear gravity bombs stored at Incirlik, which is relatively close to Turkey’s border with Syria.
Given recent events, along with the Ottomanization of Turkey’s government over the last decade (sparked by our misadventures in Mesopotamia), we should remove those weapons ASAP.
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Roland Dobbins
Subj: Calculation of speed of Russian aircraft shot down by Turks
Surely the calculation by Joshua Jordan is ridiculous?
Obviously the Russian airplanes — if they intruded at all — went in and out of Turkish airspace, either following a curved path (most likely) or flying in and turning around?
What useful purpose is served by injecting such absurd calculations into the analysis?
I hope the investigators have access to recorded tracks from ground or AWACS radar.
I haven’t the time to work the numbers, but given the shape of the Turkish spur into Syria, the Russian warplane could not have been in Turkish airspace very long whatever their flight plan was; which was I thought the point that was made? I make no comment on ‘ridiculous’ because I did not check the numbers. Perhaps I should have but I have many distractions. It did not seem unreasonable to me, but I still have no time.
something odd
Most of these pics are taken from refugees on the Macedonia-Greece border. Notice something odd? All the signs etc. are written in English!
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/26/pics-economic-migrants-sew-lips-shut-demand-to-be-shot-in-protest-at-european-border/I am convinced that most of this country’s problems could be corrected if we stopped attempting to educate people beyond their intelligence.
They are protesting European border closures. To whom are their protests directed?
Bezos says Blue Origin landing achieves ‘Holy Grail of rocketry’
Jeff Bezos’s space exploration company Blue Origin sent a rocket 62 miles up into space and then, in a carefully controlled descent, landed it upright.
Jeff Bezos’s space company just made a dramatic breakthrough (WP)
It looks like they’re now officially well past the DC-X level of achievement.
It’s sad there was a 20-year interruption in the forward progress of the concept, but at least it’s no longer at NASA’s mercy.
Even if Bezos doesn’t know who to thank for getting this concept off the ground, Jerry, we all do.
So thanks, and congratulations to you, too.
. png
I expect Mr. Bezos knows of DC/X but there’s no particular reason for him to know of my part in the creation of DC/X.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
A blessed Thanksgiving Day to you and yours!
Back in the days it was possible to hear almost anything on the FM radio dial in LA, I remember hearing a recording of Abdul Abulbul Amir being sung — likely most often on Dr. Demento’s Sunday evening program. Not surprisingly, one can hear that old Frank Crumit record dated 1927 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6vyZ_q-TjA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv6M2omQ__U for a less scratchy version.
YouTube also points me to an old MGM cartoon short of “Adbul the BulBul-Ameer” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gt0PRpnShQ based on the poem and song. They don’t make ‘em like that any more!
Pax et bonum, Steven+
They have guns, but we have A-10’s
I watched the video you linked, of the small Parisian child whose father tells him that the flowers are being left at the massacre site to protect them. I watched the video with some sympathy for the father, because I know how hard it can be to explain things to a small child without exposing him to too much reality too quickly. His boy’s take-away was “They have guns, but we have flowers. So all will be well.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkM-SDNoI_8
That reminded me of the time I took my oldest child (age 6 at the time) to an air show, at which we saw a ground display of an A-10 and chatted with one of the pilots. As we were about to walk away, she pointed to the main gun sticking out of the nose of the aircraft and asked “what’s that?” Well, being a bit of a nerd, my mind flashed up various theological objections to killing and ruminations on just war theory, but in the end all I said was “that’s a really big gun to kill the bad guys with”.
Such was my daughter’s real world introduction to the concept of “just war”, and it seems to have stuck. I still think I did a reasonably good job.
Neil
We can hope so. There Will Be War.
Fuzzy dark matter = ?????
In reference to the first article of Jerry’s I ever recall reading, the Galaxy Jan 1975 (IIRC, but after 40 years it still made an impression) essay on Hawking’s visit to JPL, “Fuzzy Black Holes Have No Hair.”
The first thing I thought is that this only makes sense if dark matter is somehow tied to gravitational force lines – which leads to the conclusion that dark matter must be a modern, quantized version of ether. A la Beckmann and Kooistra.
Doesn’t prove anything – it is just a computer model and subject to the GIGO rule (or even Gospel In, Garbage Disposal, Garbage Out, if the data are good and model flawed). But my interest in modern ether theories just went up a notch.
Jim
As you know I am a fan of Petr Beckman’s aether theories; not that my opinion has any weight, but from what I can tell it is simpler that General Relativity, and accounts for all the observations that led to Special Relativity. I know of no crucial experiment refuting either GR or Beckmann’s entailed aether.
I have received this link from a number of PhD readers none of whom care to have their names listed.
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
