December 17, 2019 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Year: 2019
Fawlty Towers – Wrongly Shaped Chips
An evening pause: John Cleese at his peak.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann, who noted that the kid reminded him of what we think of as the typical millennial. Is he right? I await some response from my younger readers.
Starliner launch set for Friday, December 20
Capitalism in space: The first orbital flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, remains on target for launch this coming Friday, December 20, 2019.
The launch is presently set for 6:36 am (Eastern), with a docking at ISS early the next day.
NASA will be broadcasting the launch and docking.
Original investors sue Firefly
Capitalism in space: The original investors in Firefly Aerospace, cut out when the company went bankrupt, have filed suit against the reborn company.
A group of original shareholders in the defunct Firefly Space Systems have accused co-founder and CEO Tom Markusic of fraudulently conspiring with Ukrainian billionaire Maxym Polyakov to force the rocket company into bankruptcy in 2017 and reconstitute it under a nearly identical name without giving them any stake in the new venture.
Markusic “betrayed the trust of his original co-founders and investors and committed fraud to cut them out of his aerospace company. Instead of managing the operations of the Original Firefly, a revolutionary rocket company with endless potential, Markusic schemed with…Maxym Polyakov…to rob Plaintiffs of their investments and form a new company called Firefly Aerospace, Inc. (the ‘New Firefly’),” the plaintiffs said in a lawsuit.
The article at the link has a lot more information. Read it all.
This is also not the first time Markusic has been sued. He left Virgin Galactic to found Firefly, and was then sued by Branson’s company for stealing proprietary technology. That lawsuit was settled when Markusic agreed to not use that technology in Firefly’s rockets.
Soyuz rocket launches five satellites for Arianespace
A Russian Soyuz rocket, launching from French Guiana for Arianespace, successfully placed five satellites in orbit early this morning, including CHEOPS, a European space telescope designed to study exoplanets.
Though this was a Russian rocket, I count it as an Arianespace launch as that is the company under which the launch operates. I also realize this is open to debate.
The leaders in the 2019 launch race:
30 China
20 Russia
13 SpaceX
8 Arianespace (Europe)
China still leads the U.S. 30 to 26 in the national rankings.
Beverly “Guitar” Watkins – Rock Me Baby
An evening pause: Performed live March 3, 2017, with the Rick Fowler Band. She passed away, aged 80, on October 1, 2019.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
FISA court condemns FBI
The FISA court has issued a rare public rebuke of the FBI over its apparent misconduct and illegal tampering of evidence, as documented by the inspector general report released last week, misconduct aimed at misleading the court into issuing uncalled FISA warrants.
[T]he chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISC] strongly criticized the FBI over its surveillance-application process, giving the bureau until Jan. 10 to come up with solutions, in the wake of findings from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
The order, from the court’s presiding judge Rosemary M. Collyer, came just a week after the release of Horowitz’s withering report about the wiretapping of Carter Page, a former campaign adviser to President Trump. “The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the [Office of Inspector General] report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor described above,” Collyer wrote in her four-page order. “The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.” [emphasis mine]
This is another independent confirmation that the behavior of the upper echelons of the FBI during the Obama administration was corrupt, apparently acting to take sides during the 2016 election against Donald Trump.
The highlighted words however are to me very distressing. The FISA court is asking the bad apples to come up with new procedures to prevent them from behaving as bad apples again. If this is all that happens then they will have gotten away with it, and will proceed to do worse in 2020 and beyond.
What needs to happen is firm contempt citations against specific individuals, people like James Comey, followed by prosecution. Until that happens the bad guys will still be in charge, and the American justice system will still be corrupted.
Martian impacts and streaks
Click for full image.
In the most recent image download from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), there was the cool image to the right, reduced and cropped to post here, of a crater that appeared to have hundreds and hundreds of slope streaks along its inner slopes.
Slope streaks are quite mysterious. They are found in the equatorial regions as dark (though sometimes light) streaks on steep slopes, appearing throughout the year and slowly fading over time. They also appear to be a geological phenomenon unique to Mars. Nothing on Earth or any other planet appears to correspond.
As such, their nature and cause remains unknown, though there are a bunch of theories, with the most popular being that these are a kind of dust avalanche. They are always found in connection with dust-covered terrain, but they also make no significant topological change to the surface, other than brightness.
The slope streaks in this crater are especially intriguing, because of the number of streaks. In digging further into the MRO archive I found a number of images of this crater and its surrounding terrain. It appears that sometime before 2012 there was a relatively recent impact close to the exterior of the eastern rim of this crater. The image below, taken in 2014 by MRO, shows this impact as the large dark splotch, with the new crater indicated by the arrow..
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SpaceX successfully launches commercial satellite
Capitalism in space: Using a first stage for the third time, SpaceX today successfully launched a commercial communications satellite while recovering that first stage.
Fun fact: This first stage recovery today was the 47th time that SpaceX has successfully completed a vertical landing.
The leaders in the 2019 launch race:
30 China
20 Russia
13 SpaceX
7 Europe (Arianespace)
China now leads the U.S. in the national rankings 30 to 26.
Thomas Dolby – Blinded Me With Science
An evening pause: Somehow I don’t think it was science that blinded him.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Spygate from a scientific perspective
Back in February 2018, Republican-controlled committees in both the House and the Senate released detailed memos, dubbed the Nunes and Grassley memos respectively, accusing the FBI and the Obama Justice Department of using unverified and false information that was nothing more than opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign to illegally obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), warrants that allowed them to spy on the campaign of Donald Trump as well as his administration following his election victory in 2016.
Put more bluntly, the Republicans accused the Clinton campaign, with the help of the Obama administration, of weaponizing the surveillance powers of the FBI and the Justice Department in order to defeat their political opponents.
Not surprisingly, the Democrats and former Obama officials denied these allegations, calling both memos partisan and false. In the House the Democrats issued their own memo, claiming the Republican memos left out key information that made their arguments invalid.
Who was right? What was true? How was an ordinary citizen going to determine which of these competing political positions properly described what had actually happened?
At the time I admit my instincts and own personal biases led me to believe the Republicans. Even so, the allegations were so horrifying — suggesting a clear abuse of power and a willingness of people in Washington to subvert an American election — that some skepticism of the Republican accusations was certainly reasonable.
In fact, the best thing one could do in this situation is to take a scientific approach to the problem. The Republicans had put forth a theory, citing some data that suggested the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had abused their power in the worst possible manner. To prove that theory the Republicans would require both corroborating evidence as well as independent reviews that confirmed their conclusions.
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Turkey buys machine gun toting drones
Our fascist future: Turkey has purchased shipment of an unspecified number of drones equipped with a machine gun capable of firing as many as 200 rounds.
Made by the country’s own Asisguard, the Songar drone can carry 200 rounds of 5.56 x 45 mm NATO class ammo, and can hit a 15-cm-square (6-inch-square) target from 200 m (650 ft) away with single shots, 15-bullet bursts or a full auto unloading.
The 25-kg (55-lb) drones use a four-armed carbon body design with two coaxially mounted large props on each arm. The automatic machine gun beneath rests in a tilting mount, allowing a remote operator to aim it using controls that would be familiar to anyone who’s used the camera on a DJI Phantom. It carries sufficient battery and powerful enough communications to fly 10 km (6.2 mi) on a mission, it’s GPS and GLONASS stabilized, and it offers twin camera operation for a pilot and gunner if required.
This is not the first or the most sophisticated killing drone ever built. Its simplicity however suggests that it is becoming very easy for governments and the power-hungry individuals who like to run them to obtain technology capable of killing their opposition, in a way that will be untraceable.
I have embedded below the fold a sales video produced by the company. If it doesn’t send chills up your spine you are very divorced from reality.
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