The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
One thousand ninety-eight miles, just over fifteen hours on the road, and I’m here! Just got checked in, still need to unpack, then I’m going to verify the route to the training center so I can get there easily tomorrow morning.
More writing tonight, I hope, but the Überpost probably won’t go up before I go to bed.
From a Facebook post:
I like George Takei, but I find it amazing that somebody who has been personally put into an internment camp by his government can hold the position that only the government should have guns.
Checked into a hotel room at 6PM after departing Tucson at 7AM. Two-hour time shift involved, so I was on the road for eight hours, with about an hour’s stop in El Paso for food and fuel. Averaged 73MPH and 24.6MPG. (I love that just East of El Paso the speed limit on I-10 is 80!)
Just checked the comments. How did you guys get access to my Überpost draft? Dammit, you’re making my arguments for me! That’s my job!
Tomorrow, on to Houston!
So tomorrow morning bright and early I’m headed out for Houston. My plan is to stop in Ft. Stockton, and then drive on to Houston Sunday. I’m taking the ‘Stang.
I’ll be taking a technical class for two weeks, but at the end of it is the National Rifle Association Annual Meeting, which happens to be scheduled at the same time as a major gun-blogger get-together! I’m really looking forward to meeting a lot of people I’ve read but never shared meatspace with, and seeing others that I only have met once or thrice.
I am working on another Überpost, but it probably won’t go up before Sunday night at the earliest.
And congratulations to the various Massachusetts police departments who got to put on their full battle-rattle, drive around in their armored vehicles and practice house-to-house searches while looking for a guy who was actually outside the perimeter they’d set up. But they got him, and I’m glad. Thankfully for Chris Matthews, both of the bombers were Caucasian (by definition!) but they were Muslims apparently practicing Jihad. Who’s the sad clown now?
Now, tell me again that these “weapons of war” have “no place in civil society,” that they’re only good for “killing large numbers of people quickly, indiscriminately.”
Edited to add:
I did. I got this in an email today and had to share:
Cheerleaders and Soldiers: Call Me Maybe
The Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders did a dance video to “Call Me Maybe.” U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan saw it and did their own version, matching the cheerleaders scene-by scene. SO cool!!! Plus the Soldiers light off a four point deuce mortar as a point of punctuation. Soldiers win. Hands down!!! Here are the two videos together.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H96-TwrwY7M?rel=0]
The Toomey-Manchin amendment admirably attempted to carve out certain protections for gun owners, but today’s carve-outs are tomorrow’s loopholes. The current ‘gun show loophole’ was itself once considered a legitimate carve-out that protected certain private sales.
—
The amendment also took an incremental step toward universal background checks, which, as a Justice Department memo written earlier this year suggested, are effective only when coupled with a national registration system.
—
After all, you cannot track all gun sales without tracking all gun owners. But the government has no business monitoring constitutionally protected activity, like gun ownership, any more than it has any business tracking what books Americans read or how often they attend church.
Edited to add: Former Rep. Adam Putnam once said,
Government does only two things well: nothing, and overreact.
Yesterday it did the first, rather than the second. Let’s hope it keeps this up.
The other night my wife and I were watching Top Gear, and she asked me if Jeremy Clarkson did any non-car shows, like Richard Hammond and James May do. I didn’t know. Turns out, he does.
Here’s a corker of an episode about a battle I knew nothing of:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s?rel=0]
“Greatest Generation” on both sides of the Pond. How far they have fallen…and us.
The mighty F-1 engine of the Saturn V rocket – recently reverse-engineered.
Interesting excerpts from an engineering perspective:
Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”
—
“Because they didn’t have the analytical tools we have today for minimizing weight, everything was very robust,” noted Betts, when I asked what they found as they tore down the engine. “That’s apparent in really every aspect of the engine. The welds—”
“Oh, the welds!” interrupted Case. “The welds on this engine are just a work of art, and everything on here was welded.” The admiration in his voice was obvious. “Today, we look at ways of reducing that, but that was something I picked up on from this engine: just how many welds there were, and how great they looked.”
“You look at a weld that takes a day,” he continued, “and there are thousands of them. And these guys were pumping engines out every two months. It’s amazing what they could do back then and all the touch labor it took.”
—
An engine like the F-1 is sort of like two separate rocket engines: one small, one large. The smaller one consumes the same fuel as the larger, but its rocket exhaust is not used to lift the vehicle; instead, it drives the enormous turbopump that draws fuel and oxidizer from the tanks and forces them through the injector plate into the main thrust chamber to be burned.
As with everything else about the F-1, even the gas generator boasts impressive specs. It churns out about 31,000 pounds of thrust (138 kilonewtons), more than an F-16 fighter’s engine running at full afterburner, and it was used to drive a turbine that produced 55,000 shaft horsepower. (That’s 55,000 horsepower just to run the F-1’s fuel and oxidizer pumps—the F-1 itself produced the equivalent of something like 32 million horsepower, though accurately measuring a rocket’s thrust at that scale is complicated.)
Fascinating article.
As I’ve noted previously, my father worked for IBM on the Saturn V Instrument Unit – the rocket guidance system. I got to see all of the Saturn launches as a child growing up on Florida’s Space Coast. I don’t think I’ll ever see anything that impressive again in my lifetime.
Today’s Day by Day.