Nuke

i have a shot of greenhouse-item as my desktop. such a beautiful ball of angry plasma.

you have the same containment requirements as fusion, except lost particles can annihilate parts of your containment system.

i saw one of these reported on the news and it looked more like an optical aberration in the optics of what ever sensor pod they used to gather the image.

dirty rockets. we have come far.

yea, but id want all my military bases and naval vessels upgraded with fusion power plants before i let the world have at it. that's assuming the skunkworks made any progress at all on their reactor. if they did its not a forgone conclusion that the military would be the first customer, and the contract exclusive.

always figured hitler declaring war on the us as just posturing. germany didnt have the means, bomb or no, to engage with the usa. even with the v2. they would have needed to find an ally in range of the targets in the us or figured out sea/air launch capability (i suspect launching from a moving position would have played havok with the guidance system). we may have scaled up our bombing of japan significantly to get them out of the way for the inevitable and likely short lived cold war with germany. with von braun firmly in the fatherland, it would have only been a matter of time until a longer range rocket was available. and if that came to fruition before we developed our own rockets that would put germany in an advantageous position. we would have also been playing catch up as far as jet aircraft go as well. we could have done a b-29 strike, but they would likely have aircraft that could intercept it. the cold war would play out in a more aggressive format than the one we actually got, essentially both sides trying to position themselves such that they could deploy a first strike, rather than seeking the best deterrent. of course for that all to happen would have required germany to take a more moderate stance on their internal policies, being more methodical and strategic in their conquest of europe. not backstabbing russia, not declaring war on the us, not slaughtering millions in death camps, etc. but then again with such constrained ambitions, who would we use four our go to bad guy movie villian template. honestly not sure what they would have been doing. with no war with germany, the soviets may have turned their attention towards japan and would have ended up with more of asia as a result. but with a wolf at the front door you would want to deal with it sooner or later.

drones are a thing. military intelligence is a thing. stealth is a thing. skunkworks gonna skunkworks. ufo's were successfully used as a cover for us black projects in the past. history tends to repeat itself. put 2 and 2 together. lets just hope whatever they are flying is fusion powered.

not sure its possible for me to collect it, it keeps disappearing. so i limit my consumption to a couple bottles a year. usually on my birthday and during the holiday season (my personal tradition is that booze gifted on christmas must be consumed by new years). my 42nd birthday is coming up, so this is the one where i discover the meaning of life, the universe and everything. i suspect it will involve pink elephants.

or maybe don't try to fight a war on too many fronts. hitler's biggest mistake was to backstab stalin and invade russia. hostilities were there, so stalin would have probibly done the same if given the chance, but further down the line. but once the blitzkrieg met the russian meat grinder at stalingrad, the war was pretty much decided. d-day was just a formality at that point. russian attrition had left their fangs broken. one could argue that if they did not waste resources (human resources, not just the administration costs) on the holocaust he may have had the manpower and the skill within germany to actually hold onto his reich, but i honestly dont think hitler could have come to power in the first place without his preferred scapegoat. it could have just as easily been one of the others, goebbels, himmler, etc. they could have thrown conscripted jews at the eastern front while their scientists develop the bomb, and they would have had a long range delivery system, then knock out london and moscow in one fell swoop. things could have gone a lot worse. in this alt timeline i suppose einstein would have never sent his letter to fdr and the manhattan project may have never even got off the ground. if it did, then the end of ww2 would have had a lot more boom boom.

again human behavior is the biggest great filter. inherited from the transition from apehood to humanhood. no mater what notions of civilization you claim to hold, it is so easy to fall back on old patterns, patterns which are very destructive at scale. and with post industrial weapons of war, those behaviors had us killing eachother in droves. sometimes it takes an existential threat to make people think about what they are doing. things like nuclear weapons and climate change. lets say we all agree to give up nuclear weapons, we start having them dismantled and their cores burned in nuclear power plants. it only takes the last world leader to go: "haha we got nukes and you dont, surrender or die!" of course they wouldn't be the only one to pull that stunt and they would be lobbing nukes at each other in short order. old patterns are always there. its better to just let the nukes rust in their silos and carry out our stupid little proxy wars as the world leaders beat on their chests like gorillas. on the other side the good thing about primitive instincts is that survival is one of them.

not sure when we will get the movie. out little hole in the wall theater at the high school does movies on the weekends (a clever way to pay for teen sports). the next 3 weekends are booked up, with barbie being the last one, since it came out around the same time its a fair bet that oppenheimer will be next. anyway i see nuclear weapons as mankind's maturity test, which thus far it has passed (some initial use is required because who would believe you otherwise). i suppose its one of many filters a civilization must go through. if we are to move out into the greater galaxy and beyond, we are going to need to master very high energy systems. any one of which could glass a planet when used carelessly or maliciously if it falls into the wrong hands. nuclear warheads are the only viable means of interstellar propulsion at our disposal, provided we find a valid reason to to tank the economy for years building it. want something better than old boom boom? its going to be even more dangerous. ultimately the biggest filter is not technological, its is our own behavior.

better off using the hydrogen as remass in nuclear engines to help power the interplanetary logistics that a mars colony will require.

i dont really use social media at all. i don't like the direction its been going.

the water is less than 50 yards away from my front door. but im not getting in, its too cold.

i honestly dont care much for tans, but i got me a pretty good trucker tan just getting some sun this summer. its been a fairly nice one as far as alaskan summers go. there are health benefits from getting sun, but too much and it becomes a risk for skin cancer. tanning beds are at least a controlled way to get those benefits, but overuse can cause some pretty horrific side effects. its probibly fine once and awhile, but people who go every month or so are probibly cooking themselves.

cats so big you need giant fighting robots to stop them.

because if i sat out on my deck nakid id get arrested.

looks like the asteroid people are retaliating.

i broke 3 drill bits today drilling and tapping holes for my joystick project. since these things are very old i did not trust the existing corroded threads, many of which were frozen and had to be drilled out (that cost me a couple bits in of itself, including an expensive carbide bit), not to mention the original grub screws were also corroded and many were stripped. so i decided to drill out and re tap all the holes for m3 and m3.5 threads, since i just got my grub screws. anyway i did about 8 gimbal drive sets, 2 gears, and 2 couplers. since the gears turned out to be steel rather than aluminium and the couplers are a somewhat tough steel, i was afraid to break the taps, so the brass gimbal sets got top billing, plus enough other parts to rebuild one complete joystick unit. will probibly tap all the gears tomorrow. the couplers need the most work since they have a sleeve that needs to be modified and a flange that needs to be dremeled off. not jobs i like to do in my room for the amount of shrapnel it produces. i also need to clean and polish all the shafts, and put flats on them with a file, slow tedius work. im gonna go back and revist the last 2 that i refurbed, because ive come up with new ways to improve the conversion process. not to mention to convert them over to the new sensors. anyway breaking a drill, or hell forbid a tap, is going to kill this project flat out till i can get more tooling.

like that time i was racing my sister on single lane dirt roads out in the sticks with grandma on the tailgate.

i think ive seen that one, its crazy how much just gets turned to chips. the chips weigh more than the finished part.

one of the reasons subtractive processes are preferred with metal is that you can give it more consistent properties across a volume of stock. casting is technically additive yet it produces lower quality parts, inclusions, voids, etc. castings are also often less precise than you want and you do have to remove some material to put the surfaces into spec, but the amount of material removed is significantly less than starting it as a block and shaping it as needed, and where precision is not needed the cast surface is more than adequate. i watch a lot of machinist videos and the amount of material that ends up as chips on the floor is more than you would think.

thats odd, wikipedia was the first place i searched. maybe i spelled it wrong (makes my case for using common language). or maybe the censorship beast has really big tentacles. either way until i see evidence for this act, im gonna have to call it a conspiracy theory at worst and a metaphore at best. evil doesn't need to be that elaborate to be evil.

same thing i do every day. sleeping.