benzman

This video is quite beautiful and includes what must be one of the luckiest remote camera shots ever.

My niece once took me somewhere in her Golf. As she didn't know how to get there she took out her phone, thumbed up a GPS app, dialed in the destination then studied the route. All while driving and taking the occasional look outside. When I nervously asked her why she didn't get a proper GPS so she could hear directions and take a quick look down at the screen now and again she airily replied that she preferred to look at her phone because she was a visual person, not an auditory person! It all helped to reinforce my opinion that humans in a car are unpredictable loose cannons, and that the sooner self-driving cars become a lot better the sooner the road toll will show a precipitous decline. On another note, a couple of years ago I took a demonstration ride in a Tesla. We were going along a multi-lane, slightly winding freeway and I was enjoying the sensation of the car keeping between the white lines, slowing down behind a slower car and then speeding up again when the road was clear. We came up to a truck in the lane to our left and, just as our front was about level with the truck's rear it started to move into our lane. I don't know whether the car would have done anything because I immediately turned the auto off and the car slowed down. Thinking about it later it occurred to me that as it was my first experience of auto driving I was alert and had my finger poised over the kill switch. I wonder how many Tesla crashes have been caused because the driver has been daydreaming, distracted or playing games on his phone?

My favourite is when the Apollo capsule separated from the third stage, turned around, docked with the lunar lander and extracted it. That took nerves, skill and steady hands.

I think that the original idea was to decrease the drag by getting rid of the wingtip vortices. No wingtips - no drag from wingtip vortices.

It's all getting a bit out of hand!

The light has gone out of 221b Baker Street Vale Una Stubbs.

At my next birthday I will be 8! Looking forward to my tenth!

I have got to the age where I only take notice of birthdays that end with a zero.

This subject has been done to death on a lot of different flightsim and gaming forums. I suspect that a lot of hardcore gamers will never be satisfied with a framerate less than infinity.

It is worth going onto YouTube and watching the film 'Gizmo". The first half shows people doing stupid things. The second half shows people doing stupid things with home-made contraptions. Much of the footage is from the 'twenties and 'thirties.

JUST a negative mass?? I feel that making an oval mirror to use in a telescope would not be a trivial problem. I am prepared to be educated on that point, though.

Australia - Brilliant!

Being a gentleman of advanced years, I experience 'glitches' all the time. For instance, I still flirt with women, I just can't remember why. Having said that, I still get lucky now and again. Of course, these days, 'getting lucky' means walking into a room and remembering why i went there.

There is an old joke about a women saying the her marriage has never been consummated because her husband is an aerospace engineer and all he ever does is tell how how great it will be one day.

Possibly not, but economics is certain to. Nuclear power stations are horrendously expensive to build, take many years to build and are horrendously expensive to decommission at the end of their life. Not to mention the problem of safely disposing of a waste the remains highly dangerous for literally millennia. Solar farms, wind farms, wave power, geothermal and batteries are all vastly cheaper. As a point of interest, Scotland in 2020 produced 97.4 % of its energy from renewables. They would have probably reached 100% had they not exported some to England. Nuclear power may have sounded like a good idea back in the nineteen-fifties but history has shown otherwise.

The graphic shows an engine with a centrifugal compressor whereas virtually all modern gas turbines have axial flow compressors. As I understand it, in the early days it was much easier to build a successful centrifugal engine even though it was realised that an axial flow engine would be superior.

Well - I haven't seen it but I guess you shouldn't expect too much from a film with a title like that.

Murray Walker, famous for his occasionally hilarious Formula One commentary, has died aged 97.

Early Spitfires had cloth covered ailerons, elevators and rudder. The fuselage and wings were always metal.

After he lands he fires a very pistol into the cockpit and the whole aircraft bursts into flames, despite it having run out of petrol.

I read Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff and thought it was one of the best books I had ever read. When I heard that they were going to film it I had reservations, I didn't think it could possibly be filmed. When I saw the film I was pleasantly surprised. Despite all the myth-making, flaky bits and telescoping of facts I thought they had done a great job. I tried to watch the recent Right Stuff mini series but gave up on the second episode. The makers were obviously just going for fantasy and it was all turning into just another soap opera. This is something that annoys me. I feel that the true story of the American space programme has all the drama and human interest that anyone can want. It does not need any fictionalising or fantasizing, It can stand perfectly well on its own. I felt the same after watchin First Man. Didn't care for that either. But then, I am just a Grumpy Old Man!

I think the cracks are rilles, which are collapsed lava tubes.

Reading this sort of stuff, if you know nothing about the subject, is hilarious.

A local museum had an exhibition of Star Wars props a while ago, It was fun looking at a Millennium Falcon model and identifying all the salvaged plastic kit parts. I saw several BMW motorcycle parts, front forks, engine covers, cylinders and so on.

Captain Sir Tom Moore who raised nearly thirty-seven million pounds sterling (about US$40,000,000) for charity by doing 100 laps of his garden at aged 99 has died of covid19 aged 100..