ThisMyShiznat

To me, there may not be anything more American than an outright vulgar display of power.  In this video clip obtained through foxnews.com, NASA does a test firing of the Ares booster rocket that will be used to send astronauts into space, and eventually back to the moon.

NASA is developing new booster rockets, and new space capsules that are planned to replace the current space shuttle design that we have all seen for many years now.  I don’t know what the new capsule will look like, or whether it will be reminiscent of the airplane style shuttle with the big red hydrogen tank and two booster rockets.

In the video below, NASA does a test firing in Promontory, Utah.  The booster spits massive amounts of raw thrust for roughly 2 minutes.  You can see dirt and dust being picked up from the thrust, even a few hundred feet in front of the rocket.  I can’t even imagine how they mounted this rocket to the earth so it wouldn’t move.  They must have a reinforced concrete slab that goes a mile down.

I hope they didn’t effect the rotation of the earth with this thing.  I really don’t want to have to adjust daylight savings time again.  Or then, maybe twice a year we should fire 20 of these bad boys all at once, adjusting the rotation of the earth by exactly one hour at 2:00am.  It does make sense.  There are about 750 billion clocks that need to be adjusted, but only 1 earth to readjust.  I’ll let NASA do the math.

Click the icon to see full screen video without leaving my blog.

When you see this video, you might ask yourself,  “How much did this outright vulgar display of power cost?” and you would be asking a good question.  Good questions deserve answers.  Some answers are probably classified.  Either way, I don’t have that number for you.  If you really care, go ahead and look it up and let me know, but I bet it’s a large number.  Another good question is “Who paid for it?”.  That one probably isn’t ‘top secret’ but I don’t have an answer for that either.  Looking at my federal budget article I don’t see anything about 3.6 million foot pounds of thrust.

Some people are definitely asking the question lately, “With our current economy, should we really be spending money on this?”.  The answer is yes.  yes were should.  As for space exploration, Rick Moranis put it best in the 1987 movie SpaceBalls when he said “We can’t stop.  We’ve got to slow down first”.  And he is right.  We cant stop, but slowing down might not be a bad idea.  Maybe they even have slowed down.  Thats one of the things about “Top Secret”.  It’s classified.

Do not attempt to adjust your monitor. The video is actually posted in fast forward. I appreciated it that way because I already know the movie.  I’ve probably seen it a gazillion times. Watching the whole scene in just over a minute works for me.  I know whats going to happen already and I still want to watch it again.  It saves me time.  Technology has actually increased the value of that particular movie.

Today a small engine plane and a helicopter collided in mid air over the Hudson.

Following the mantra that lightening never strikes twice, and considering the incident back in January where ‘Sully’ landed the Airbus A320 in the water, I would have thought that the Hudson would be a real safe place to fly a plane for at least the next few years.  Of course I would have been wrong had I been putting any thought into that.  I wasn’t thinking about that though because I had other things on my mind, aside from FAA regulations over the Hudson.  I can definitively say that I wasn’t the only one.

Immediately I asked myself, “How does this happen?”.  Terrorism immediately seems far more likely than stupidity, but this really doesn’t have any of the earmarks representing a terrorist attack.  If this is the best the terrorists had for today, then it would be definitive proof that we are winning the war.  It probably wasn’t though.

In an interview, Bloomberg was asked by a reporter, “Can you, as a pilot describe the airspace and how aircraft indeed have to navigate it.”

Bloombergs answer consisted of a few key statements that stood out to me.

There is a corridor here where aircraft can fly uncontrolled by air traffic.

There is a common frequency used on the Hudson river.

Pilots that fly in this area all the time pretty much always use those
frequencies to announce where they are.

Helicopter pilots pretty much always describe where they are, what altitude they
are and which direction they are going.

There's no requirement that they do that although common sense says, and the
maps do show what those frequencies are.

The term that caught my attention was “pretty much”.  The first time he used it, I saw his face cringe a little.  The second time he said it, he used it with authority.  No looking back.

Basically, to sum up his response, he said that there is no FAA control over the Hudson River airspace, nor is there any controll over the East River airspace.  He did note that there is regulation of the airspace requiring airplanes not to go near buildings, but he didn’t mention the governing body responsible for enforcing the requirements that do exist.

To me, this sounds like the helicopters are flying somewhat ‘willy nilly’ over the Hudson, and are required to provide their own communication between pilots.  As for airplanes, this particular plane took off from a NJ airport roughly 7 miles west of Manhattan.  The airplane was flying south to Ocean City New Jersy.  I’m not a pilot, but I don’t see why the airplane would have needed to fly over the hudson at all.

Bloomberg Interview obtained through FoxNews.com

In recent news AT&T was under fire from the web site operators at 4chan. Over the weekend, AT&T began blocking traffic to www.4chan.org, do to what it called a DDoS attack being launched from 4chan servers.  Today, 4chan argued that the AT&T was intentionally blocking the sites content from its subscribers.

I’m sure you have heard of AT&T, but if your not familiar with 4chan, then I don’t recommend visiting their site at www.4chan.org.  Even if you just did go there, you won’t think it’s very interesting at first glance.  From visiting the site, I would assume that they are based out of Japan.  Traceroute tells me the server is being hosted in California by a company called xeex Communications.

During todays report, a false report of Randall Stephenson’s death showed up on a website affiliated with CNN.  The website, at IReport.com is “a user-generated site” and that stories are not “edited, fact-checked or screened”.  Basically, the site appears to serve as a bulletin board for real news.  In this case, the report never made it into the national news, but in the past these pranksters have managed to get these stories through.

Read the whole article here.

A pair of gay penguins have broken up in a steamy saga of death, betrayal and heartache.   Where else would this happen but at the San Francisco zoo?  I mean seriously, only in San Francisco would this happen.

The gay penguin couple, Harry and pepper were in a common law marriage for 6 years, with a baby chick that they received government approval to adopt.  Pepper became suspicious about Harry’s late night visits to Linda’s den, and although Pepper was suspicious, he never expected the betrayal that comes next.

Back in March of 2008, Linda the female penguin next door, took out a significant life insurance policy on her husband Figg.  Later that year, Figg died under questionable circumstances and the death was ruled to be “of natural causes”.   Harry and Linda started spending more time together.  Then one day, Harry told Pepper that he was going to the store, borrowing $20 for cigarettes and milk.  Harry never came back from the store.

Today, Harry and Linda are happily married and have a baby together.  Pepper still lives in the cave next door, bitter and alone.  On occasion, Pepper visits the new couples home, but he is not met with a warm welcome.  Harry and Linda are happy together, and want nothing to do with Pepper.  Currently there is a custody battle over guardianship of the gay couples child.

Several calls to the penguin department caretakers have gone unanswered.  So far, the only information we have gotten has been “no response”.

Pepper only had one thing to say to our reporters. He wants his $20 back.

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To add extra spice to the video, grab a bottle of whiskey and take a shot every time they say penguin.

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In the computer and network industry there are a handful giants that everyone has heard of, but there is one little known giant that many people may not have heard of.  A little known company based out of Mountain View, California called Google.  Just in case you are not familiar with Google, let me fill you in.  You’re an idiot and I don’t know how you possibly found my site.  Please put your computer into it’s original packaging and ship it back to the manufacturer.

In a recent news story, Google has announced their plans to increase their ever expanding reach by releasing a full fledged Operating System for home computers.  I suppose that their marketing data on everyone in the civilized world, including their age, race, sex, interests, where they live, where they travel to, where they go on vacation, an index of their email, who they communicate with, what tv shows they watch, music interests, office documents, news interests and preference to boxers or briefs… well.. I guess that isn’t good enough for them.  Now they want to seal the deal by dominating your life by gaining control over your home PC entirely.

Is anyone else a *little* bit concerned?  I’m sure that Micro$oft is wetting their pants a little bit.  Luckily, Google has the ability to make a piece offering by sending the Micro$oft executives new underwear that fit’s their particular preference.

The definition of a monopoly is when a single entity has significant control over a particular market, giving the entity a great latitude of control over the  pricing and terms of the services and products offered in the given market.  Now, technically this definition doesn’t really apply to Google.  Instead, what Google is doing is trying to gain a significant level of control over the lives and habits of it’s individual users and customers.

I am not sure if there is a term for this level of domination, but this is another case in point for my “Google is evil” theory.  Just in case you havn’t been following my blog regularly, let me restate the theory for you.  “Google is evil”.  That’s the theory.

People.  We can’t let any one entity have this level of domination.  Before technology, I don’t really see how this could have been possible but if there were a single company back in the 60’s with this level of big brotherhood, (aside from government) don’t you think there would have been public outcry?  Today, especially with the power of technology and the ease of sharing information, where’s the public outcry?

Where is the fear for our privacy?  Who is protecting you? oh… yeah, I forgot.  Googles got your back.  ok…

Sleep safe I guess.  For today.

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For those of you who are interested, here is the official Google press anouncement on “Chrome OS”.

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A video posted on youtube a few days ago shows a mysterious creature living in a South Carolina sewer pipe.

Now the video is a little hard to see at first, and for the first 30 seconds or so, I honestly thought I was looking at something NSFW.  No further details available on my mistake.  Just to clarify for you, what you are seeing is a mysterious blob attached to a joint in the sewer pipe.  After about 35 seconds, the camera rotates left and you can see down the pipe.  (which I also seriously thought was something else).  The camera goes down the pipe a little ways and rotates left again to show another one of these mysterious blobs affixed to another joint in the pipe.

*Warning.  This video may cause nausea.  Please, do not induce vomiting.”

I can’t say for sure how big these creatures are because I have no idea how big the pipe is, and have nothing to reference it to, but I like to think that the pipe is 10 feet in diameter, making the blobs an estimated fucking huge in size, and clearly capable of world domination.

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An ABC report claims that the mysterious creatures are a colony of tubifex worms. I’m suspicious, but on a related note, I’m skeptical too. Also, for a third point, I’m hopeful that the blobs will let me join forces with them once they emerge from the sewer to take over the planet.

The video below claims to show a colony of tubifex worms “in the wild”.  The reflection showing the canon digital camera in the aquarium glass adds true credibility to the video.  I’m not saying the video doesn’t show tubifex worms, I’m just saying it could have been more accurately labeled and that they look nothing like the first video.

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I don’t care what it is.  I’m going to be sure to keep following my mantra of “Don’t shit where you eat”.
You know,  just in case.

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To me, it seems that satellites have been in the news a lot recently.  Particularly spy satellites, and questionable circumstances surrounding them.  If there is one thing I learned from writing this article, it would be the proper spelling of the word ’satellite’.

Case in point…

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October, 1967

• Over 60 countries world wide signed a treaty that went into effect, essentially banning nuclear weapons and nuclear testing from outer space.

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February, 2008

• The US loses control of a US spy satellite surrounded by secrecy.  Rather than letting the satellite fall into the earth’s atmosphere and burn up, the US took unprecedented action by launching a surface to air missile, proving their ability to take out satellites from a navy destroyer.  At the time North Korea was being a real pain in the ass (like usual), preparing test launches for long range ballistic missiles against the approval of the civilized world.

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March, 2008

• North Korea test fires three ballistic missiles, and goes out of their way to make sure the world knows about it.

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March 12, 2009

• North Korea informs Russian officials of its plans to join in with the rest of the world by signing the outer space treaty, as Kim Jong-il continues to thumb his nose at the world.

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April, 2009

• North Korea proceeds with a launch.  North Korea officials insist that the launched missile contains a satellite payload bound for orbit, while US officials maintain that North Korea is testing a long range missile system capable of reaching North America.

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May 25th, 2009

• North Korea successfully tests and detonates an underground nuclear weapon with claimed power rivaling that of the bomb used to destroy Heroshima.  Lucky for the rest of the world that one was only called “Little Boy”, yielding roughly 15 kilotons.  The underground test took place in the north east section of North Korea and caused a resulting earthquake measuring a magnitude of 4.5.  Shortly after the nuclear tests, three short range missiles were launched from eastern North Korea, in an attempt by Kim Jong-il to wave his tiny penis in the worlds face.

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June 9, 2009

• North Korea launches a modified Taepodong-2 long range ballistic missile containing a satellite payload. North Korea claims that satellite made it into orbit, while the US insists that the missile went off course and crashed into the pacific, east of Japan.

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June, 2009

• US makes a decision to classify images taken by government satellites of meteorites entering earth’s atmosphere, restricting access to the general public, including the scientific community.

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I think the message is fairly clear, and I hope I have accurately outlined my case.

Irony is a difficult word for some people to define, and some of those people probably work at Clarcon Biological Chemistry Laboratory.  This one is pretty simple.  Even the slower of my readers, and those who are slightly touched in the head see the irony here.  Just in case you didn’t figure it out yet, let me repeat the problem.

“Hand sanitizer with deadly bacteria.”

The soap in my bathroom is labeled as antibacterial, and claims to kill 99.98% of germs.  When I was at my local store buying that soap recently, I was specifically looking for bathroom soap that said it was antibacterial on the bottle.  Out of the vast selection, I was quite surprised to find that only one, yes count them one of the soap products were clearly labeled as antibacterial.  One particular brand even went so far as to say that it “Washes away germs and bacteria” but the word antibacterial was nowhere to be found.

99.98% is better than nothing at all, but common sense tells me that the remaining .02% are probably really nasty.  The kind of super bacteria that will eventually kill the cocroaches after nuclear war.  I don’t know if this remaining .02% is the problem in the Clarcon screwup.  It is entirely possible that it could be a mixup at the manufacturing plant.  Maybe the disinfectant comes in a barrel that’s the same color and shape as the one that contains the infectious bacteria.  If that’s the case, any idiot could make that mistake.