Posts by Kracklite
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Oh, and look both ways.
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Actually it did involve me. I concluded that SUVs do indeed impact more on the pelvic and thoraic regions than the femoral and that sometimes one can be extraordinarily lucky and some SUV drivers can be very gallant indeed afterwards. I do not intend to repeat the experiment by samples of control data, eg., an incident of broadly simlar dynamics with altered geometry utilising a vehicle of another type, even though I am confident that relatively less harm would be done to vital regions if the vector of primary impact were lower. I suspect that my reluctance has something to do with my aversion to prolonged pain.
The doctor who conducted one of the physical examinations afterwards assured me that my kidneys were "beautiful", but according to the state of my liver, I should eat less cheese.
Fortunately, my iPod was undamaged.
Sagacity, I note, is a descriptor that is bestowed upon one by others, not oneself.
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Or it could be Tony...
Pretty good, yes. Did you know that there are subatomic particles that have to spin seven hundred and twenty degrees instead of the usual three-sixty to end up back where they began? I'm sure that there's an allegory in that.
Oh Sagenz is back. What a bore. Hell is other people, banality is itself an evil....
"has validated the general history..." Oh dear. "general"? "Straws, grasping at, this is" in Yodaspeak.
Look up "tar baby" and especially, "In Camera," a play by Jean Paul Sartre (translated by Paul Bowles as "No Exit"). I really can't be bothered with this - I conducted an inadvertent experiment in Newtonian physics involving the meeting of a 90 kg human and a 2,500 Ford Explorer and decided from a rigorous analysis of the results that life is far too short for this sort of shit.
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I'm afraid that when you say Curtis, I think of Ian. That would probably be a unit of existential melancholy?
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when he consciously and consistently tried to provoke WWIII, not just once or twice but as an ongoing policy
I'd heard that myself, but hadn't a source.
Body fluids? Le May? Really? Wow. Still, it's no weirder than Wishart and a step below Icke or any of the apocalyptic fundies.
Hmm, I wonder if we can come up with a recognised unit of paranoid weirdness... a Hoagland, an Icke, a Wishart, a LaRouche... "Yep, it's metric, unlike the old fashioned Adamski scale... I'm getting four hundred and thirty-two milliIckes on the wackometer for that Fox newscast and a reading of a couple of kiloForts of inexplicability too."
How about a unit of desperate denial and advocacy masquerading as sagacity? I nominate the Fran as a unit considering a certain columnist's most recent epistle in the Herald. "Point eight-five Frans of specious denial there... and there's an ambient patriotism factor of eighteen Jingoes, oddly misplaced, since this isn't America."
Bah, sorry, just being silly.
The scary thing though is Kubrick was so spot-on in deconstructing the myth of the competent masculine leader. To me, Teller strikes me as one of the most obsessive and considering his long and powerful influence, the most malevolent of those old Cold Warriors.
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The bigger threat to the whole thing was Curtis LeMay who was, being generous, verging on obsessed, almost mad.
Scary. I get shocked looks when I explain that Dr Strangelove was originally planned as a serious drama. Kubrick, as ever, did meticulous research and the main characters were based on real people.
Then I have to explain who these people are.
Buck Turgidson was equal parts Le May and Patton (ironic, considering George C. Scott's later performance in that role), Jack D. Ripper was mostly Le May, Merkin Muffley was based on Adlai Stevenson and Dr Strangelove himself was an amalgam of Herman Kahn, Werner von Braun and Edward Teller.
In his later years, interviewers liked to goad Teller into tantrums by mentioning Strangelove. Bringing up Carl Sagan would get him frothing too, but for different reasons.
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Because we must be strong. Because if we are not strong, then we will be weak. And if we are weak, we will not be strong....
Rich, you sound like the Sphinx.
Meanwhile, those interested in Spore might want to check out Will Wright and Brian Eno giving a seminar on its development at the Long Now Foundation. Blog summary here and mp3 here.
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Footnote,
<geek>The pilot in question with the MiG-25 was Victor Belenko and the incident was the inspiration for a mid-80s novel and a Clint Eastwood film</geek>
I have to say, they're dumb but fun.
Now that's really off-topic.
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81C, Ha!, yes. SG, no worries. I'm always reminded in such cases of Colin Chapman: "Simplificate, then add lightness." Technology is sometimes the antithesis of complexity. Anyway, on to the nominal topic, which is something of which I am quite ignorant...
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technology gap with the west. When the Mig25 defected to Japan in the mid 1980s there was shock at the fact it's avionics were largely valve driven.
Sorry, pedantic and somewhat off-topic, but here goes...
The differing design philsophies of the USA and USSR are summed up by a famous conversation between Andrei Tupelov and and Clarence "Kelly" Johnson (head of the famous Skunk Works). Quothe Tupelov:
You make planes like fine ladies' watch: drop watch, watch break. We make watch like alarm clock - knock it off the table and it still wakes you up.
The point is that rather than being crude, agricultural dunderheads, the Soviets - and the Russians still - understand that technology needs to be resilient. Valve technology actually makes damned good sense in an environment of nuclear war - the sheer power and resilience and easy maintainability of valve-based avionics makes perfect sense - the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) of nuclear explosions would knock out chip and diode-based radars but leave valve-based systems relatively unharmed.
Sorry, but one of my bugbears is the assumption that "technology" and "magic" are synonymous. They aren't (sorry, Sir Arthur). The Soviets, for all their (enormous) faults deserve more credit - they simply adopted a different and arguably more pragmatic technological philosophy.
The later history of obscene cost overruns and functional failures of various much-touted hi-tech weapons systems from the US bears this out.
The Cold War was even more of a damned closest run thing than most imagined. I think that politically as well as technologically, this was the case (and for the usual trolls, politically my sympathies do NOT lie with communism).