One of my closest friends on Twitter hit upon a good life lesson for the ladies.

Money and sex and drugs.

Doctors and patients and indictments.

I can't choose between headlining this.

New Crime: Traveling while black

OR

TSA Replicates hilarious Better Off Ted episode (perhaps the only hilarious Better Off Ted episode).

Oops. Here is the Better Off Ted episode reference above.

Older man at the gun range.

https://youtu.be/hMDHdt8WIwE

Is that you, Mr. Hathcock?

The balls on this guy.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/46099/hero-priest-who-saved-notre-dame-relics-comforted-emily-zanotti

The balls on this guy. ~ I R A Darth Aggie at April 18, 2019 8:57 AM

I once attended a Mass officiated by a veteran combat chaplain. The A/C was out and it was over 100ºF inside the chapel. Most Catholic masses take about an hour. This guy had it over inside 10 minutes without missing any of the rites.

"Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition." ~ attributed to Lt. j.g. Howell M. Forgy, US Navy chaplain abroad the USS New Orleans at Pearl Harbor

Feel the Bern!

https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/04/bernie-sanders-attacks-cherokee-author-for-criticizing-elizabeth-warrens-false-cherokee-claim/

That's a bad look, criticizing an actual Cherokee who's criticizing a fake Cherokee.

"This guy had it over inside 10 minutes without missing any of the rites."

If only there were more of them. Most priest get to love the sound of their own voice and want to share the fruits of their navel gazing no matter how inane.

Trouble brewing in Tulsa?

TU’s governors do not understand what a university is: a precious cultural institution whose essential task is the preservation, cultivation, and transmission of knowledge. Absent a board willing and able to defend our integrity as an academic institution, we have experienced what one could call a hostile takeover that appears to have made TU a subsidiary of Tulsa’s biggest charitable foundation and an agent of the city’s corporate interests. Our infantilized and indoctrinated students will receive but a light wash of liberal arts before they are popped from the higher-education oven. They will perhaps be credentialed, but they will not be educated.

https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa

Just when you think the authorities have hit rock bottom in their hiring practices:

crappuccino fling

Yes, Benny Hill is a sexist...the women always won

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC2GAQ45ll0

> New Crime

Via Paul—

Do not underestimate the intimately intrusive power of contemporary scanning technology.

Lots of good stuff here, if you give presentations. Or communicate with other people.

Next time you’re asked to give a talk remember Columbia. Don’t just jump to your laptop and write out slides of text. Think about your message. Don’t let that message be lost amongst text. Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally.

https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/new-blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx

RIP.

If you're going to use bogus DMCA takedown notices against people on Twitter, it's probably a bad idea to target the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Here comes a fun sentence! You will want to know how it ends—

As John Dolan, the War Nerd, was complaining a decade ago, war has been tailing off in both quantity and quality. Young men would rather play first-person shooter video games than get shot at themselves. John Mueller, who holds the manliest-sounding academic position imaginable, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State, pointed out in his 2005 book The Remnants of War that the....

> if you give presentations.
> Or communicate with other
> people.

Point taken, I promise. I mean it. Swears.

But these guys had decided to gamble, right? There wasn't much reason not to. Correct me if this is wrong, but they didn't actually *know* that the heat shields were damaged, whatever the probability. There had been damaged tiles here and there in earlier landings. (Right? No?) More specifically, the shuttle wasn't provisioned to sit in LEO for three months while another method of return was provided at God knows what financial and political cost....

Every word of the might be bullshit. My final memory of that crisis is that the woman who made the final decision to move forward with the mission/landing was [1.] blonde, and [2.] otherwise attractive and [3.] about my age, and all these things seemed grotesquely inappropriate at the time.

(IIRC, and maybe not!)

The point is, we can't blame Bill Gates/Powerpoint for this one. Self-interested people on a budget gonna do what self-interested people on a budget always do.

(Even if he ends malaria, and he very well might, there will be other reasons to detest Bill Gates, I promise.)

> They will perhaps be credentialed,
> but they will not be educated.

Absolutely! But universities are merely answering the demands of the marketplace. The money, and the tax breaks that make it all happen, are coming from a federal government that moves like molasses, and is similarly inclined to pander to idiot students and idiot parents.

Again, please review the recent youtube appearances by Jonathan Haidt. And follow Jean Twenge on Twitter. (Best of all would be to read their books.) The kids who say things like this aren't kidding.

They're among the safest people who ever lived, and they're scared out of their skulls… With cable TV fear-mongers on one end and conniving social media sharks on the other, they weren't allowed to grow up.

I remember this weekend, having spent it elsewhere.

Lots of good stuff here, if you give presentations. Or communicate with other people. ~ I R A Darth Aggie at April 18, 2019 11:47 AM

Edward Tufte is a good resource for improving your presentation of analytical data.

He covered the Columbia explosion in "Powerpoint Does Rocket Science."

He also covered NASA's previous Challenger Powerpoint failures his book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

And Crid's right, Powerpoint is a crutch for lazy presenters and sloppy analytics, not the cause of either.

Thanks for the Tufte link, Coney.





After all these years, I still miss F keys on the left.

Updates in the news: a sex slave cult apparently illegally bundled contributions for the Clinton campaign.

Oh, Mildred.

It's all so sordid.

Trenchant analysis.

First-lifetime use of the smartguy
word "trenchant."


Hold your applause... For now.

The irony...

https://freebeacon.com/politics/middlebury-college-cancels-conservative-philosophers-lecture-on-totalitarianism/

Bigotry of any kind should not be considered a form of inquiry.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/videos/this-atomic-energy-lab-kit-is-the-world-s-most-dangerous-toy

The kit, which first went on sale in 1950, came with an instruction booklet, a pamphlet on how to prospect uranium

"Correct me if this is wrong, but they didn't actually *know* that the heat shields were damaged, whatever the probability. There had been damaged tiles here and there in earlier landings."

There is some confusion that went on, and still happens in many descriptions of the accident. Everyone has heard of the notorious silicone heat shield tiles, which did get at least a little damage on nearly every mission. On some missions, it got considerable damage from ice that shed from the external tank during ascent. Also, the tiles were pretty brittle, and vibration made them crack. There was a flight in the late '80s (can't remember which one right now) where one tile in a high-heat area on the bottom came completely off; there was a partial burn-through and some structure damage that had to be repaired.

However... what happened to Columbia was not tile damage. It was damage to a different material, called reinforced carbon-carbon or RCC for short, that was used to shield the very hottest areas -- the nose cap and the leading edges of the wings. NASA didn't have very much experience with RCC damage, and that "Crater" software program that was used to predict tile damage wasn't written for the RCC, which has different physical properties. Boeing had dug up some test data showing what kind of impact the RCC could take, but that testing was done with new pieces, and the RCC pieces on Columbia had been through a number of flights. The chunk of foam that broke off of the external tank during ascent whacked the left wing's RCC near the wing root (the part of the wing closest to the fuselage) and probably punched a hole in it that was between 12 and 30 inches wide.

Unfortunately, on orbit, that part of the wing was hidden by the left side payload bay door, and not visible from either the aft flight deck windows, or the payload bay cameras. There was a lot of speculation about what might have happened -- I had seen it myself on the launch video. I was a controller in the MCC for the SPACEHAB, a research module which was the primary mission of that flight. Being that it was a research flight, there was no robot arm on board because no mission objective required it. There was some discussion about doing an EVA (spacewalk) to go inspect the wing, but it would have required the astronauts to leave the envelope of the payload bay, and that mission was not set up with any of the safety equipment for that; it would have been rather dangerous. Had we known, there were extra resources aboard the SPACEHAB that could have been used to do an Apollo 13-style resource stretch-out, maybe to 30 days, while KSC prepared another Orbiter for a rescue attempt. Additionally, had the nature of the damage been known, it is possible that the reentry profile could have been modified so as to reduce the thermal loads on that wing. Wayne Hale, who was the launch director at KSC, tried to use contacts that he had to pull strings inside of the intel agencies and get some satellite photography of Columbia that might have revealed the damage. But NASA upper management found out and they got it cut off.

So as we know, none of these things that might have mitigated the situation happened. During reentry, ultra-hot plasma got inside the wing structure through the hole in the RCC and melted everything, until the wing either detached or folded up over the top of the Orbiter. At that point it was all over.

> There is some confusion that
> went on, and still happens in
> many descriptions of the
> accident.

Including mine— Thanks for the correction.

Just reading what you've written there recalls to mind the gruesome violence of the event.

But, like, why did NASA get the photography cancelled, and did any careers ever suffer? I mean, there must have been some confrontations later about what was said on telephones or what-have-you.