Recent Comments

1. about 14 hours ago on Overboard

   Our dogs ignore the vacuum unless it’s a Roomba. And only Redrum the Attack Chihuahua cares about the Roomba. Normally, he thinks that he’s a wolf, but the cats like to ride the Roomba, and he thinks that the Roomba is his self-propelled throne and kicks them off it. They’re more than twice his size, but he’s a wolf long enough to get rid of them, and then he rides in regal splendor until She Who Must Be Obeyed picks him up so that the cats can have a turn.

2. 1 day ago on Tank McNamara

   I used to watch a lot of Notre Dame football, even when they were terrible. (Gerry Faust stands out. He was not alone.) I had, at one point, watched every single home game since 1978 and all but two away games. Then NBC started putting some home games on Peacock, and certain conferences had broadcast deals; in both cases, I would have had to pay to stream the games. I usually put the games on my DVR or my VCR, so I could rewind/fast forward at will. Usually, this was so that I could see something of interest to me; it also meant that I could fast-forward past ads. Streaming services hate that. They go out of their way to make it difficult to record because I might skip their beautiful ads… after paying for the service in the first place.

   I might want to keep a recording around… not allowed, except under tightly regulated circumstances. I’ve missed more games in the last two years than in the previous 40 because I WILL NOT PAY THEM. AND I WON’T WATCH THEIR ADS. PERIOD. NOT AFTER THEY TRY TO FORCE THOSE ADS DOWN MY THROAT. The streaming services KNOW how much their ads are hated; for a price, you can get ‘ad-free’ (really more like ‘ad-reduced’) service. I’m not paying for that, either. I’m in Florida. The possibility exists that I can get free-tv college football featuring obscure schools like Miami, FSU, UF, UCF. USF, UGA, Auburn, Alabama…

   I’ve registered my dislike of streaming with ND. No reply. Not surprised. I did get the annual season ticket offer, so they have my address.

3. 3 days ago on Brewster Rockit

   The Heinlein had a fixed magnetic accelerator on the Moon. Put the rock in a steel container, slap some maneuvering rockets on it, accelerate it to lunar escape velocity, use the motors to make course corrections as necessary, use gravity to accelerate it down. Three days from launch to hit, but rocks are cheap and plentiful and gravity is free. Interceptor missiles, especially interceptor missiles with nuke warheads, are expensive. The boys on Earth are going to run out of expensive missiles long before the boys on the Moon run out of rocks.

   Niven & Pournelle had their bad guys strap motors, small ones, to their rocks. Gravity is free. They didn’t get 11.2 km/s because the rocks weren’t falling from lunar orbit. They just needed to deorbit and let gravity do its thing. Rocks are cheap. Gravity is free. That rock missed? Cool. Drop another one. Repeat until you get a hit. Your rocks move at velocities measured in kilometers per second, targets on the ground move at kilometers per hour, you have plenty of time and plenty of rocks to try again.

4. 4 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   Yes, they should. I did. To be sure I would have done the reading for fun, but there was homework.

5. 4 days ago on Brewster Rockit

   The kinetic energy is .5*m*v^2. v from orbit would be between 8 km/s (minimum orbital velocity) and 11.2 km/s (escape velocity). A 1 kg package at eight km/s would have 32 MJ of energy, or about 7.5 to 8 kilograms of TNT. You’re going to notice 7.5 to 8 kg of TNT going off. It gets much worse as velocity goes up. That’s a square value. At ten km/s, that’s 50 MJ or 12 kg of TNT.

   The real problem would be to shield the inbound enough that it doesn’t burn up. Look up Project Thor. Or read Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” or Niven & Pournelle’s “Footfall”. Heinlein had 100-tonne projectiles full of rock free-falling from the Moon, impacting at around escape velocity and making nice big holes. Niven & Pournelle were more conservative. Smaller rocks, not moving as fast, but lots more of them. I mean LOTS more. And then they had one Really Big Rock.

6. 8 days ago on The Boondocks

   Ho got lots of US support when he was shooting Japanese troops. Once the war was over, now…

   Note that a significant fraction of the Foreign Legioneers deployed to Vietnam were recruited at recruiting posts set up on or near the French-German border, and that no questions about what new recruits might have been doing 1939-45, as long as whatever it was hadn’t been in France, were asked. Allegedly a good chunk of both 2 REP and Groupe Mobile 100 were not merely SS, but LAH. It is NOT true that all, or even most, of GM100 was LAH. Maybe 10%.

7. 9 days ago on The Boondocks

   Huey, m’man, you do know that Ho Chi Minh was also heavily supported by the US for years? And that American companies from Coca-Cola to IBM to Ford made a lot of money in Germany 1933-41? This kind of thing ain’t new and ain’t likely to stop.

8. 11 days ago on FoxTrot Classics

   Ready Player One.

9. 11 days ago on Bloom County

   I think that this strip originally came out in 1984. Bill the Cat hasn’t yet exchanged brains with Donald Trump. (You think I’m joking or making this up? Keep watching this strip…)

10. 11 days ago on Tank McNamara

    The same way that players made the University of Texas El Paso and Northwestern University football teams during their respective Streaks. (Northwestern holds the all-time record: 0-34. At one point UTEP had three 1-10 seasons in a row.) Let’s just say that football’s finest were not attracted to Evanston or El Paso. Anyone willing to put on pads and get run over by Ohio State or University of Texas could make the Northwestern or UTEP teams