The Charleston was Once the Rage, uh huh...

[rain_gryphon]

So, Romain Grosjean. I'm still sort of in shock over that. As you watch automobile racing long enough, survivability improves, and you're bound to amass a collection of crashes that appeared absolutely fatal at the time according to your prior experience, yet the driver more or less leaps out of the car unhurt. This is the third one that left me completely open-mouthed. Tom Sneva at the Speedway in '75, Gerhard Berger at Imola in '89, and now Grosjean. He could have leapt over the barrier, raised his arms in triumph, and shouted "Tah-Dah!", and I'd not have been a bit more shocked. Reading the reports about it, it seems I'm not alone in that.

*****

Am I the only one who think the folded protein looks like Australia? TBH, I don't see this as a huge news item. It's an extremely useful ability to have, especially in these plague-ridden times, but it's one of the things that a powerful enough AI was pretty much bound to solve. I'm kind of surprised that it took so long.

*****

Yet again, someone suggests a cheap, common-sense way to control the climate. Yet again, the Climate Warriors are in a panic to stop it being adopted.

*****

The Tubby Tyrant volunteers to be a Lab Rat! It would be an improvement.

*****

Earlier, at Meijers (big box store), I overheard a child (maybe four or five) insisting to her mother, in an extremely reasonable tone of voice, that she was, in fact, a Wolf. She gave out an "Awoooo!" too, by way of demonstration :)

Comments

[nodrog]

“The use of sjamboks is unlawful under South African constitutional and international human rights law. It is also not included as an authorised weapon in the South African Police Service (SAPS) national instruction 4 of 2014…”

The story is told in New Zealand of an ex-pat SA whose daughter’s house party was invaded by twenty (20) “youths” with their own kind of party in mind - and her Dad took down the sjambok he had on the wall and set to work.  He cleared the house single-handedly.  The New Zealand authorities later considered charging him with excessive force; he said, “I’ll do it again if ever I must.”


n b  The account I read said “twenty,“ but that’s an awfully large, conveniently even number - I suspect the story grew in the telling.  But street-gang numbers there were, certainly.

[nodrog]

I have to say, in this case I rather agree with the people who are horrified at the idea of deliberately fouling the atmosphere for short-term gain.  It would be difficult to find a better example of “unintended consequences,” both ecological and political, as they point out.  That is a weapon of war.

- Imagine if, during the nastiest days of the Cold War, instead of propping up our Necessary Enemy with massive annual grain handouts “on credit,” some clothhead had blown reflective aerosol particles into the stratosphere and cut their sunlight by 10%, plunging most of Russia and China - and Japan too! - into a massive Siberian winter, Antarctic temperatures for months.  Guess what would happen next.

“What’s the plan now, genius?!”

---

(“We own the day, Charlie owns the night” - During the salad days of our involvement in what our own Secretary of Defense said we could not win by anything short of nuclear carpet-bombing, but which was “useful for domestic politics,” particularly jobs, the idea was floated to launch another Echo II satellite - followed by, oh, say, maybe fifty more…  The cumulative result would shine reflected sunlight from the sky several times brighter than the full Moon, banishing darkness across SE Asia and everywhere else also for years.  As you say, cheap and effective!  The measure was not adopted; both astronomy and public opinion of the USA survived - that, at least.)

[nodrog]

There was a science-fiction story in 1957 (or thereabouts) called “Torch” that dealt with a similar idea:  In the aftermath of a ‘Tsar Bomba’-style Soviet nuclear blast, it became increasingly obvious that something had gone terribly wrong, try to hide it as they might; something like Chernobyl, involving mass evacuations and shipping heavy fire trucks and earthmovers eastward &c.  No satellites then, so we didn't know anything until Japan reported black soot falling like snow - and finally the USSR appealed to the UN for help with a supervolcano-sized coal fire they'd accidentally lit and couldn't stop…  The story is told in the form of dispatches, and unfolds realistically; it ends with the combined resources of America and the West finally stopping this monster, but “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” was a bagatelle to this - agriculture in the Northern Hemisphere is all but stopped, particularly in Russia (pun intended), and 1991 comes early to the overstrained starving Soviet empire, unable to hold by force, and the USA is damned lucky to be wealthier and have South America helping out…

It was a thought-provoking story.  Unintended consequences…

[thewayne]

I read a second article about Romain's crash (on Ars Technica), and two things saved his life. One was F1 upgraded the standard for the driver's suit this year, greatly improving fire safety. That definitely helped. But the biggie was the roll cage, it prevented his head from hitting anything, which would have been fatal at 140 MPH. The funny thing is, he poo-pooed it when it was made mandatory a couple of years ago, he's certainly a believer now!

Apparently the crash was over a 50G impact! The guardrail was a different standard than most F1 circuits and actually grabbed the front end of the car, causing it to snap in two. I would expect they'll be requiring it to be replaced before they race there next year.

[loganberrybunny]

Yeah, I muse sometimes on the fact that I've seen any number of crashes now that would have assuredly killed the driver even when I started watching motorsport in the mid-1980s. Oddly enough, Berger's -- which I saw live on TV -- wasn't one of those that scared me the most. It did scare me, especially when the fire started, but not as much as it probably should have. Though that may have been because I was still a kid at that point and hadn't really gained the knowledge to understand how serious it was.

One I can remember that really did terrify me -- not at first, but once I'd seen it from a closer angle -- was Pedro Diniz's crash in Germany in 1999. This is it, with Murray Walker and Martin Brundle commentating as I remember -- the first close-up view isn't until a bit after 3 minutes in. Another that comes to mind is Martin Donnelly's 1990 crash at Jerez, though I didn't see that happen live, thankfully.

[gremy.livejournal.com]

Climate Warriors, more often than not, defend an ideology rather than the actual environment.