Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Watering Hole: December 11 – NAZI Stealth Aircraft

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This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

The outcome of WWII could have been different if  stealth aircraft had been in Germany’s quiver. German engineers had actually produced a stealth aircraft in the Horten 2-29, a technological leap in aircraft design by two brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten This caught Adolf Hitler’s attention and he ordered the start of a secret project for a stealth aircraft, the Horten 2-29. Its radar foot print was less than that of a private aircraft.
The Horten 2-29 made a successful test flight in January 1945.

As NAZI forces were about to lose the war, the Hortens never got a chance to perfect the design and start mass  production.

Recently a team of Lockheed engineers reconstructed the Horten 2-29 using the Horten’s project blueprints. The reconstructed aircraft is a model and cannot fly (No engines.) What is amazing about this aircraft is that it used techniques incorporated in the B2 Stealth Bomber 45 years later.

The Lockheed reconstruction is below. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has a production version in storage. Compare the Horten 2-29 to the B2.

The Horten 2-29 was developed to operate as either a bomber or a fighter. Payload limitations barred the option of a dual capability version.

The Horten brothers received DM 500,000  (Worthless in trade in 1945.) for their contributions in the development of this aircraft.

Note: The designation of this aircraft can be Horten 2-29, Horten 22-9  or Horten 229.

The Watering Hole: December 10 – Weed

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Eighty years ago today in 1929, Germany adopts the “Opiumgesetz” which banned, not only opiates but cannabis, too.

Cannabis use is quite frequent still in most countries in Europe. Here in Switzerland several attempts to legalize the use have been narrowly lost at the polls, but the work on decriminalisation of the substance and it’s users is ongoing.

This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

Rachel Maddow trashes gay-to-straight therapist

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RawStory

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow took a prominent gay-to-straight therapist to the woodshed Tuesday night. In an interview with Richard Cohen, whose claims that gay men can be trained to become heterosexuals have been used to support an effort to pass a law in Uganda that would imprison gays for life or execute them, Maddow blasted Cohen and said he had “blood” on his hands.

The Watering Hole: December 9 – Hubble

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This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

Hubble is back up and is returning spetacular images once more. The last gasps of the doomed star Eta Carinae is but one example:

Note that nickel is the heaviest observable element emitted in the cauldron of this star’s demise. That’s 64 atomic numbers below uranium. Whether the heavier elements are remnants of the Big Bang, were emitted by black holes or are the result of a breakdown of their structure is the next question. Naturally, trace elements do no show up in the spectrograph. There seems to be unlabeled lines for isotopes of silicon, carbon and oxygen.

To see more Hubble images, start here. Not all are recent.

And the killing goes on..

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Again, multiple blasts have rocked Baghdad. Latests news claim 127 people have died and 448 men, women and children have been wounded.

The explosions on Tuesday shook houses across the capital.

Official buildings located near the blasts include the interior ministry, the social affairs ministry, a university and the institute of fine arts.

There were civilian and security force personnel casualties, officials said.

Survivor Ahmed Jabbar, emerging from a damaged ministry building, told AP news agency: “What crime have we committed? Children and women were buried under debris.”

If anybody needs a reminder that not all’s well, even if the media have mostly stopped reporting on the violence unless it’s as devastating as the latest attack, here’s icasualties.com.

The Watering Hole: December 8 – Aegis Control Systems

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This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on any topic.

The Aegis Control system is both a Combat Control System -

Bush and Cheney used this aspect of the program to project shock and awe on a defenseless nation.

And a Ballistic Missile Defense System -

The Obama administration decided that it offered a better option then the ground based system that had been the favorite program of the Bush administration and the Aegis BMD system had already been deployed.W cancelled the ABM Treaty in June 2002, at about the time the Aegis BMD system was proven.

Actually, Aegis did not describe a particular class of ship, instead, it describes an electronics package that is integrates a ships offensive and/or defensive capabilities into a system the links both the weapons and their control systems.

Copenhagen climate change conference: ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’

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The Climate Conference is now underway in Denmark.

The Guardian:

This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages.
 Copenhagen climate change summit – opening day liveblog

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

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