Daily Archives: January 14, 2012

It’s important to have unrestricted access to guns so you can do:

this:

…The argument continued after they left the restaurant and went to one of the women’s homes. It was then that the other man jumped into the argument, standing up for his girlfriend. This angered Lloyd and the two men began arguing.
Lloyd pulled out a gun, unintentionally discharging the firearm. The bullet grazed the other man’s head. ..

or this

Police were called to Amy’s home on Thursday were they found she had been shot. According to reports, “D.C.I. determined that Hettinger had been shot by a 10-year-old inside the house who had been handling a loaded handgun. The gun belonged to another family member.”

or this

…As he was standing on the porch his friends were inside “messing around” with handguns. One man decided to practice shooting

what he thought was an empty handgun. When he pulled the trigger the gun fired, sending a bullet through the front door and into the man standing on the porch. The bullet went through the victim’s left shoulder blade. …

Fall of Phobos-Grunt into the atmosphere imminent

UPDATE: With the last orbital elements decay prediction is now january 15, 2012 at 18h27 UTC +/-4h

Thirteen tons of space ship once destine for the planet Mars is starting to lose altitude, and may drop into the thicker layer of the atmosphere and (mostly) burn up Sunday (story at bbc). The Russian space agency estimates that about 200 kilograms will make it to the ground. It is impossible to predict this far in advance where any of that might fall.

You can track Phobos-Grunt here, but that tracking tool does not give you the location of the object; It shows you where it should be based on calculations. Once Phobos-Grunt starts to interact with the thicker atmosphere and, perhaps, bits and chunks start to fall off, the trajectory will probably change and this tracking map will no longer be that useful, and probably won’t tell you if the space craft has crashed yet.

The original mission is described as follows:

Fobos-Grunt or Phobos-Grunt… was an attempted Russian sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. Fobos-Grunt also carried the Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1 and the tiny Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment funded by the Planetary Society.*

The space ship made it into earth orbit, but for unknown reasons, a booster designed to push the craft towards the Red Planet failed to fire. This of course makes this re-entry interesting in a novel way: Since the booster didn’t fire, there’s about 10 tons of rocket fuel in aluminum tanks on Phobos-Grunt. It is assumed the tanks will melt quickly and the fuel will burn or explode.

I wonder if this will make re-entry more visible than otherwise?

1%er CEO John K. Castle calls waiter schmuck, breaks finger?

I also hate it when the waiter brings the bill, but I usually don’t break their fingers.

According to a report in Raw Story, the waiter at a fancy Palm Beach restaurant Club Colette was asked by Castle’s wife to bring the bill to Castle’s table, and did. However, Castle had the idea that the waiter would not bring the bill, but rather, just put it on the guy’s account or something. So, naturally, Castle had to break the waiter’s finger as punishment.

No charges have been filed and nothing is going to happen.

Now, imagine the reverse scenario: A member of the 99% becomes annoyed withe a member of the 1% and breaks his fingers. What do you think would happen then?