The Spitfire is starting to take shape

I posted about this airplane a while ago, but it was still pretty bare at the time. Now its starting to look like an airplane.

Guest blogging at Ace of Spades

If you haven't noticed, I've been doing some guest blogging at Ace's joint. A lot of the same sort of stuff I've been doing here, but it gets a lot more exposure over there.

What's wrong with this picture?

We have here a photo from AFP of an Iraqi woman who claims the bullets she's holding "hit her house".

H/T Confederate Yankee

...the greatest thing I have ever done

MNF-I

Baghdad Soldiers rescued a 2-year-old Iraqi boy from a dry well in which he fell Aug. 9.

Soldiers with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division responded to the pleas for assistance from the father of a 2-year-old boy who had fallen into a dry well near the family’s residence [PA's note: this was a serious 25' deep well].

The company commander, Capt. David Powell of Newport Beach, Calif., was about to begin a scheduled security patrol when the boy’s father approached the gate of his Coalition outpost on foot. Using an interpreter, Powell quickly assessed the situation and sent the patrol to assist with the recovery of the child[...]

[...]"In my 18-years in the Army," Powell said, "this is, by far, the greatest thing I have ever done."

H/T North Shore Journal

Amy Winehouse - "(drug) Rehab is a cop-out"

This girl needs a bit more than rehab. She needs a 7x24 keeper.

Daily Mail

[...]The 23-year-old, who is notorious for her wild partying, was treated in a London hospital last week after taking a cocktail of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine and the horse tranquiliser ketamine[...]

[...]Rehab is a cop-out[...]

Very cool -- jet engine simulation from NASA

While stumbling through a bunch of links researching pulse jets - specifically the Lockwood-Hiller design that has no moving parts (Lockwood eliminated the petal valve...the only moving part in a traditional pulse jet) I ran across this sim for a turbo-jet engine.

Its a Java applet, so you'll need to enable Java on your browser.

NASA Glenn Research Center

With this software you can investigate how a jet (or turbine) engine produces thrust by interactively changing the values of different engine parameters[...]

Pelosi "earmarks" for bioweapons

Wassup with the biowarfare WMD shit Nan? The nutroots ain't gonna be down with that at all girl.

Bloomberg

The California Democrat has won funding for six companies in a 2008 defense funding measure. One is a $4 million request to develop a ``novel viral biowarfare agent'' for Prosetta Corp., based in her San Francisco district.

UPDATE -- NRO is saying they talked with the reporter who wrote the story and the guy screwed up. He says the work was to treat viruses used in biowarfare.

Chinese torture/kill "corrupt" officials in online game

I wonder how well such a game would do here in the US? Being able to shove a virtual red hot poker up a few politicians asses might prove very compelling.

Middle East Times

BEIJING -- An online game in which players can torture and kill corrupt officials that a Chinese local government set up to teach people about the perils of graft is proving a roaring success, state media said Thursday.

"Incorruptible Fighter," developed by the government of east China's Zhejiang province, was launched just over a week ago and is already so popular that it is being redesigned to accommodate more players, the China Daily said.


"I feel a great sense of achievement when I punish lots of evil officials," one gamer surnamed Sun was quoted as saying.

The game, which lets players get ahead by killing officials by means of "weapons, magic, or torture," has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, the Southern Metropolitan Daily said[...]