Author Archives: Sci Fi Engineer

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3 factions vie for the MidEast, Should we care? Yes but it looks like we’re on the sidelines…for now

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Seems a clear eyed look at the Middle East, a mess as always, trending rapidly nuclear…what me Worry?

After the Pax Americana: Three factions vie for influence and dominance in the Middle East.
by JONATHAN SPYER PJMEDIA


  • The Iranian block: Assad’s Syria, Hizballah in Lebanon– replace the U.S. as the dominant power Gulf area, build a contiguous alliance from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean and into the Levant. It is committed to acquiring a nuclear capability to underwrite and insure this process


  • The MB block: Turkey, Qatar, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood– the Sunni Islamist alignment that a year ago looked to be on the march across the region. They have lost power in Egypt and in Tunisia, the new emir in Qatar is not aggressive. And in Syria, al-Qaeda and Salafi-oriented units now form the most active pillar in a confused insurgency which shows signs of turning in on itself.


  • The monarchist block: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (excluding Qatar) and in the shadows Israel– they survived the recent wave of popular agitation in the Arab world, which instead took its toll on the “secular,” military regimes. But Saudi Arabia sees the MB as an existential threat and was infuriated by the Qatar-MB nexus. Nuclear Iran’s potential domination of the Gulf and the wider region is also an existential threat. Saudi support for and cultivation of allies in Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere should be seen in this light.


    • So the Saudis are engaged in a political war on two fronts, with an acute awareness of the high stakes involved.

    The Iranians and their allies have a clear-eyed view of the obstacles to their ambitions, ..

    The Turks and the Muslim Brotherhood also well understand the nature of the power political game. Their current dismay reflects their recent setbacks in it.

    Well…it seems obvious that Commercial Defense Firm is a 21st century oxymoron

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    20131109-163511.jpgBAE Shipbuilding Fiasco Has Lessons
    Source: defense-aerospace.com; published Nov. 7, 2013 By Giovanni de Briganti
    BAE TO SHUTTER LAST UK SHIPYARD
    A vastly different and nuanced take on the ‘closure’ from Sir Humphrey:

    The death of UK shipbuilding has been greatly over exaggerated
    The news in the UK is dominated today by the announcements of mass redundancies in the BAE shipbuilding business, with almost 2000 jobs being lost at three sites in Portsmouth and Scotland. The news is very sad, particularly for those families involved, but offset slightly by the news of a planned order of three new OPVs for the Royal Navy, ostensibly to replace the current River class vessels. The news has been seen as highly damaging to the UK shipbuilding industry, and resulted in headlines claiming the end of 500 years shipbuilding as we know it in Portsmouth (in fact utter nonsense as Portsmouth has gone many decades without building warships other than HMS CLYDE – it had only recently regained construction of blocks for the Type 45 project) and leading to unpleasant suggestions about it being a sop to the Scots ahead of the referendum.

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    And it’ll never rust….

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    3D printing company Solid Concepts announced it has manufactured the world’s first 3D Printed Metal Gun using a laser sintering process and powdered metals.
    The gun, a 1911 classic design, has already handled 50 rounds of successful firing. It is composed of 33 17-4 Stainless Steel and Inconel 625 components, and decked with a Selective Laser Sintered (SLS) carbon-fiber filled nylon hand grip.

    at 3ders.org

    Smart lighting idea…but in some ways it’s back to the future…

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    This diagram shows how the University of Cincinnati’s SmartLight can direct sunlight from the outside of a building (far right) to the inner part of a building and to a centralized harvesting- and energy-storage hub (far left). Credit: Anton Harfmann, U?
    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-smartlight-bright-idea-revolution-interior.html#jCp

    Very cool but think about this, a century ago buildings had tall ceilings transoms, etc to duct light and air around, then we invented air conditioning and electric lights…and we got lazy. Sounds like the naked monkeys at it again.

    Interesting, a wind jammer for the 21st century

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    The Norwegian Vindskip design from Lade AS uses a specially shaped hull to capture the wind and convert it into forward motion.

    Natural gas fired Gas Turbines to get wind speed on the right ‘quarter’ and the combined wind speed provides a boost to get up to 60% fuel savings. All very well till you get in a real blow, it does look like it’ll be a bit of a handful in bad weather, it has big stabilizers like a sailing yacht so maybe it’ll work…anyway it’ll be a figment of computer simulation sthen tank testing for a few years yet.

    Charlie Martin @ PJMEDIA Obamacare vs Arithmatic

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    Mr. Martin lays out ‘my’ plan for health car, he got it probably long before I did, you should too. This should be the Republican, Tea Party, soft libertarian ‘answer’ to Health Care. @ http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacare-vs-arithmetic/

    In there is Gammon’s Law:

    From Milton Friedman: Some years ago, I came across a study by Max Gammon, a British physician who also researches medical care, comparing input and output in the British socialized hospital system. He took the number of employees as his measure of input and the number of hospital beds as his measure of output. He found that input had increased sharply, while output had actually fallen.
    He was led to enunciate what he called “the theory of bureaucratic displacement.” In his words, in “a bureaucratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like `black holes,’ in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of `emitted production.'”

    Friedman referenced health care in general but it applies to the square with Obamacare…

    Build your own device Motorola’s (Google’s) next cell phone play

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    Motorola Announces “Project Ara,” a modular phone hardware platform20131030-225519.jpg20131030-225530.jpg

    Motorola has announced a free open hardware platform for smartphones called “Project Ara.” The goal is to create a modular smartphone that would allow users to swap hardware components at will. Motorola says it wants to “do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”

    looks cool seems reasonable for the large geek, nerd, techie, metro, hip, individualist, contingents out there. Making it rugged and relatively ‘duh’ proof will be a challenge.

    Too quiet to be a race car

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    Do we really go to the races for the visceral shiver a race car’s engine can give you, the aching memory frisson that the stink of castrol can trigger?
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    Formula One dominator Sebastian Vettel gave short shrift Saturday to the new, electric Formula E series, saying it would be far too quiet and was “not the future”.

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-vettel-formula-future.html#jCp