Month: January 2019
Cool Stuff
Bison covered in Frost
Stored Locomotives in Arizona
No Doors
Walking The Golden Gate Bridge
Tagged Cougar in The Hollywood Hills
New York City Changing Skyline
The changing skyline. The Hudson Yards development will add 5 huge new skyscrapers to the skyline. The main tower will be 30 Hudson Yard. It will have one of the most spectacular outdoor observation decks in the world. The building is scheduled for completion in 2019.
Heights don’t scare some people. Is that guy wearing yoga pants?
Extreme Cold Warning
That infamous Polar Vortex ia at it again. The weather phenomena is spewing super cold air down the spine of North America. And the central Canadian city of Winnipeg is dab smack in the middle of its path.
Steam rising from blaring furnaces and car exhausts everywhere.
Elon Musk Reveals SpaceX’s New Retro Test Rocket
Complete with a decidedly retro feel, SpaceX’s new experimental rocket has been fully assembled at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, launch site. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has tweeted out a picture of the Starship test rocket.
The “test hopper,” as Musk and COO Gwynne Shotwell call it, isn’t actually meant to fly into space. It’s meant for suborbital VTOL testing (vertical takeoff and landing). It will hop, so to speak, around 16,400 feet into the air and then land again, according to documents filed with the FCC. These tests are crucial for new rockets like the SpaceX Starship.
No stranger to branding or pop culture references, Musk celebrated the Falcon 9’s testing with Johnny Cash’s classic “Ring of Fire.” This time around, he’s referencing Hergé’s classic Tintin cartoons, as well as 1950s sci-fi classics like Destination Moon.
This isn’t what the final version of the Starship will look like. The orbital Starship, eventually meant to ferry up to 100 people to Mars with 150 tons of cargo, will be bigger and sport a much sturdier skin needed to withstand the journey out of Earth’s atmosphere. Formerly known as the BFR, the Starship remains the company’s most ambitious project. Down the road, it’s hoped that the Starship will replace all of the company’s current rocketry, including its reusable Falcon 9.
Because of its experimental and limited nature, the SpaceX team could get a little more creative with the design. Reflecting on the design on Twitter (where else?), Musk commented that it “must be more pointy.”
Popular Mechanics
Divers swim with one of biggest great white sharks off Hawaii
A team of divers has had a close encounter with one of the biggest great white sharks on record – and lived to tell the tale.
Some of the divers came so close to the female shark in the waters off Hawaii that they were able to touch it.
The shark, nearly 20ft (6m) long and weighing an estimated 2.5 tonnes, is believed to be one tagged by researchers about 20 years ago called Deep Blue.
It was attracted to the area off Oahu’s south shore by the carcass of a dead sperm whale.
One of the divers, Ocean Ramsey, told the Honolulu Star Advertiser that they had been filming tiger sharks feeding on the whale when the shark arrived.
“We saw a few tigers and then she came up and all the other sharks split, and she started brushing up against the boat,” she said.
“She was just this big beautiful gentle giant wanting to use our boat as a scratching post. We went out at sunrise, and she stayed with us pretty much throughout the day.”
Ms Ramsey said the shark was “shockingly wide” and could be pregnant. Deep Blue is believed to be about 50 years old and has its own Twitter account.
Great whites are rarely seen around Hawaii as they prefer cooler seas.
Ms Ramsey said older, pregnant great white sharks were the safest to swim near but cautioned against swimming anywhere where sharks were feeding.
She said sharks would only attack humans if they were curious or if they mistook people for their normal prey, the Honolulu Star Advertiser reported.
BBC
Pretty brave girl.
Window Washers
Hanging in there in -25 windchill. These guys are about 120 feet (35 meters) up.
The MarkoZen Blog 