Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Colorado Caucuses

Last night was Colorado Caucuses night for both parties. I can't speak for the whole state, but where I was some 15 or so precincts met and it was definitely well attended, about 5 times what we had last time. No official presidential candidate voting occurred, but unofficially it looked like a pretty even split between Cruz and Trump. The official results of the unofficial voting may or may not be released later.

On the Dem side it appears the law and order wing of the party triumphed over the Chicago Rules wing with the doctrinaire Marxist triumphing over the felon. Still Mr. Sanders' victory speaks badly of the educational system in place here. As soon as a candidate announces he or she is a socialist, the correct response is to laugh them out of the room.

4 comments:

Railgap said...

I owe you an email, but I'm on my Win7 box which doesn't do email, so I thought I'd leave this here as a "bug in your ear":

How do you feel about designing a blow-down supersonic (Mach # TBD) wind tunnel, figure cross section of test area only about 3" - 4" max, using rural LP tank for high side supply, another (possibly larger) rural LP tank for vacuum side, could fold tanks under and behind test section for easy access to test specimens. plumbing oversized and similar to previous gun work except for requirements of flow straighteners and good tapering for the convergent-divergent supersonic flow region.

This would become a fully instrumented, functional wind tunnel in an educational lab doing both summer studies and in-season lecture (off-sites) tours for school field trips, with all the interlocks and instrumentation of a college grade facility, but aimed at being a STEM dog-n-pony show for grades 6-12.

Facility would get some hands on by students in summer labs (wherein students organized as a team do real experiments and write up real papers for publication in as real a journal as we can manage to accept) but when school is in session, facility is used for gee-whiz shows to tours.

Applications for (probably retired or semi retired) tour guides now being accepted, ahem.

Facility needs a super sonic wind tunnel to help design armatures for the railgun range, yup. Fully enclosed with armature and payload capture, full instrumentation, interlocks, range safety, etc. Built on a length of structural steel, whole range would be less than 20 feet with every toy imaginable, probably less than 12 feet with a sensible feature set.

There ought to be and will be a HV lab including Tesla coil, Marx bank / impulse machine, etc. Same story as above.

Laser lab / demo bench as well.

Point being for the tours (and this should sell the facility to parents, educators, and kids in one swell foop): "go into a STEM career path and you get to play with toys like this before you even leave school! (ie; college)"

There used to be touring groups that did this. Ask John Doran about the one he saw.

I'm thinking stationary however, serves entire front range.

I already have multiple parties interested, and I know all of the requisite talents, ie; you, me, other DMSC members... I even know where there is an appropriate sized capacitor bank and a guy who wants to build a mad science lab... who also has kids...

Railgap said...

or yanno, call me maybe, same # as ever

Billll said...

For the rest of my readers: This is typical of the people I hang out with. You need a pound of Thorium for that new hi-tech backyard barbecue you're building, these are the people to ask.

Railgap: Sure I'm interested. When and where is the study group?

Anonymous said...

"As soon as a candidate announces he or she is a socialist, the correct response is to laugh them out of the room."

Along with anyone who says things like "let me suggest trying free market capitalism. It has worked in the past after all".