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  A real disasterJul 02, 2011 6:55 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Yesterday I did a bad job of describing Arthur C. Clarke's fictional "Braincap" device! Wikipedia had like one sentence on it, and obvious Googles weren't working, so what's a scatterbrain to do? Fortunately more information for those of us too lazy to actually read his book was forthcoming in A*'s page thing on Twitter, and you can go there to find out more about it, or--and this would be super--join the discussion and help straighten me out. :D Yes I am trying to get people to follow and talk to me on Twitter, as if that wasn't obvious. I'm doing a bad job of it. :P
 
For some reason I felt like taking a screenshot of me putting some of the final touches on today's page--here's a thumbnail you can click for the gruesome 1080p full size screenshot:
 
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See if you can spot the little detail that I hadn't done yet!
 
By the way, you shouldn't work at 66.7% zoom in the ancient Photoshop 4 (and yet there's no way tell it to skip that zoom level when zooming, gar) 'cause it'll make your edges a little blurry. :P And it looks extra ugly. So obviously I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing as I tried to get what I was hoping was the last little bit (it wasn't ;|) tweaked.
 
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(Warning: the video at the following link auto-plays and is kind of noisy at the beginning.)
 
Here's a neat BBC video of a prototype hybrid airship being developed by the British company Hybrid Air Vehicles Ltd, a 50-foot-long and propeller-driven craft filled with helium. That's 'cause it's only a little heavier than air, thanks to all the helium, so it needs just a tiny bit of additional lift from its rotors to stay airborne. It's supposed to be a very economical--if somewhat slow--method of air transport; no hybrid airship has ever made it past the prototype phase, but HAV Ltd has signed a £300 million deal with the US Army to develop the technology, so maybe this one will actually see the light of day; the full version is supposed to be 1000 feet long, able to stay aloft for three weeks without refueling(!), and capable of carrying 1000 tons through the air; at 1000 feet, it'd be 25% longer than the current record-holder for hugest air vehicle, the Hindenburg; they kind of stopped trying to make big airships after that line didn't end up so well in the 1930's, but part of the real problem they had back then was that helium was really expensive, and only available in the United States--and the US didn't have enough for its own airships, so there was a strict ban on exports--so the Hindenburg had to switch to all-too-flammable hydrogen.
 
So in a way (okay so this is a stretch; and incidentally, the cause of the ignition of the Hindenburg's hydrogen was never discovered), it's America's fault!
 
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image by Gus Pasquerella (source)
 
36 lives lost--if only America had shared its helium with the Germans' top-of-the-line ship! Although, the Hindenburg was employed from time to time in dropping propaganda leaflets and flying over Olympic ceremonies for Hitler, so I suppose we can't be too broken up that the airship as a thing went away (I mean, the Hindenburg; the airship industry as a whole did cease to be after the accident, though).
 
Oh man! Just accidentally found the footage of the disaster on YouTube:
 
video on Youtube
 
That's the voice of American radio reporter Herbert Morrison who was on hand at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey to report on the ship's first US/Europe round trip of the 1937 season. And I should have known this, but it is indeed his frantic use of the phrase in the commentary you can hear there that would make "oh the humanity" the satirical catchphrase we know and love today.
 
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Oh yeah! My Sunday fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant, will of course be updating this weekend, so stop on by for that if you've got nothing better to do. And to catch you up, here's a teaser link (click the image :P) to last week's Princess page:
 
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Have a long and happy weekend! I *think* I will be getting an A* update in for Monday (possibly not actually arriving until the wee hours of Tuesday morning, as has been my habit :P), after fireworks and all that. Be safe, don't end up like the Hindenburg!
 
 
 
 
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