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Kleinstpeilempfänger
Fourth in a vaguely defined series on obscure spy equipment. First: Early American radar. Second: Russian modular spy radio Tenzor. Third: Truck-based German direction finder. This is a cross-pollination of 2 and 3. It’s another Peilempfänger by Telefunken, in the same modular miniature form as the Tenzor. Telefunken called it Kleinstpeilempfänger, which is bigger than…
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Barnacle Bill the Spider
Male spiders jump away with maximum G force after mating, leaping the human equivalent of 1000 feet in a second. The female stores the sperm until she determines that the male is strong enough to get away. If he gets away, she ingests the sperm and fertilizes her eggs. If he doesn’t get away, she…
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Constants and Variables 172, web-to-web edition
The “rights” fans are weeweed up this morning over Biden’s new Disinformation Centre. The director is a former Disinformation Fellowess at the WILSON CENTRE. Fact: Secrecy and censorship are the defaults. We don’t have the choice of escaping censorship. Given this CONSTANT, there are two interesting VARIABLES, a political timeline and a tech timeline. They…
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Hard answer to soft question
I don’t think there’s a ‘rhetorical’ name for this technique. It’s effective and often creates a significant shockwave in the minds of readers and listeners. Good example. The Enid Buzz FB page asked What’s the coolest prize you ever won? Lots of money prizes, small vacations, side of beef, pizza for a year. The best…
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Barking UFO
Yesterday I proposed or imagined that the larger UFOs might belong to an ancient tribe that figured out how to LITERALLY harness electricity, a tribe that wasn’t spoiled by atom theories. They know how to organize charge patterns for massless or massed appearances. The sightings of small discs flying in groups have a different flavor.…
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Non-barking UFO
I just noticed one huge disjunct between modern UFO discussion and the 1947-1967 discussion. Absolutely all the modern UFOlogists are solely obsessed with the Roswell event. They don’t mention the hundreds of other non-dismissable sightings over thousands of years. It’s just Roswell, Roswell, Roswell, Area 51, alien Greys. Wikipedia partly answers the question. The event…
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Illustrated two ways
Today is Morse Code Day! I don’t need to add any new animations, since Polistra has been tirelessly sending the same prayer on several different keys in two different languages. The HappyDays365 webpage has a pretty good writeup on Morse himself and the code in general, giving proper credit to the MANY inventors who came…
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More Tur(k)ing test
A few weeks ago Eric Holloway set up a fiendishly clever machine vs human test, essentially proving that one of the major AI engines is partly or mostly human. Now he’s done it again. Here’s the sequence leading up to the crucial moment. 153 EMH: what is a belief? 154 GPT-3: A belief is a…
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Walz rehash
Here’s why I continue to keep track of a SANE place (Enid) while living in a NAZI TORTURE CHAMBER (Spokane). Enid is celebrating Bacon Bash for United Way! Sample the best bacon recipes from the cook-off contestants! Spokane is celebrating Compost Fair! Learn composting recipes from the Master Composter! = = = = = Reprinting…
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Winged metrologists
I bought several of Frank Edwards’s books on UFOs and other subjects. Near the end of his short life he was following the model of Hix and MacHarrie and Nesbitt, producing a set of books and short radio features on historical and scientific oddities, well beyond UFOs. All of these ‘Fortean’ writers were presenting known…
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The ultimate one-liner
Last week I made a bet that Elon wasn’t serious about buying Twitter. I lost, and I’m provisionally glad. Still not clear what he will do with his new toy. But: unlike all other billionaires, Elon is capable of occasionally doing the right thing. He protected his Tesla factory workers from muzzles and vaxes. Maybe…
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Fast service!
The CryptoMuseum, primary source for my last three animations, has scored a scoop. After pestering the government for many years, they finally got a FOIA release. Fast service! Only 70 years! In 1945 KGB built a remarkably elegant ‘RFID’ responder microphone into a big wooden Great Seal sculpture. As part of the mutual admiration ceremonies…
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Peilempfänger
Part 3 of a vaguely defined theme on obscure spy equipment. Part 1 was the first American radar. Part 2 was the Russian Tenzor portable spy rig. Today I’m featuring a Kraut portable direction finder or Peilempfänger. (Peilen = take a compass bearing; Empfänger = receiver.) It’s not as interesting as the other two, so…
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Gets it
The Enid Buzz fb page asked who had CB radios. Here’s a reply that GETS IT: The FCC did regulate CB indirectly. CB radios had to be prepackaged. The manufacturers had to keep the power below 5 watts ‘gross’, and had to maintain accurate frequency. Homebrewers who built 1 kilowatt amplifiers got caught pretty quickly.…
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More on vanished knowledge
Continuing from previous item on mass forgetting… We do know a few things now that weren’t known, or weren’t easily available, in the ’60s, and these new bits of info should inform our discussion now. The earlier UFO thinkers were reluctant to conclude that the devices were ours, because (1) Nobody can keep a secret.…
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