Archives for category: Military

Space X No-Go a Go-Go!

19 March 2007 //
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spacex_0091.jpgExper­i­ence the thrill! — 7Mb WMV file of the lift off

Went through a won­der­ful spate of feel­ings watch­ing the live cov­er­age of Space Explor­a­tions’ attempt to launch their Fal­con 1 Space Vehicle –demoflight2. As you may or may not know, Space X was one of the win­ning con­tract­ors to provide private space deliv­ery sys­tems. Unlike gov­ern­ment sponsored agen­cies, such as NASA or the ESA, SpaceX was foun­ded by the chap that made a bit of money selling PayPal to eBay. They have failed on a pre­vi­ous launch attempt after a fuel leak and this sub­sequent launch went as far as 1:02 when they went into a ter­minal shut­down pro­ced­ure. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Business Idea, Military, News, Technology

Recruitment Contrast

23 February 2007 //
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armies.jpg

Ok. Who’s really tap­ping the reason why we fight?
Eng­lish Rus­sia, a per­en­nial source of high qual­ity com­ment­ary, pos­ted a Ukrain­ian Army recruit­ment ad. As I watched I was struck by the latest Cana­dian Armed Forces ad designed to pre­sum­ably accom­plish the same end. With a long dry period between recruit­ing ads, they’ve been show­ing up on Cana­dian TV with greater fre­quency as of late. They have taken a very ‘Cana­dian’ high brow approach: look how Cana­dian men and women are work­ing around the world to make it a bet­ter place. How well does this sell? At least the Ukrain­i­ans have found a blunt but hon­est approach: chicks dig men in a uni­form and very chic APC. Mind you the res­cued lass with the blanket wrapped around her is look­ing rather lov­ingly at her hero…

Categories Canada, Military

Military Remnants

5 January 2007 //
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kirov.jpgNot to suck dry an inter­est­ing blog, but Eng­lishRus­sia had another fas­cin­at­ing post this morn­ing. Its a won­der­ful col­lec­tion of tagged Google Earth shots from Rus­sian mil­it­ary sites. I was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested to see that the ‘Kirov’ is still float­ing. Not sure if its still in act­ive ser­vice, but is is moored at one of the North­ern Fleets docks in the one pic­ture. I always fan­cied that the lines of the Kirov were par­tic­u­larly grace­ful. I am not miss­ing the fact that its a rather potent killing machine, but am appre­ci­at­ing the aes­thet­ics of the design. For what is is worth, you can find more inform­a­tion about the Kirov on Wiki­pe­dia or at Mark Meredith’s Kirov Page. I know its a bit of a guy thing, and I am reminded of both Tony Soprano’s addic­tion to war doc­u­ment­ar­ies as well as Den­nis Leary’s Asshole song. I am chided, but still mildly intrigued.

Categories Blogroll, Military, Technology, Visualization