Aerodynamic efficiency and the airliner of the future

Today's airliners are a long tubular fuselage, carrying the passengers and cargo atop a wing that does all the aerodynamic work, lifts, stability etc.  A good deal of sheet metal goes along just to carry the payload.  A more efficient design (illustrated on the cover of Aviation Week)  blends the wing and the fuselage into a single body, like the B2 flying wing bomber.  The B2 is as efficient as it gets, it's all wing, no structure is just along for the ride.  Fortunately the payload (iron bombs) is good and dense and doesn't take up much room inside the wing.  Passengers are not that dense. 
   So the blended wing Lockheed  design is a wing with a great swelling in the middle to accept a passenger cabin.  Trouble is, cabins have to be pressurized, which imposes enormous forces trying to blow the cabin open.  With only 5 pounds per square inch cabin pressure, over the 13 million square inches of a typical cabin, you get nearly 70 million pounds of force straining the cabin walls.  The only structure that can resist this is a round tube, like present day airliner fuselages.  So the Lockheed designers have a cylindrical passenger cabin buried inside their swoopy blended wing/body swelling.  Trouble is, we have many feet of space between the cabin wall and the outer skin.  Which makes cabin windows impossible.  Which doesn't bother the designers, cabin windows are a pain, heavy, prone to leaks, points of weakness, and crack start locations.  They are happy to omit cabin windows.
   Passengers are not in favor.  They like window seats, they like being able to see out, and they like sunshine.  Boarding a windowless airliner gives some of them the willies, and depresses many others. 
   Maybe the conventional jet liner design is not so inefficient after all.

GIMP, poor man's photo edit program.

Gnu Image Manipulation Program.  Very powerful, free, photo edit program.  It can do things that Picassa cannot such as correct perspective, filter out artifact, smooth out seams, and bunch of other stuff.  Extremely steep learning curve, which is a polite way of saying the program is user hostile.  The GIMP people assign whimsical names to things, the on line documentation doesn't describe or explain many obscure concepts used in the program.  GIMP enthusiasts claim that GIMP can do everything Adobe Photoshop can do and then some.  This may be true, if you have the time to experiment until GIMP starts to work.  Version 2.8  can now drive the printer under Windows, something that the previous version 2.6 could not. 
   Anyhow, wanting to correct the perspective, and being too cheap to buy Photoshop, I downloaded GIMP.  And it does work.  If someone would write a decent manual, in plain English, it could be a winner.

I'll take the high road and you'll take the low road

And I'll be in Scotland before ye.  Scotland, formerly an independent kingdom, merged with England at the beginning of the 17th century.  It was part of the deal upon the death of the childless Queen Elizabeth, by which the Scottish King, James, became king of England, as well as of Scotland.  So this is a deal that goes way back.  Despite some tensions, and a number of old rivalries, the merger worked fairly well, at least to outsiders, it looked like the writ of the London government ran over all of the British Isles, and it has been that way for 400 years. 
   Zap, Pow, Kablam.  Save your whiskey cups, the Scots will rise again.  Scottish separatism has come to the point where there will be a referendum on Scottish independence in September.  Polling right now is mixed, the referendum might go either way.  If Scotland votes to leave Great Britain there are a number of "issues".  Like money.  The Scots want to keep using the British pound, the Brits have said  "No way".  The Scots want to become/remain EU members and the EU is saying, "Perhaps, but no guarantees".  Who knows what this will do to the British Army, who will have to turn the Black Watch, all the kilts, all the bagpipes over to the Scots.  The Brits get to keep their redcoats and bearskin hats, but no more bagpipers piping the troops into the attack, like we see in all the old WWII movies.. 
   Or course Scottish separatism may go the way of  Quebec separatism, where it got voted down by a thin margin some years ago, and has died out. 
   When Quebec separatism was riding high (before the referendum) some Quebec leaders visited Wall St to inquire about floating bonds and exchanging the newly created Quebec currency.  According to the Wall St Journal, the Americans poured cold water on the separatist idea.  The Quebecers were told, no loans, no bonds, and we won't accept your currency.  Which had something to do with the referendum failing a few months later.

Case of beer bet on Can Am hockey game

Heard on Fox TV this morning.  Obama bet a case of beer with Canadian prime minister Stephan Harper on the woman's Can-Am hockey game. 
  What?  A case of Bud Lite against a case of Molson's?  You gotta be kidding.  Especially as Canadians think American beer is watery and flavorless.  I agree with them, and fortunately I live close enough to Canada to get the good stuff. 
   They should have bet a case of whiskey.  A case of Jack Daniels against a case of Canadian Club, now there's a bet.
By the way.  Congratulations to both hockey teams.  

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

It didn't rain last night.  It cooled off and we got a dusting (too little to measure) over night.  It's warm this morning, a degree or two above freezing and my roof is melting off, at least my icicles are dripping.  Skiing ought to be pretty good. 

Ukraine

Looks like they have a good little civil war going there.  One side is on our side.  We wish them well.  We ought to give them diplomatic and public relations support.  But we cannot give them military support.  Ukraine is right next to Russia, and the Russians look on it as estranged Russian territory.  They won't allow US military action in Ukraine.  They will oppose us, with the full force of their army, fighting close to home, on home soil.  We don't want to get into a fight with the Russians.  They can probably beat an American expeditionary force operating so far from home.  And if they cannot, they still have nukes.  We don't want to go there. 
  It's like the East German uprising in the 1950's, the Hungarian uprising in the late '50s, the Czechoslovakian uprising in the '60s.  We sympathized with the insurgents, but we didn't dare touch off a war with the Russians.  So let let the Russians crush the uprisings.  It's grin and bear it time, again. 

Can a shoe bomb bring down an airliner?

I mean just how much explosive can you fit into a shoe? Really.  And Boeing builds very rugged airplanes.  They have been doing it since the legendary B-17 of WWII, one of which was tough enough to fly back to base after a mid air collision with a German fighter.  The modern 737/777/787 jetliners are very strongly built.  I think the best a shoe bomb could do is punch a smallish hole in the skin, depressurizing the cabin. This would be exciting for all on board, but the plane will keep flying.
   TSA snoopers must love this.  Another excuse to make life miserable for passengers.