essentially, a person in space is about these days and about the days 50 years ago. The International Space Station is already kindergarten: in terms of the Earth, it is only slightly higher than airplanes fly.
Month: April 2026
Precision in the Sky: Aerial Refueling of HH-60 Pave Hawks by a KC-130 Hercules | April 05 2026, 12:59
An interesting photo from Iran. An American Lockheed Martin KC-130 Hercules tanker and Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters connected to it. If you think about it, it’s incredibly complex. Look, the plane has to fly at a super low speed for it – close to the stalling speed – while the helicopters, in contrast, must push to their limits to keep up. To avoid entering into a spin, the plane is forced to rapidly lose altitude, consequently, the helicopters must also purposely drop altitude. The helicopters are positioned lower than the plane, so if the pilot slows down even more (though how much more can he slow down?), and the helicopters don’t slow down, the hose could hit the rotor blades and that’s it. The helicopters also gain several tons during refueling, which adds to the complexity. Why refuel two at once? It’s more complicated. Actually, it’s both more complicated and simpler, because the load on the wings is distributed symmetrically, making it easier for the plane to maintain a stable course. It’s also interesting how the issue of static electricity is handled in the dry air.
A good addition from the comments (Sergey Snegirev):
1. It is noted that the Hercules stalls at 100-110 knots (depending on the air temperature and altitude, which is important in Iran), and the photo shows the flaps deployed, allowing it to stay up to even 90 knots. Meanwhile, the Pave Hawk can accelerate up to 190 knots (but obviously, nobody performs AAR at max speed), with a cruising speed of 150 knots, so there’s quite a sizable overlap. It’s assumed that AAR takes place around 120 knots on the video.
3. It is noted that AAR happens at exactly the same altitude, so there’s no need to lose altitude
4. It is noted that the tanker – like any other aircraft – can dissipate static electricity using an electrostatic discharger. The refueling hose has a contact that equalizes the potentials of the two aircraft before fuel delivery.
5. It is noted that the fuel used to refuel external aircraft is stored in tanks in the aircraft’s cargo section, separate from the tanker’s own fuel system. Even if the pumping were from the tanker’s own fuel tanks, it would come from the central tank, which is set up to transfer fuel from the side tanks.
It is noted that on the underside of the plane’s wings, several metal “antennas” are installed on the flaperons to discharge static electricity into the air. It is noted that when the hose is connected, a wire passes through and the potentials on the bodies are equalized.
Unexpected Visitor and the Power Switch Mystery | April 02 2026, 18:01
Everything is normal, I’m working, suddenly there’s a knock from the backyard and the power goes out in the whole house. I look over my right shoulder – and there through the window IN MY LOCKED BACKYARD is some guy.
I go out, say hello. He’s like, “I’ve done everything.” I say, I noticed, but who are you exactly? He’s like—you submitted an application to switch to the EV tariff. Well, I had to press a button here. I say and you’ve pressed everything already?
He says – yes. I say then close the door behind you, because my dog got freaked out here.
Then the dog comes up. Sleepy. Stunned. Who’s this, he asks.
But generally, it would be nice at least to be warned about visits and the sudden power cut. I could have shut down my computer or something.
But now it will be $0.0732 per kWh at night, and $0.12694 during the day.
Navigating the Lexical Complexity of Nabokov’s “Lolita” | April 02 2026, 15:56
I’ve finished the first version of a dictionary-style book on Nabokov’s “Lolita”. The chart shows how the complexity of vocabulary is distributed across the pages of the book. The lower chart averages 25 sentences, displaying the number of complex words on the vertical axis, with colors indicating their complexity/rarity (purple – the most complex, red – less complex, yellow – even less so). But I have already removed two levels, and overall, for a foreigner, all five levels are challenging. In the book, level 3 is marked with a dashed line, level 4 with a simple frame, and level 5 with a double frame. Currently, there are 5794 words, of which 541 are fifth level, 1070 are fourth, 1883 are third, 1393 are second, and 54 are first (the simplest ones). Considering that the first version ended up being 1148 pages, the dictionary will need to be significantly streamlined by removing what can be dispensed with. This mainly pertains to the first and second levels, and some from the third and fourth. The rarity of words is calculated in three ways: through LLM, and through two lists of word frequencies in the English language corpus (300K words).
Not all words are complex. For instance, in the sentence “With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.” someone well-acquainted with English might not know the words ebb, abet, drabness, while everything else is familiar, but lower the requirements for the reader, and the dictionary might not be very useful for such cases.
Or consider the sentence:
Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms; the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatric appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.
My browser even highlights four words here.
I have definitions of words in English, German, French, and Russian. I’ve encountered the issue that different words from the text are considered complex in different languages, yet they are unified for me. So, I’ll have to mark, for example, French words in the English text separately, so they are not included in the French version, since there, the reader knows, for instance, what quel mot means.
Overall, this weekend I’ll be manually removing about half, and then I can make the cover and list it on Amazon.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 