1. Matt Mullenweg
2. Brad Cavanagh
3. Jenn
4. Joe Collins
5. [anonymous donor]

I will contact the winners via email for a suitable shipping address for them. Derek IM’d me today to let me know that the signed DVDs should be to me later this week. I won’t be able to ship them until Saturday, but I will get to the Post Office on Saturday to send them all out. [If I don't mail Kari back her Gilmore Girls tapes this weekend, she may hurt me when she next sees me. She's small, but she's wiry!]

Thanks to everyone who sponsored the Blood:Water Campaign through Blogathon 2005. Together, we raised $585 for the cause, which is far more than I expected.

As Brad also notes, I don’t get a dime of this. You can still sponsor me if you’d like; I understand if you held off making a pledge until you knew I’d actually go through with it.

I’ll pull sponsors’ names for prize winners tonight: each has a 5-in-12 chance of winning one of these Derek Webb DVDs. For now, I’m going to go back and try to get some more sleep; my shoulder made it impossible for me to get to REM sleep last night until I moved out to the loft to sleep in my leather reading chair. Unfortunately, when I did finally awake, I had a pisser of a migraine, so I’m home today … and honestly, I got more sleep after calling in sick to work and going back to bed than I did anytime in the time since the Blogathon ended. Yeah, the most sleep I’ve had at a stretch since it ended is about two-and-a-half hours. I feel like dog meat.

1. My right arm was numb below my elbow.
2. My stomach is demanding FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.

Right … I should have planned a large meal for 0715 or so. Damn. Gotta remember that next year.

Remember how I bailed on going to my Chinese place yesterday so I wouldn’t fall asleep? Yeah, well … I said something about it in one of those entries. And … yeah. As soon as I get enough brainpower together to form coherent words and sentences, I’m calling in an order of moo goo gai pan. I think I can make it down the block and back without endangering myself or others. Trip + MSG === Geof sleeping the afternoon away.

I want to thank Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay for seeing a need and building Blood:Water Mission as an organization to fill it. I want to thank all of Jars for supporting Dan in this endeavor. I want to thank Derek Webb again for introducing me to Blood:Water and for giving me encouragement when I first considered doing the Blogathon a couple weeks ago. I want to thank everyone who commented on entries here today, especially Roger and Kari, for helping to keep me awake and sharp.

And lastly … I thank the bank for the money. Thank God for you.

I’m OUT.

It’s good to know that the kinds of newbie stuff you’re seeing with me today is entirely within the norm of first-year Blogathon participants. [Blogathoners?] Makes me feel better about my level of suckitude.

All right … one last post, and I can go crawl in bed.

Am I happy with how STS-114 has gone? Generally, yeah. It’s been a great mission. But I won’t feel good I see two puffs of smoke come out from under the tires on the Orbiter’s landing gear and then see that big ol’ nose come down on the third axle.

Godspeed, Discovery, and we’ll see you soon.

Impressive.

[And yes, I know that kilograms are a measure of mass. Deal. It's tired, I'm late, and I doubt that I could do the math right now!]

Well, in the 24 hours of the Blogathon, anyway.

But anyhow, I’m back up and running, and while the sun’s rising outside, my body’s sun is starting to set. I have enough wakefulness to make it through to the end without caffeine, so I will likely get to sleep reasonably easily.

And yes … I still say that this has been fun.

It’s not quite to the level of a video camera recording an image of its own video monitor, but it’s close.

Wow, I really need to reboot again. Something is making this thing run dog slow. Sun’s coming up here…

Having spent all this time watching a girly show and not letting it affect my personal conception of who I am, I will now go further and admit to a man-crush for the first time in IJSM.org history:

I love Luke Danes.

Luke Danes wears plaid shirts rolled up to the sleeve. [See also: me in high school.] Luke Danes always wears a baseball cap. [See also: me outside of work.] Luke Danes likes to let his facial hair go scruffy. [See also: me the last 2+ years.] Luke Danes likes to work with his hands. [See also: all the carpentry projects plotted for the house.]

Yeah, I pretty much love Luke Danes. I’d like to be him, in many ways … and yes, having a Lauren Graham-esque girlfriend would be a perk of that.

[And I typically don't go for skinny girls.]

So … yes, Kari. I’ll admit my man-crush for Luke Danes. Why? Because all the world should come to know Luke Danes.

[I will now wait for Josh to come along and tell us that we're ruining the show. ]

I had to go in and manually approve her to keep commenting. Kari, you should now be able to comment here, and not just in your heart.

I love how I’ve hardly gone any length of time without support. This has been pretty doggone awesome.

And they’re totally mocking “Black Hole Sun” … which is a song I actually like. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen B&B make fun of a song I’ve ever heard of before. Poor Soundgarden…

“Shut up, Bunghole.”

Okay, so I had to break out the Thinking Man position, because right now, I’m kinda tapped out for topics. Not much is going on right now, but as far as interaction goes, things are looking up … because two of my favorite folks, Chrissy and Kari are both awake now and keeping me company.

But they have no idea what I should babble on about now, either.

I’ll think of something, probably something about rockets or something.

Damn, this sucks!

I’ll be okay in a few minutes when I can will myself out of this, but right now … ugh. Creepy.

I’m starting to wind down a bit right now, but … I’ll make it.

Right now, I’m relying on the external timestamps with Flickr to ensure that, indeed, I’m still doing this.

Maybe I could do this all Emotion Eric style. That would be fun, in a way.

This emotion is, “I have how much longer left to go?”

Right now … I’m honestly surprised that I’m still stuck on this movie. I think I’ve been here over half an hour. My friends would crack up at this concept, because they know how badly I fidget during movies. I’m fidgeting, sure, but … it’s just the way I am.

What do I do now? Oh yeah … Publish

Right now, I’ve jumped in about halfway through Red Letters. It’s a weird movie so far … but it’s oddly fascinating.

Unfortunately for you, my capability to explain any of it to you is exhausted. But … Jeremy Piven is hilarious in it.

Yeah, I actually want to do next year’s. I’ve enjoyed all this. It’s been pretty crazy, and with some knowledge from this year, I’ll be more enjoyable next year. [More presearch, to be sure!]

I think Noah will do it, too, if I can make sure he’s got enough notice.

Next year, I think I’ll be blogging for the Dalit Freedom Network.

And of couse, when you think about Dave Chappelle, you think of the Rick James Sketch.

And you know… it kills me that Wikipedia has an entry solely dedicated to the Rick James Sketch.

… and Flickr is back online!

WOOHOO! More photos of my crazy mug as I roll in to the home stretch.

I wonder at what point I have to quit the caffeine so I can sleep after 0800 in the morning. I’m still shocked that this is only my third Sun Drop of the entire Blogathon. I thought I’d be through a six-pack of it by now.

All in all, this has been pretty fun. A definite do next year if my schedule permits!

Let me tell you why SSTO fails miserably. With multi-stage rockets, especially liquid-fueled rockets, your structure is also your tanking. You make very thin-walled rockets, stuff barely able to stand up on its own without being under pressure. In fact, if you launched these things unpressurized, these things would just rip completely apart. Why do you do this? Structure is “dumb mass”—it just doesn’t do anything.

When you have a multi-stage rocket, you shed dumb mass as you go through stages. When you’re done with a stage, you jettison it, and the next stage doesn’t have to carry that mass on through the next phase.

When you do SSTO, you’re stuck with the structure for the entire flight. You need structure, of course—millions of pounds of thrust has to be resisted. Newton’s Third Law doesn’t just apply to the overall system, but also to internal components. [In fact, N3L is the basis of finite element analysis of structures.] If you’re carrying structure for the whole flight, that’s less usable mass.

We ran the numbers once in undergrad propulsion … the best an SSTO vehicle can do is to expect to carry 3% mass fraction of usable mass. But that’s everything … crew, the food, water, and air they breathe … everything.

Now, that doesn’t seem bad, does it? Well, when you run the numbers for what that 3% needs to be to do a good mission, that vehicle ends up being prohibitively expensive.

And mind you, 3% is a very liberal figure. The real answer is probably lower.

SSTO was a great concept, but it was a pipe dream. Sticking with multi-stage and going back to capsules and modules is the way to go, and that’s where NASA is headed.

Dear Russia: don’t send out subs that you can’t bring back without Western help, unless you want to stop giving us crap about the whole ISS cargo thing you have going on.

…

I knew that, at some point, I would get so cheap as to troll Google News for things to post about. I have hit that point, folks.

“Ever since you hung up on me / I’m hung up on you” … oh yeah. That’s sooooooooooooooo true.