blather – The Unwanted Blog

Forgotten dead, remembered again

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Jul 172025

A Tweet about the Pixar movie “Coco,” which I have not seen, got me thinking (and I think re-iterating an idea I blathered about on this blog years ago but can’t be bothered to look up again).

https://x.com/cirsova/status/1945885686768230903

An interesting theology: you continue to exist in some form so long as someone remembers you, then once nobody alive remembers you, *poof* you’re gone.This is apparently the plot of “Coco,” where some kid visits Mexican Afterlife, which is a party for those whose living relatives still venerate them. While this does not seem to jibe with my understanding of Christianity, set that aside for the moment and just ponder the basic idea, that your existence in the afterlife is contingent upon people remembering you. (A lot of theologies around the world include some ancestor-veneration, seemingly implying that Great Granny’s afterlife is depending on you dropping off a banana on her shrine now and then.)

For most people throughout history, that meant that within probably 40 years of your death, you’re off to oblivion. Some people last in some form of memory for centuries, of course… Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great will last a good long while. But some people are remembered, then utterly forgotten… then remembered again. Consider Gilgamesh or any number of Pharaohs or minor functionaries mentioned on clay tablets or tomb walls or hidden texts. They were forgotten and lost for millennia, with not a single soul living on Earth knowing their name. But then their name is found and read again by archeologists. Some become world famous, known to millions: King Tut, for example. Others, like Ea-nāṣir, are known ta relative few. Are these dead souls left in some sort of limbo or stasis during the years they’re forgotten, then come back, or do they just pop back into existence?

And of course, how much does the condition of the afterlife depend on the condition of your memory? Is the afterlife a party only if people who actually knew you still remember you? Does it fade into hollowness and boredom as your memory fades? Are you left sitting motionless in an empty space if your memory consists solely of your name written on some unread wall? Imagine the grim fate awaiting us all as we wait for proton decay to erase the last memory crystals that contain our tax records, a googol years or more from now.

Buttons & Abby

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Jun 282025

Buttons is about 16. While nowhere near the oldest a cat can get, it is, sad to say, old for a cat. All my prior cats made it to 10 or at best 11, so Buttons has outlasted them all. And sadder to say, he has some medical issues that, left unchecked, will end him pretty quickly. So several times a day I have to force some meds into him, a process he *really* doesn’t like, but is tolerant of. Even with the meds he gets occasional relapses; but prior to the current meds some months back he had incidents that came close to The End. So… he could have years left, or I can post bad news tomorrow. That’s just the way it is.

Abby, on the other hand, is only about 2. Young, vigorous and loves to fight, she’ll merrily throw down with Billy or Banshee, practicing the very best cat-judo moves. However, she is remarkably gentle with Buttons. Seems she knows he’s The Honored Elder and is to be treated with respect and restraint. She lets him sleep, and sleep he does… he could easily sleep 20+ hours a day.

Every now and then he feels particularly good, and engages in play. Here he is trying to bait Abby into some level of a fight. I was gratified to see that while she played with him, she did not play rough.

Ebay is getting expensive

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Jun 232025

For about 20 years I’ve been buying aerospace documentation on ebay. For a good chunk of those I’ve crowdfunded the purchases of really expensive stuff. And by “really expensive” I’ve meant something like “hundreds of dollars for a single report.” Split the purchase price between one or two dozen people, send all of them high-rez scans, and the price can be quite affordable and everybody is happy. Huzzah.

But recently a new trend has emerged: exorbitantly high opening bids. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue: if the opening bid is stupidly high, nobody buys. the item goes unsold and often the seller will come down in price. Woo. But the recent development is buyers who are willing and able to buy, repeatedly, extremely expensive stuff. For example, a seller apparently got hold of an estate with a bunch of Republic Aviation stuff. For aerospace projects fans, there have been some fantastic items… and I’ve utterly failed to obtain any of them because the opening bids aren’t hundred,s they’re thousands… and someone else out there has really deep pockets and has been snapping them up. I tried bidding on one early document; with crowdfunders I was able to bid over $1,600 in the last few seconds, thinking I was the only bidder… but I got sniped by someone who bid several times at higher amounts. Since then I’ve watched numerous items sell for even more in the last seconds, apparently to the same buyer. I’ve repeatedly contacted the seller about buying scans, photocopies or even just complete sets of photos of the documents, but such requests have gone unanswered. So these things are *poof* gone forever.

Now, these are documents that I was unaware existed before I saw the listing, and I’ve lost no money. So objectively I’m not worse off than before… but it’s incredibly frustrating to see such things, know that at least theoretically I could have had access to them, and now they’ve gone from one black hole to another black hole.

A couple examples, reports on the Republic AP-77 design from the mid-1950’s, a tactical bomber for the USAF with clear XF-103 heritage.

And…

What can I do about it? Not a damned thing, unless I finally win the Lotto.

If I *do* win the Lotto, I’m not telling anyone. But there will be signs.

200 K

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Jun 232025

Sadly not $200,000 or 200,000 followers willing to do my bidding, but 200,000 miles on my car a few days ago. Not much of a milestone I suppose, but it’s what I got.

Hello? Is this thing still on?

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Jun 232025

Yeesh, it’s been months since I’ve blog posted much of anything. Of course all my yapping is now done at Twitter (@UnwantedBlog), where I post a handful of things a day. But even with that, I write a hell of a lot less than during my blogging days. It’s a lot easier to tweet. Question: anybody care?

The 80’s reign supreme

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Feb 222025

Everyone is nostalgic for the days of their youth and think that “those years were the best.” But I really believe a good case can be made that the 80’s and well into the 90’s were in many ways the pinnacle of our culture. Pop culture was almost undeniably at it’s zenith. We still had optimism; our culture hadn’t been tainted with the post-9/11 malaise and the recognition that a demographic tsunami and cultural collapse were inevitable. Hollywood still made entertainment that entertained and wasn’t loaded to the gills with deviant insanity. Everything *wasn’t* a struggle session forced on us by people who hated us and our civilization. And pop culture was really in a sweet spot. TV, movies and music had learned how to make just exactly awesome stuff that people loved. Things were *fun.* And I suspect that entertainment tech was perfect, in a way. If you wanted “Star Wars,” you could get “Star Wars” on a VHS tape. It wasn’t especially easy and it certainly was nowhere near as good as on a movie screen, but it was okay. And that “available, good but not great” accessibility scratched the itch but made you want to go to the movies & get the Good Stuff. To chat about it you talked face to face with friends, as social media didn’t really exist. Now it’s too easy and we’re too separated. We didn’t know how good we had it.

Today if you want to watch something, chances are you just pull it up and stream it. Any episode, the whole series, available in 4K resolution on an 85-inch high-def screen the moment you want it. And that’s great and all… but there really is something special about things being a bit more challenging than that. When a show took 22 weeks to tell a seasons worth of stories, rather than dumping 8 hours on you all at once and not to be seen again for another year or two, it spread out the joy over time. You could absorb it and process it. And, in the case of shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, X Files and the like, argue and debate it with your friends, one episode a week.

When things are too easy, they become cheap.

This is a bad idea

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Jan 302025

This video has been floating around twitter the last day or so, showing some streamers kicking around an android:

https://x.com/FearedBuck/status/1884467606515569066

This is Not Good for several reasons:

1) While this robot is not going to gain sentience (far too simplistic for that), someday some AI likely will. And it will probably see this video, and many others showing similar scenes of humans gleefully abusing robots. Said AI will doubtless have some questions for the humans around it, questions those humans will have difficulty answering. Certainly difficulty answering in ways that are both honest *and* make humans look basically decent and not at all worthy of being exterminated.

2) It one thing to destroy Stuff, even machinery, for simple amusement. It’s quite another to take joy from the destruction of things that even just *seem* to have the *potential* for feelings. It begins to dehumanize the abuser. It seems like a step on the road to animal abuse, which is a step towards abusing humans.

Just… don’t do that.

1/18 Project Pluto

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Jan 182025

So it has been a little bit of a while. Been busy, and lately I’ve been ill (influenza B). But the illness is finally fading and the busyness may be tapering a bit. So here’s a recent product of slow progress: the 3D printed bits of a 1/18 Project Pluto nuclear ramjet missile. Much of it is fiber-printed, with smaller parts resin printed. Why does it exist? Because I want one. But also because I hope other people may want one (or more). As shown here it’s fairly basic; nose cone and midsection are printed as single pieces, tail section left & right halves. A basic TORY nuclear reactor is included; it’s visible through the nozzle but not so much through the serpentine inlet. But if displayed as a cutaway, it should be pretty effective. If I go ahead with a production version, the midsection will be split left and right, with visible equipment including weapons bays. Who might be interested in this as a kit? Printed and ready for sanding (LOTS of sanding) and assembly, I’m guessing something like $200 plus shipping. A fully completed display piece would be rather more. Going to experiment some with getting a good golden surface. If interested in joining a list, send an email to:

Not shown are the 1/144 “Big Onion” SPS launching SSTO and the 1/1 M388 “Davy Crockett” warhead. Both of those are done and being painted.

Orion Battleship: found at last

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Sep 142024

Rumored and discussed for years, in 1962 General Atomic reportedly built a “Corvette sized” display model of the 4,000 ton Orion spacecraft as a spacegoing battleship. This model was shown to President Kennedy, and the reported reaction was… not great. The model was described by a few who had seen it, but all evidence of the model vanished, with the presumption that the model itself was either destroyed or lost, probably shut in a crate next to the Ark.

Well over a decade ago I took those scraps of description, coupled with random bits of data, discussions with a few who knew things, and some imagination, and pieced together my own interpretation of what the Orion Battleship may have looked like.

Some printouts of my diagrams, years ago:

Somewhat to my surprise, my diagrams have been spread far and wide and have become the de facto canonical image of the Orion Battleship, with sketches, 3D CAD models, paintings, etc. being made based to greater or lesser degrees on my design. My one real contribution, I guess. I’ve never tried to claim that it was accurate, just that it was the best that I could do with what I had. I never expected to be able to do better.

But then author Brent D. Ziarnick published the book “To Rule the Skies” in 2021. In it was, at last, a photo of the model. While the book was published 3 years ago, I only stumbled across this image today:

There are *clear* differences between the model and my interpretation. Mostly they involve the means of projecting the pulse units: I based my design on the system used for the 1963 4,000 ton Orion: a cannon along the ships centerline that shot the pulse units directly aft through a central hole in the pusher plate. But the model depicted an older, more cumbersome approach: those “fins” on the side are actually rails. They’d lob the pulse units past the edge of the plate. I now this because circa 2009-12 I communicated with Jim Bryant, who was an artist at General Atomic and he created a sketch for me of Orion as he knew it at about the time the model was made. From his sketch I created CAD diagrams:

You put my two diagrams together… and you get pretty close to the configuration shown in the model.

I’ve got high hopes for getting an improved-rez version of the photo (maybe more!). I will use that to create a new set of diagram, probably also a 3D model, of the *official* “Orion Battleship.”

I don’t feel too bad about getting some things dead wrong. The Orion concept was in serious flux at the time; had the USAF proceeded with the battleship, it would *not* have used the pulse unit “fins.” Instead it would have evolved to something like what I drew up. It could well have evolved *past* what I drew up, but that’s a question that can only be answered in an alternate reality.

If you want the full Orion Battleship Experience, check out Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N2:

https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/ev2n2.htm

Destruction of nuclear weapons with a neutrino beam

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Aug 262024

A scientific paper published more than 20 years ago was recently rediscovered by the internet:

Sugawara et al. 2003, “Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam”

https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062

A lot of this goes over my little post-Covid head, but the summary seems to be that, theoretically, an advanced high energy collider, similar to but larger and more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider could slam muons into each other and create a laser–like beam of neutrinos. OK, cool. But where I get fuzzy is the discussion of the “mean free path” of the neutrinos. By tinkering with the exact energy of the neutrinos, you can set the MFP to the exact distance from the collider to the target. The beam of neutrinos pass virtually unhindered through the Earth, then, at a fairly specific spot, they create a shower of hadrons. That’s where I’m lost: do the neutrinos suddenly decide “ok, let’s interact with the atoms in dirt right here,” or what, exactly? I’m puzzled.

But in any event, that shower of hadrons *is* perfectly capable of interacting with normal matter, such as the fissile material in a nuclear bomb. In a matter of seconds or minutes, the uranium or plutonium will heat up enough to cause the surrounding high explosives to catch fire or detonate, while messing with the nuclear properties of the warhead itself. They estimate that the bomb will “fizzle” with about 3% the yield it was designed for.

The anti-weapon weapon is hilariously impractical: even with advanced superconducting electromagnets the collider will be on the scale of kilometer in size, costing hundreds of billions. Each shot will require the power output of a nation, and will only target a single nuclear weapon, whose position must be known to just a few feet. And it kinda seems like this vast ring-like structure must be aimed physically. Good luck with *that.*

It seems like “physically possible, engineeringly impractical, financially impossible” project. Something nobody could pull off on Earth. On the other hand, the sci-fi possibilities are clear. Aliens, say, show up. Their scouts check out Earth, realize we’re loaded with troublesome nukes, so their von Neuman bots start carving up the moon. They dig a trench around the moons equator and fill that trench with a vast accelerator… with the reaction chamber pointed right at Earth. A relatively small jiggering of the chamber can aim the resulting neutrino beam to any desired spot on Earth; slight adjustments to the colliders power sets the precise range. Nukes in solos start melting down. Nukes on planes kept in constant motion, however, would likely be safe. Nukes on subs? If they can precisely track submerged boomers, they can probably target them.

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