Feb 242024
 

Fortunate is the man who has this coffee table. Fabulously wealthy is he if he has a woman who looks at that table and thinks “that’s awesome, I picked the right guy.”

 

It’s a spectacular piece, and I kinda really want one. However… before I’d plunk down money I don’t have for this sort of thing, I’d demand some improvements. From a distance it looks great, but in the closeup shots you can see the pretty strong layer lines. This appears to have been filament-printed, and little effort seems to have been made to smooth out a lot of it. But as a prototype, it’s fantastic.

 

It’s also interesting to point out that with 6 years worth of Star Trek to choose from, the stuff people *really* seem to like, to the point they’ll spend time, money and effort on, is the TOS and TNG stuff. A similar coffee table using the 1701D bridge? I can definitely see it. Ops from DS9? Meh. Bridges of NX-01 or Voyager? *Maaaaybe.* Kelvinverse Enterprise bridge? Unlikely. STD or SNW bridges? Literally no.

A lot of that is because the TOS and TNG designs were brilliant, while the later ones have been kinda bleh. But also, TOS and TNG are beloved. The shows themselves inspire interest in the designs. nuTrek inspire little more than dismay and fatigue.

I’d be interested to see a kickstarter for a production run of these, with the layer issues dealt with. Pretty sure it’d be far beyond my means, but I’d wish ’em well.

 Posted by at 4:33 pm
Jan 262024
 

Styropyro takes a an off the shelf 2 kilowatt fiber laser welder/rust remover and makes it a long range laser sniper weapon. There are a  number of issues… the mount is rickety and there’s no scope, primarily. But it’s remarkably capable, burning holes relatively quickly through steel plate and cinderblocks.

 

This would seem to indicate that a refined version with a better mount, better aim and a much faster reaction time/slew rate would serve as a dandy anti-drone system, easily mounted to something like a Hummer, small truck or as an add-on to armored vehicles. If one kid out in the boonies can do this on a YouTuber budget, I’m left to wonder why the Russian military *hasn’t* done it on a large scale.

 

 Posted by at 7:41 pm
Jan 222024
 

With all the little publications I’ve written and illustrated, and all the years of blogging ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT political opinions and the like, it seems that at least *one* of my efforts will go down through the ages: my design for the Orion Battleship. We know to a fair certainty that such a craft was designed in the early 1960s, and that a mockup the size of a car was built; we know some of the components and features of that design. But other than that… we don’t know much. The overall size and configuration are unknown. So, fifteen years ago when I was working on an article for Aerospace Projects Review about large Orion vehicles, I went ahead and made a speculative reconstruction design. I did my best with what was available… and in the years since, nothing seems to have come out to refute the design. I do not contend that the design is an accurate reconstruction; I was never able to get in touch with anyone who knew the Battleship design first-hand to confirm my reconstruction. I could well be *badly* wrong, especially since the descriptions of the original design tend to be second-hand. One day we might find out for sure.

But in the years since I showed my design to the world, I’ve seen it recreated here and there. It seems to be the accepted Actual Design.

Huh.

Behold:

That second video uses a model based on my design, more renders of which are HERE.

Shipbucket:

A purchasable 3D printed, lower fidelity copy of my design on Etsy:

 

My renders – unimpressive even by 2009 standards – even made it into meme format:

If you want to see the Orion Battleship as I designed it in its original format, check out Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N2.

 Posted by at 12:41 am
Dec 312023
 

Well, *some* of our jobs:

AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans

Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.

Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional.

So… do we care?

If we are an influencer, sure. But this is one of the more socially worthless “jobs” out there. They add nothing to society; they learn few skills or trades useful for other more practical forms of employment. If all “influencers” were suddenly unemployed, there’d be tens/hundreds of thousands of talentless hacks suddenly dumped into the job market, competing for burger flipper roles against millions of new migrant voters. Sucks for them, I suppose.

 

But after the “influencers” will come the TV news anchors, actors, singers. Some have argued that people will prefer actual humans to AI for such things, but evidence is mounting to the contrary. And at some point soon (if not already)  it’ll be impossible to tell the difference, and *very* difficult to confirm that an AI isn’t real, especially if those controlling it want people to think said AI is a real person.

 

 Posted by at 7:38 pm
Dec 182023
 

Movie and TV remakes are often garbage. But covers of songs? Sometimes the remake is a triumph. Some examples:

 

“My Body Is A Cage” by Arcade Fire, then covered by Peter Gabriel.

“Smooth Criminal” by Michael Jackson… then perfected by Alien Ant Farm.

 

“Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. It was good… but what Johnny Cash did with it is astonishing.

 

“Tainted Love” by Gloria Jones from 1964 was utterly eclipsed by “Soft Cell’s” 1981 cover.

 

Cylon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” is peak 60’s pretentiousness. But Disturbed’s remake kicks substantial ass.

 

David Bowie’s “Heroes” is OK. Peter Gabriels’ cover gives it emotional depth wholly lacking in the original.

 

And… what the heck. “All Along The Watchtower” by Bob Dyna was meh, the Jimi Hendrix cover was pretty good, but Bear McCreary reworked it into the best season-ending cliffhanger music ever.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 4:03 am
Dec 022023
 

On one hand, the utility of this ad for selling Chevy’s seems limited. After all, it doesn’t tell you much about how they perform or what they cost, though there is the suggestion that they can last a long time. On the other hand, the nature of the ad is such that people will be talking about it (and they are), and any publicity is good publicity. On that latter score it’s a remarkably effective ad, very effectively mastering the “holiday tearjerker” trope. If this *doesn’t* work you up a little, I can only assume that “Jurassic Bark” left you unmoved and the Iron Giant’s final “Suuupermannn” was met with a shrug.

 

 Posted by at 4:31 pm
Nov 202023
 

I recently re-watched the 1998 movie “Pleasantville.” For those unaware, this starred a pre-Spiderman Tobey McGuire as a kid who’s a fan of the fictional 1950’s black and white TV show “Pleasantville,” sort of a cliche of the bland, utopian family shows of the time. It turns into a fantasy when Don Knotts shows up as a TV repairman who gives Tobey’s character a magical remote that zaps Tobey and his sister, played by Reese Witherspoon, into an episode of “Pleasantville.” There everything is in black and white, the world is *extremely* limited, and the other people are devoid of curiosity or initiative, just fulfilling their roles. The two new people begin to add a note of chaos to things, and in the process the characters begin to have awakenings… and color seeps into the environment. A flower here, a tongue there, and soon signs, trees, cars and whole people are appearing in glorious technicolor as they realize that there’s more to life than their roles. It’s an amusing fantasy that I first saw in the late 90’s, and last saw probably more than 20 years ago.

But upon rewatching it… I’ve decided it’s not just some lighthearted fantasy. It’s a sequel to “Tron.”

The “TV show” is a simulation based on the old TV show. The characters are actual NPCs, nonsentient avatars just going through their programmed motions. The “magic remote” is a much more advanced version of the laser “scanner” from “Tron,” and it uploads the two new users into the Pleasantville grid. The simulation is capable of learning and growth, and the non-sentient NPC slowly, and sometimes quickly,  come to awareness. And when characters or objects get a resolution increase, they go from black and white to color. At the end, the simulation expands: previously, when you went to the end of Main Street, you found yourself at the beginning of Main Street: the simulated universe was at best a few miles across. but now there is a college in the town of Springfield, 12 miles away. The simulation is growing.

I assume Don Knotts is a former employee of Encom, likely a friend and co-worker of Kevin Flynn. In “Tron: Legacy” Flynn is stated to have disappeared in 1989, and we find out that he’d been stuck in a simulation of his own ever since. In 1982’s “Tron,” the laser scanner was the size of a building; by 1989 it was portable enough to be installed in a basement. I guess Knotts, who was clearly enough of a fan of the old “Pleasantville” show to have created a simulation based on it, had continued development to the point where the scanner was now hand-held. Throughout the course of the movie it’s shown that he stays in a “TV Repair” van outside the real-world house of the two experimental subjects; perhaps the scanner is connected to the actual simulation hardware contained within the van through a wifi system.

At the end of the movie, Tobey returns to the real world, while his mean-girl, vapid and slutty sister stays behind: she does so because she, too has come to an awakening, and is now going to the college that appears at the end of the movie. Since several days had passed within the simulation while less than and hour had passed in the real world, the sister should be able to get a fair education in relatively short real-world time; of course, the education will be uncredentialed. But it’s better to be educated than not, regardless of whether you can prove it with paperwork. On the other hand… at the end Knotts drives away, presumably taking the simulation with him. How will Tobey get back into it? How will his sister get out? How will they communicate? These are left unanswered

 Posted by at 1:27 pm
Nov 182023
 

A common trope in science fiction is the discovery of “an element that does not appear on the periodic table.” This is of course nonsense… if the element has three protons, it’s lithium, full stop. And we’ve discovered – or invented – every element up to Element 118, Oganesson. These higher elements are quite unstable, generally having half lives of microseconds to minutes… but there is a suspected “island of stability” with some of these heavier elements if you can nail the isotopes correctly. Which nobody has.

But even if you can reliably manufacture the stable versions of these heavy elements on an industrial scale, the likelihood of them being useful to make spaceships or battle armor is low… and they’d still appear on the periodic table. Their physical properties probably won’t be that terribly interesting. Oganesson, for example, melts at a boring 52 C/125 F, and has a density of only 7.2 gm/cubic cm.

But Amazing Materials are terribly useful in science fiction. Witness Star Trek’s “dilithium,” a crystal that somehow or other allows matter-antimatter reactions that are controllable and useful. In Babylon 5 there was Quantium 40, necessary for the construction of jumpgates.  So what the hell are these?

 

I kinda recall that “Quantium 4o” was just bog-standard potassium-40 that had been close enough to a supernova to be *somethinged,* and changed at the quantum level *somehow,* resulting in a material that does Amazing Things.  How about dilithium? Well, dilithium is a real substance…. just a molecule with two lithium atoms bonded together in the gas phase. It’s clearly not the same thing as Trek’s “dilithium crystals,” and certainly not the later “trilithium resin” which has the interesting property that a few grams of the stuff can cause all fusion to cease in a star moments after it’s dropped in.

So… what the hell are Trekkian “dilithium,” or “vibranium” or “adamantium” or “byzanium” or “naquadah?” A century or more ago, fabulous new elements like “cavorite” could be thrown in without issue, because the list of known elements was massively incomplete. We can’t do that today.

In general, unless it’s important to the story, there’s neither need nor benefit to explaining such details in a story… it just exists. But now we know that there are no slots in the periodic table for new elements, so introducing them raises questions. So how to create actual new elements?

Honestly… I don’t know. But I’ve got an ill-formed probably crappy idea.

 

Take “dilithium.” Clearly “lithium” has something to do with it. Presumably *two* lithiums, given the name. If you simply stick two lithium atoms together, you get the previously mentioned uninteresting real-world “dilithium.” If you mash the lithiums together hard enough that the nuclei bond together, you no linger have lithium, you have carbon. This is just the way it is.

 

But while we can’t really posit new elements, we *can* posit the discovery, creation, utilization of new particles. We’re not done discovering such things. So *perhaps* there is a particle that can, say, replace neutrons in a nuclei, fullfilling the same function of gluing the protons into place. But they have a different effect on the electron shells. Perhaps to the point where two lithium nuclei so modified will actually stick together, but not actually fuse into carbon. Sort of a contact binary nuclei. Or these mystery particles are simply added to the neutrons and protons; being the same mass as a proton, if you add six of these new particles to a lithium atom you double the mass… thus di-lithium. These modified atoms would undoubtedly have very different properties from the regular stuff… properties the writer can simply declare. Adamantium, for instance, is a modification of helium; this turns it into a metal that, apparently, melts at a low temperature *once*, but when it solidifies it becomes not only insanely hard and tough, its melting temperature shoots way up.

 

In recent years one of the more popular fictional elements is “unobtanium” from “Avatar,” a room temperature superconductor. This *has* to be a new pseudo-element, rather than an alloy or compound. Because if it was the latter, a technological species with the ability to create antimatter-powered relativistic starships could simply synthesize the stuff. There’d be no need to mine it light years away. But if it was a material made from exotic particles… shrug.

 Posted by at 11:50 pm
Nov 122023
 

Due to a law rushed through last year, if Illinoisans don’t register their perfectly legal and common firearm (referred to inaccurately as “assault weapons”) by January 1 2024 they could get in trouble. But there’s a little wrinkle… the “Firearm Owners Protection Act” of 1986. The FOPA has a lot of problems, but it also has a fun little provision:

No such rule or regulation prescribed after the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established. Nothing in this section expands or restricts the Secretary’s [1] authority to inquire into the disposition of any firearm in the course of a criminal investigation.

Huh. No system of registration is to be established by the US, any state or political subdivision. A gun registry is *illegal* under Federal law.

So, tell me where I’m wrong: if you know a firearm registry is illegal, you knowingly violate the law if you register your gun. So if its a choice between obeying the Illinois state law or the US Federal law… isn’t it legally safer to not violate US law? Doesn’t registering your firearm make you an accessory to breaking a Federal law?

 

A good question to ask is why would a government pass a law they know to be not only illegal under federal law but downright unConstitutional. Well, it’s always worth considering that the people who do these sort of things tend to have an amazing mix of arrogance and stupidity, leading to monumental incompetence. But it’s also worth considering that the idea may well be to set up the system of laws so that not only is virtually everyone in violation of *something,* they all know it. This will necessarily have the effect of reducing respect for rule of law. It seems counter-intuitive that the government would want to bake a lack of respect for the rule of law into the population…  but it makes sense once you realize that a lot of government types are in it for *power.* A population that no longer expects or even wants to obey the law will just naturally expect all manner of corruption from their “leaders.”

 Posted by at 2:47 pm