The LG “Wallpaper” TV is astonishingly thin… apparently 0.15 inches for a TV 57.1 inches by 32.5 inches. It’s also a little pricey, but, yikes. Look at it. The “newspads” shown in “2001” can’t be too far off.
Here’s a vid of the technology from nearly three years ago showing the screen (a smaller, lower-rez prototype) actually being rolled up:
This sort of looks like soon a 4K TV screen will be actually *printed.* Think of a TV screen that rolls up like an old movie projector screen… say, a tube six feet long containing a TV ten and a half feet wide, rolls up into a tube two or three inches in diameter, store it away when not in use, cover a whole wall when you want it. or further down the line, actually cheap enough to use it as *actual* wallpaper. Cover your ceiling with it, mount high rez cameras on your roof looking up, show the day/night sky.
I’m constantly hearing about how Americans are too freaked out about terrorism, how Europeans have a more laid back, adult and rational response to it, how they just get on with life, don’t freak out about it. And then this happens:
In short, some guy started reading aloud from the Bible on a British commuter train, so other passengers actually forced the doors open to get away from him.
So, someone opened fire on a vast music festival crowd on the Vegas Strip with a fully automatic weapon. So far, two dead, 24 wounded; the police report that the shooter is dead. The videos I’ve seen on CNN seem to indicate that the shooter fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another magazine, reloaded, emptied a third. Hard to tell how many rounds were fired, but if those were standard capacity thirty round mags, that’s 90 rounds. One quick lesson to learn here: full auto is an inefficient way to carry out a massacre… 90 rounds shot into a crowd with something like ~30 people shot.
UPDATE: the police just issued a statement… at least *20* dead, 100 injured. A good chance that a number of the dead & injured weren’t shot, but trampled. They know who the shooter was, but are so far refusing to ID him, other than he was a local. They are looking for one Marilou Danley. I’ve already seen internet sleuthery that has located the online info about one such woman and her very leftist -apparent-husband (who the net-sleuths have determined based on nothing that he is the shooter), but given the poor track record of such things (recall the Charlottesville initial reporting), it is at best unwise to start pointing at individuals based on just a name.
ANOTHER UPDATE: 50+ dead, 200+ injured. Shooter ID’ed as one Stephen C. Paddock. Looks like this is the worst mass shooting in US history.
OK, so, now comes the time for rampant unsubstantiated speculating for political purposes. The weapon was full auto, which is an unusual occurrence; was it a legal full auto weapon, shot by the owner or someone who procured a stolen one? Was it an illegally modified semi-auto? Was it a legally modified bump-fire conversion, or some sort of crank-fired gun? The gunfire *seems* to be slightly variable in rate of fire, so maybe the latter.
The shooter is reportedly dead, and reportedly alone. So was the shooter a lone whackjob? Was he a Trump supporting white supremacist… shooting into a crowd of country music loving white folks for some reason? An Antifa/BLM anti-Trumper/anti-white-folk terrorist? An ISIS supporter? This being Vegas, other options are available. Was he some guy who was perfectly fine a day or two ago, but went to Vegas for a fun weekend and wound up losing his lifes fortune playing the slots and it drove him over the edge? Some guy who’s upset about the Reptilian Conspiracy (again, this is Vegas)?
My unwarranted speculation: not a jihadi. This shooting was carried out at some considerable distance; jihadis seem to prefer to kill people up close and personal.
Right now there are a *lot* of people saying “please don’t be one of mine, please don’t be one of mine…” And when the identity of the shooter is released, there will be a lot of people going “Yay, ammunition I can use against my political opponents!” and lots of people going “Damn, I can’t use that.”
Apropos of nothing: CNN is interviewing a lot of people who were on the scene, as you’d expect. And a *lot* of them seem to be Canadians. Is Vegas particularly popular among Canucks?
A number of companies are working on technologies to extract carbon dioxide from the air, and *seem* to be making practical advances. The technologies seem to differ somewhat in the specifics, but they seem to all involve passing air over some chemical – liquid or solid – that preferentially absorbs or adsorbs carbon dioxide. The CO2 is then stored for sequestration, selling to customers such as greenhouses, or, in the future, conversion to a hydrocarbon fuel.
The machines are all necessarily big, require a lot of money and materials to manufacture, and undoubtedly require a lot of maintenance. At least some of them use an ill-defined fluid that absorbs the CO2; there would necessarily be loss of the fluid over time, along with the stuff getting gunked up with pollen and dust and everything else. To make a difference on a planetary scale to reduce the CO2 levels, a *lot* of these things would need to be produced, and they would doubtless require a whole lot of power input.
To me it seems like it would be a whole lot easier to simply crank out a few terawatts of nuclear powerplants to start replacing coal and gas plants, but, whatever. I’m in favor of people developing whatever technologies that might work and make a profit. If these systems can be made self-contained (equipped with PV arrays to power themselves, packed into shipping containers) and good and rugged… sure, why not. You could park these things pretty much anywhere, since CO2 is pretty much anywhere, but there are some places where it would obviously make more sense. Downwind of major CO2 sources – urban areas for example – and near transportation infrastructure so that the captured CO2 can be collected for transport to the processing or utilization center.
On one hand, if these things can be made into standard shipping containers, it should theoretically be possible to park these things pretty much anywhere. On top of skyscrapers might seem a good location…. they’d be out of the way and might be located somewhere with constant wind, requiring minimal power input; but the more you distribute these things, the more difficult it becomes to deal with the produced CO2. if a rooftop unit produces a ton of compressed CO2… what do you do with it? Are you going to build pipelines all over town, or will you have to airlift the containers hither and yon? On the other hand, unproductive areas could be used for large-scale CO2 capture; deserts, of course, but presumably also arctic locations (assuming cold doesn’t screw up the system). Given the current dropoff in NFL viewership due to the anti-anthem protests, perhaps those great big stadiums could be seized via eminent domain. The roofs could be covered with PV arrays, the interiors and parking lots filled with CO2 absorbers. This would turn those useless monstrosities into something that would at the very least clean up the air in the immediate vicinity; by centralizing the CO2 capture into large arrays, the CO2 storage and processing could be made pretty efficient.
There are doubtless vastly cheaper ways to procure methane fuel, but the use of systems like this could in theory make something like SpaceX’s BFR rocket system a virtually self-contained system. Locate the launch facility near the ocean or a river for ready access to large quantities of water; build a very powerful energy system (again, nukes would be preferable, but PV/wind turbines could be used if there was sufficient area); build a vast CO2 capture system and chemical reactors to convert CO2 and hydrogen from the seawater into methane fuel. Would this system make economic sense, compared to simply shipping in the methane from conventional sources? Mmmm…. very likely no. But it would be very useful on other levels. Politically and economically it would insulate the launch system from fluctuations in the market and difficulties with propellant transport logistics. And perhaps most importantly, nailing down and perfecting the system on Earth would be very useful for learning how to do it on Mars, where you *have* to make your own fuel. Twenty years ago I built a chemical reactor that converted CO2 and water into a range of propellants such as methanol and methane… the system was small enough to fit in a suitcase, though of course at that scale efficiency wasn’t so spectacular. But if a small group of knuckleheads can cobble together a system like that on a small SBIR Phase 1 contract, then it’d be readily doable on a large scale.
In the animal world, predators are almost always smarter than herbivores. This makes sense, evolutionarily… you don;t need to be all that smart to sneak up on a leaf, after all. There are of course exceptions… elephants are reasonably bright. But stacks a rabbit against a cat, or a deer against a wolf, or an Aurox against a Cro Magnon… the vegetarians is going to come out on the losing end of the who’s smarter” scale.
The same seems to apply within species as well. Take, for example, this group of vegans who decided to stop a fully loaded semi truck by jumping out in front of it while it was in motion. As any meat eating engineer will be able to tell you, even if the truck driver wanted to stop, these things don’t stop on a dime.
So the Russians have some seriously badass off-road vehicles, including some surprisingly large vehicles capable of going prit-near anywhere. They pretty much *have* to , since they have a whole lot of territory, and apparently not such a good road system.
For a really WTF example, take a look at the following video. It’s a collection of Wacky Videos From Russia, including the usual collection of stuff you might expect. Most of the clips are the sort of things you could see anywhere, but at about 1:33 there is a short clip showing a paved asphalt road that is… I don’t know what it is. It ain’t right, and I can’t explain it.
If anyone can explain that road and just what the frak happened, I’d love to hear it.
Elon Musk just gave a presentation in Australia, updating SpaceX’s plans for the interplanetary transporter. It seems they are indeed making some meaningful progress… with an aspirational goal of sending to of these rather gigantic landers to Mars in 2022 carrying cargo, and four in 2024… two of which are to be manned. Seems ambitious. But then… this is SpaceX, and they’ve accomplished some amazing things in the field of rocketry. if they’d just stop tinkering with that silly hyperloop and devote the effort and manpower to *this…*
It would be entertaining as hell of SpaceX gets the BFR up and running and shooting prototype interplanetary colonization ships to Mars before NASA even has the SLS ready to go.
Tonight was the 4th episode, “If The Stars Should Appear.” I thought it was pretty good… it would have made a perfectly cromulent TOS episode. There were a few bits that made me laugh out loud – Lt. Lamarr’s response to Commander Grayson’s enthusiasm about “Isn’t it exciting to be out here on the edge of the unknown,” for instance. The unforeseen Liam Neeson cameo. But the part I liked best was actually part of the music: early on, they discover a truly vast alien spacecraft, several hundred square miles in cross section (an odd way to answer the “how big is it” question, to be sure), and they send an away mission over to it in a shuttlecraft. The music that plays as they approach the door leading to the interior? Taken *directly* from the score for “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” specifically from either “The Cloud” or “Vejur Flyover” bits. And if you are going to steal some Star Trek music, you could hardly do better than the ST:TMP soundtrack. Which is one of the most awesome soundtracks ever put together. Jerry Goldsmith knocked that one directly out of the park.
“The Orville” is not the show we were promised, but it’s really starting to grow on me. I shall be quite annoyed when it is inevitably cancelled in a few weeks…