It’s well done, and I laughed till I scared a cat, but I’m not sure how it’s supposed to make me want ice cream.
Sep 122017
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Sep 112017
Take a read:
Memorials of Grief
The World Trade Center memorial is a freakin’ hole in the ground. It is used as a place to grieve, of course, just as the Vietnam War Memorial is. But when the people who were directly affected by those events are no longer there to grieve, they won’t be places of grief anymore. They’ll simply be holes in the ground.
Feh.
There is greatness in our history. There is darkness in our history. But it seems like in the last forty or fifty years we’ve stopped celebrating the greatness and have learned to wallow in the darkness.
These old trailers seem relevant somehow…
Sep 112017
Another example of technology apparently proving itself and promptly becoming a political football.
Row over AI that ‘identifies gay faces’
A program looks at a photo of a human face and can tell you with 70% to 80% accuracy whether that person is gay or straight. And interesting trick, I suppose, but at this point in society I’ m unclear what actual purpose such a thing would serve. But unsurprisingly, people are annoyed that the capability seems to exist.
The algorithm was built using 14,000 photos culled from dating sites. On one hand, this is a useful strategy… the site members would presumably accurately self-report their sexuality. On the other hand, it is necessarily somewhat limited… people post what they think are their best photos, and ugly folks of any sexuality would *presumably* be less likely to post their photos.
Additionally, all the photos were of white folks. This is again a useful strategy for early development; keeping the group of limited visual diversity would presumably help the computer from getting too confused. But to be *truly* functional, it would need to be able to tell a gay white guy from a straight black woman from a straight Thai man to a gay Eskimo woman.
But even then… “functional” it may be, but “useful?” I suppose it could be handy for forensics… find a dead body somewhere, if you can reconstruct the face, knowing if the corpse was gay or straight might be useful in a police investigation.
Of course, it being early in the process the whole thing could easily fall apart. It may prove to be an unrepeatable system, as reliable as phrenology.
Sep 102017
In retrospect, I think that the negative reviews a few days ago worked for the best here. Up until I read the reviews, I assumed that “Orville” would be a parody, not and actual Trek-like show with added humor. Had I gone into the show cold with that misunderstanding, I’m sure that I would also have been annoyed. But since that incorrect illusion no longer held I was able to appreciate the show for what it was. And what it was was… pretty good, actually.
Orville is clearly not meant to be hard-hitting sci-fi… and that’s a bit of a refreshing change. It’s not gritty or grimdark; the world of the Orville is, at least so far, a pretty upbeat place. The production design clearly hearkens back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, but as far as the tone of the show I got a lot more of Star Trek: The Original Series. The characters are occasionally interesting and actually seem *happy* to be doing what they’re doing. Compare that to TNG, Voyager and Enterprise, where the characters were either crashingly dull or jerks, there out of a sense of duty or some goofball socialistic ideology that means that they are merely cogs in the machine (DS9 actually had interesting characters, but it was a show loaded with grim and gritty). While Seth MacFarlane is no Bill Shatner, I see a lot more of Kirk in his Captain Mercer that, say, Picard or Sisko.
Of course, all this could change in future episodes.
I was impressed with the visual effects, especially the spacecraft scenes. If the show makes it, I can see a whole lot of people making models of the ships from the show.
So, based on a grand total of one episode, I liked it. Clearly, though, the professional critics didn’t… it’s sitting at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps the next two episodes – the critics saw the first three – stink. or perhaps my tastes don’t closely align with professional critics. Hmmm.
UPDATE: Hmmmm….
Sep 102017
An item currently on eBay:
Guided Missile Cut Away Model Prototype General Dynamics ISAS Diehl Airplane 158
A display model of…something. A seeker head for some sort of missile, seemingly. Missile defense, perhaps? Or perhaps it’s part of a payload to be fixed to an aircraft, some sort of sensor?
Sep 102017
Recently on ebay were a set of 8X10 glossies, vintage Convair artwork depicting early spacecraft and launch vehicle concepts. I had my bid in… and was sniped in the last few seconds. Oh well. Anyway, one of the more interesting images was this one of the Convair “Helios” developed by or for Krafft Ehricke… a chemical rocket first stage equipped with wings for glide recovering and a nuclear powered second stage with a “tractor” arrangement to separate the nuclear engine from the payload – essentially a small manned laboratory to land on the moon. The second stage would unreel something like half a miles worth of cabling and drag the payload along behind it, relying on distance rather than physical radiation shielding. The second stage would take the payload all the way to the lunar surface, gently lowering it down at the end of the cables, then land Way Over There Somewhere. A modern design would, I would hope, include electrical cables and would serve as a power generator.
A middling-resolution scan of the same image was posted back in January. One day I shall get a clean high-rez version. If that day is a particularly glorious day, it will come not only with the other images created for the Helios project… but they’ll also be in color.
Sep 102017
Gumball Waterson.
“The Amazing World of Gumball,” as mentioned hereabouts before, is a stealthily smart show. It has touched on subjects such as the safety-fascists and cosmic horror, even did a parody of “The Omen,” which is generally not fodder for kids cartoons. *Most* of the jokes that approach political subjects are usually fairly subtle. However, the most recent episode, “The Best,” rather suddenly came out with straight-up parodying of Social Justice Warriors, calling them out by name. A brilliant takedown of the Tumblr culture of tolerance via personal destruction.
A copy of the full episode:
In the end, the SJW smackdown was really pretty tame… but pretty predictably a bunch of SJWs were less than thrilled to be mocked even for a second.
There was a time when the Simpsons could be relied upon for some handy smacks against political correctness:
Sep 082017
Ah, hell.
Science Fiction author Jerry Pournelle has died
No details as yet. He posted on his blog yesterday that he had the flu, so, chances are it was related to that.
The ratio of “good science fiction authors” to “social justice science fiction authors” just tipped a little bit in the direction of badness.
Sep 082017
Photo taken in Houston on August 30 showing a less-than-thrilled cat:
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Hurricane Harvey cat is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore
As we all know, cats are generally unhappy about getting wet. But most cats tend to be pretty fair swimmers, so here’s hoping this little feller got where he wanted to get to.
Sep 082017
Everything about Star Trek: Discovery has screamed “trainwreck.” But this latest nugget tells me that the people behind the show are actively trying to sabotage it. Is it possible that at some point the producers of the show realized they had a disaster and rather than going to the considerable expense of scrapping and retooling, or just plain scrapping, they decided to make it an unwinnable suckfest? Is there some Hollywood-advantage in making it so bad that the studio pulls the plug with extreme prejudice?
New Star Trek show has modeled its Klingons on TRUMP supporters and ‘racial purity is a big theme’
Who actually thinks that insulting approximately half your potential audience is a good idea… especially when you have to convince that audience to *pay* to see your show?