Not quite at the “help me, Obi Wan Kenobi” stage, but we’re getting there…
UPDATE: Well, maybe not so much. See comments…
Aug 082017
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Aug 082017
A prototype animatronic Lincoln head being put through its paces. While still not what you’d call entirely convincing, it displays a remarkable range of expressions. Most of which make you think ol’ Honest Abe is being forced to sit through an SJW’s presentation on the cisnormative heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy.
Aug 082017
If you’re a history completist, or some sort of weirdo, eBay has just the thing for ya:
Genuine APOLLO ERA NASA ANAL PROBE CHAIR
Aw, hamburgers…
Aug 072017
Eaglemoss sells a line of Star Trek ship display models; their list is now over 100, including not only the expected ships but also some pretty obscure ones. They cover all the series, including NuTrek… and soon, Discovery. Eaglemoss recently displayed 3D printed prototypes of the USS Discovery and USS Shenzhou, providing decent views of the new ships:
Comments:
- The Discovery looks pretty spiffy… except for those ridiculous cutouts in the primary hull.
- The Shenzhou looks just fine… for a post-Voyager ship. A pre-TOS design? Just no.
Aug 072017
I believe “well that’s just stupid” will be the defining phrase of the next generation, perhaps of the entire century. Consider:
Prof lets students choose own grades for ‘stress reduction’
If you feel unduly stressed by a grade for any assessable material or the overall course, you can email the instructor indicating what grade you think is appropriate, and it will be so changed. No explanation is required, but it is requested that you consider waiting 24 hours before emailing the instructor.
If in a group meeting, you feel stressed by your group’s dynamics, you should leave the meeting immediately and need offer no explanation to the group members. Furthermore, you can request to discontinue all further group work and your grade will be based totally on non-group work.
Only positive comments about presentations will be given in class. Comments designed to improve future presentations will be communicated by email.
Fortunately, this if for a course on “business data management” rather than something important like medicine or engineering. (Note: how to tell if a course of study is important? If the graduate gets out into the world and gets a job in that field and manages to screw up and people *die* as a result… the course was important.)
Honestly, I can’t tell if this is a dumbass prof who has decided to coddle his students, or if he’s a worn-down prof who has decided to throw in the towel…and let reality come down like a hammer on the lazy slobs who decide to take advantage of the option to arbitrarily bump up their own grades and to avid negative comments.
Aug 072017
Here’s an interesting article:
Why Are There No New Major Religions?
I think there’s a bit of pint-missing in the article. Yes, there hasn’t been a new religion on the scale of Islam or Christianity since the rise of Islam… but major world-girdling religions have always been *relatively* few, and most of them are *really* old. Setting aside the notion that “maybe religion X is the One True Religion,” the worlds major religions have gotten *really* good at providing what people seem to want from a religion. Thus there’s just not that much room in the market for new suppliers.
Still, the article has some interesting stuff in it, including descriptions of what happened to a recently invented new religion in Indonesia that has drawn thousands of adherents, mostly from former Muslims. You’ll be shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that Indonesia has laws that make it effectively illegal for Muslims to eave their faith.
Aug 072017
BWXT Awarded $18.8 Million Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Reactor Design Contract by NASA
NASA has apparently given reactor manufacturer a contract to design a next general nuclear thermal rocket engine, a modernized NERVA. This is in support of a manned mission to Mars.
While this is of course great news, it’s not exactly world-shattering in scope. A total of 15 employees are slated to work on the project. And given politics, the chances of a nuclear thermal rocket getting to the test stand are minimal, to say nothing of getting on a launch vehicle. It would be interesting if SpaceX got on board with the project, put its money where Musks mouth is. I’m sure SpaceX wants to design their own NTR, but they don’t have the decades of experience at actually designing reactors that BWXT has.
I will also point out, just before I go off into a corner and cry, that I interviewed at BWX for a job back in 1999.
Aug 062017
During the development of the Avro Arrow supersonic interceptor in the 1950’s, 3-meter-long scale models were lobbed to high speed atop solid rockets. The models were shot into Lake Ontario, where they sank and were lost to history. However, it looks like someone is goign to make an effort to find and recover them:
New Search For Avro Arrow Flight Models Lost 60 Years Ago in Lake Ontario Has Begun
I suspect if the models are found, they’ll be found in itty bitty bits. Smacking into water at Mach 1 is rarely good.
Aug 062017
Right up front: on ideological grounds, the Universal Basic Income annoys me. But on a practical level… it’s probably coming. The combination of the re-rise of socialism, despite it’s utter failure in the Soviet Union and China and Venezuela and Cuba and every damn where, with the likelihood of automation rendering most people simply obsolete, makes something like the UBI probably inevitable. So, if it’s inevitable, the best thing to do is to try to make it make sense.
First, some numbers.
The population of adults in the United States: 125.9 million women, 119.4 million men = 245.3 million. About 93% of the population are citizens,so handwave that to 228 million adult citizens.
The 2017 budget:
From this, the “welfare” expenditures include:
Medicare & health:$1.17 trillion
Social Security, Unemployment & labor: $1.139 Trillion
Housing & Community: $0.09 Trillion
Total: $2.399 Trillion
So if we simply divide up what we’re ALREADY SPENDING by the number of American adults, you get $10,521 per person, per year. Simply cutting everyone an annual or even monthly check would be *far* simpler than the current mess of government offices and bureaucrats and armies of accountants and all the rest.
There would be ways to increase the payments per person without increasing the actual cost. Criminal status would of course be an obvious one… commit a violent felony and you’re off the Freebies List for *life.* You could make receiving the UBI optional… if you get it, you don’t get to vote in Federal elections, perhaps. Or perhaps if you turn down the UBI payment, you get *two* votes in Federal elections.
Ten grand is a good chunk of cash, but its still well below the current poverty rate. A way to help people cope, now that food stamps and the like are gone, is to make food free. As previously proposed, every place that sells food or booze could have a stand carrying free bundles of food loaf. It’s not tasty, but it’s nutritious and it would be free. And being free and of limited interest to those who don’t actually need it, there would be little to no opportunity for a black market in the stuff, eliminating the likes of food stamp fraud.
By getting rid of Medicare and the like, medical care and its costs would be returned to the responsibility of the people. Getting government out of the business would restore a measure of free market economics to the medical business; this would lower costs, potentially by a *lot.*
Aug 062017
Because I’m sure that’s an endless source of obsession for many.
On July 20, I made a post asking for a trio of reviewers for a little story I wrote. The reviews were positive and I dare say enthusiastic; a story I’d scribbled down just for giggles turned out to be something that at least three people on the planet declared was worth fleshing out. And so… I’ve been doing that.
As mentioned repeatedly before that, a little while ago I finished writing a novel. That was a sci-fi yarn that took something like a year and a half to write, and is based on characters and a future world I’ve been tinkering with for a quarter century. I think it’s pretty good, though I also bet it could use a good editor. Still… I wrote a novel. Woo. With luck it will be read Any Day Now by a recognized science fiction author who will then give it a thumbs up or down.
Having finished the novel, I had a few other ideas rattling around, one of which came upon me fairly suddenly and which I wrote down in a matter of just a few days. This was what was positively reviewed, and which I’ve been somewhat feverishly working on expanding. It is… “The War With The Deep Ones.”
Anyone who reads my first novel but who hasn’t read any of the bits I’ve published on my blog will be introduced to an entirely original (as in, I dreamed it up) setting. But “The War With The Deep Ones” is an unabashed sequel to H. P. Lovecrafts “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” from 1931. There, Lovecraft introduced a species known as the “Deep Ones,” an amphibious race of ocean-dwelling humanoid critters. Unlike a lot of the entities Lovecraft wrote about, the Deep Ones are straight-up biological entities, largely conventional in biochemistry. You can kill them if you put a little effort into it. They are also Not At All Nice, they worship Cthulhu and look forward to the day when Mankind is wiped out. Like a lot of Lovecrafts tales, it ends with the looming threat of something big and horrible happening at some undefined time in the future, but doesn’t actually show that.
Because why not, “The War With The Deep Ones” shows what happens when that day in the future comes. Sequelizing another authors work is typically not something I’d do, but in this case I think it’s fine… Lovecraft was *very* open to the concept of shared universes, and welcomed other authors of his day to use his creations and add to the “mythos” he invented. So I’ve carried his story forward a century and expanded upon what he described. I’ve tried to not change the things he invented, but I have added to it where he left blanks. Lovecraft was a fan of science, so the advances in science and technology that he simply could not have foreseen change the ways in which mankind would react to something like a planetwide invasion of “fishmen” and just how vulnerable we’d be to them, their allies and their servitors.
“War” will not be a standard novel, but is instead a collection of short stories. I have already completed a further three stories, with two more in progress; since late July I’ve already written about *100* novel-length pages. My plan is to polish a few of the stories and post them here; depending on how the prior novel goes and how the “Deep One” stories are received I’ll give further thought on what to do with the complete collection. It would of course be great to get that published, but self-publishing is becoming a more interesting way to go.
As an aside: for those of you who are fans of Lovecraft, are there any artists impressions of the Deep Ones you find to be particularly accurate to the description, “realistic” looking *and* downright scary? The sort of creatures you’d lose bladder control is you saw them coming up out of the waves?