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.
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.
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:
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.*
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?
As an 80’s kid, I was sort of a transitional fossil between analog and electronic calculators. When I was in something like the second or third grade, the school not only shut the doors, they *locked* them (yay, violation of fire safety laws) because someone had stolen one of the teachers calculators. This was sometime in the mid 1970s, and if you don’t understand why people getting twitchy about a stolen calculator made sense at the time… SHUT UP and let the old folks babble on about “remember when calculators were new and neato?”
For a while there electronic calculators were *really* expensive, but their price soon plummeted. In the 70’s, during grade school, calculators were big clunky things that had buttons the size of your thumb and plugged into the wall and were the sort of expense that that average family just wouldn’t splurge on. By high school in the 80’s, calculators were solar powered pieces of plastic the size of credit cards and were typically sold in the checkout lines of convenience stores, next to the gum. It’s rare for a whole branch of tech to become that cheap that fast.
Here’s a 1971 commercial for the “World’s Smallest Electronic calculator,” the Sharp ELSI-8.
By “small” they mean “big enough to beat a grown man to death with;” it’s not far from the size of a brick. The price in 1971 was $345; in 2017 terms, that’s about $2,123. That’s more than 42 times the cost of the pawn shop chromebook I’m typing this on, a machine that, while kinda crummy from the standpoint of a modern laptop, would had caused computer scientists to lose they damn minds back in 1971.
If someone offered me a free ELSI-8 today, I wouldn’t take it (unless I looked on eBay and saw they were selling for good money) because it’s now a useless paperweight with neither practical value nor aesthetic appeal. But on the other hand, the type of calculator that was in use just before the ELSI-8… if someone offered me one, I’d be all over it like white on rice. Before the electronic calculator there were mechanical calculators. The highest expression of this was the Curta, built from the 40’s to the early 70’s; useless today, but *dayum* I’d like to have one. because they are spectacular pieces of mechanical engineering, like a modern Antikythera Mechanism.
Unlike electronic calculators, mechanical calculators built by conventional machine tools were *never* going to become cheap. You can only get so inexpensive with professional machine tools and machinists.
But then… what happens when you combine electronics with a Curta? Sure, there are Curta emulators online… who cares. I want one I can hold in my hands. And if I had an extra $1300 burning a hole in my pocket, could wander by ebay and buy one. And from here on, I expect that that price is probably only going to tick upwards. Maybe some day I’ll stop in a thrift store or a flea market and find someone who doesn’t know what they have, and buy their Curta from them for five bucks, and, oh yeah, throw in that ten dollar Enigma machine while you’re at it. But there is a future possibility for an affordable Curta: 3D printing. Someone has already printed a functional Curta, albeit one made of plastic and distinctly bigger than the original (3:1). But unlike a traditionally manufactured Curta, 3D printed versions will only get cheaper from here on out.
Give it a few years, and someone will 3D print a 1:1 Curta in the proper metals, that will look, feel and work like the original. It might take a few more years, but eventually such a thing will be reasonably *cheap.*
The ultimate in hipster irony: advanced technology being used to make an obsolete mechanical device to be used to do what the advanced technology would be better at anyway.
MZ-3A AIRSHIP (A-170G NON-RIGID), Serial #: 107. This is a modified American Blimp Corporation A-170 series commercial airship. Unit is disassembled/deflated as of June 2016 and stored at JB Dix/McQuire/Lakehurst Hanger. Sold-As-Is. Physical inspection is strongly recommended prior to placing a bid. Please click on link below for “additional information.” $10,000 bid deposit is required to gain access to bid, please click on link below for “Bid instructions.” N00383711716012
THE CONDITION OF THE PROPERTY IS NOT WARRANTED.
I already have the cat and the antisocial attitude.
