Now that some fair imagery of the actual aircraft has been made public, it may be time to revisit the diagram I made for US Launcher Projects #2…
I think I got pretty close based on limited references, but things can always be improved.
Jun 152017
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Jun 152017
Ummmm…
Fashion label’s new crotchless jeans now selling for $570
Errrr….
I have two immediate questions:
1: Who the hell would spend $570 on those?
2: Who would wear those *at* *all?*
And a followup:
3: What the what?
Is… is this some sorta fetish thing? Is it for womenfolk with bladder control issues who need to dash off to piddle a lot?
Jun 142017
Cultural appropriation: Make it illegal worldwide, Indigenous advocates say
What they are proposing is making it illegal for anyone who isn’t a member of Tribe XYZ to sell *anything* associated with Tribe XYZ. That includes:
international law that would expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines
How the hell they’re going to protect *words* is anyones guess, especially given that states like Utah and Illinois are named after Indigenous Injuns. Are we going to have to change the names of states?
One of the advocates for this new governmental over-reach sez the law should:
“obligate states to create effective criminal and civil enforcement procedures to recognize and prevent the non-consensual taking and illegitimate possession, sale and export of traditional cultural expressions.”
“Illegitimate possession” of “cultural expressions.” Yeah. Good luck with *that.*
Now, some of this is actually pretty good. By keeping the dumbass white newagers from such things as “traditional medicines,” which pretty much invariably are useless or worse, people will have to fall back on western medicine… you know, the stuff that actually works. So that’s good. Additionally, by slashing the market for such things, even though the remaining market will be left solely in the hands of people of chosen ethnicities, the overall market will be so reduced that it may just kill the whole thing. “Traditional” medicine *might* get regulated right out of existence.
Additionally: if history has taught us anything about new laws, it is the near-universal appearance of “unintended consequences.” OK, so only a Navajo may sell something called “Navajo,” or that incorporates Navajo symbols or artistic styes. Great. So that means not only will most people simply to have no access to it, making the market for it dry up, government regulators will have a field day determining just who is Navajo enough to sell, say, a Navajo blanket. Imagine roaming government inspectors, traveling the byways of the South West, stopping at random roadside kiosks selling blankets and turquoise jewelry and other “native American” knickknacks, checking to see if the sellers papers are in order. They will doubtless have with them portable DNA testing equipment to see just how Navajo the seller is. “Sorry, but according to this it looks like one of your grandparents was Irish. You are not Navajo enough.” The process by which someone gets licensed to sell their own art will be made monumentally complex, filled with many pages of forms, innumerable lines one must stand in in government offices, wait times and registration fees powerful enough to crush dreams.
The result of this sort of thing will be that the “indigenous” people may have control over “their” culture, but it will be so much bother for everyone else that everyone else will simply put the indigenous cultures out of their minds. The same SJWs pushing this sort of law will be the ones complaining loudest – and listened to least – about “native peoples” being erased and forgotten. Because if I have to pay to remember them… guess what. Memory hole.
One has to wonder just how far they’ll try to go with this. If it’s worded broadly enough, then you’re going to have problems with only Italian people being allowed to sell Italian food. Only Scottish people will be able to make haggis (well, that one might not be much of a concern). Only people of western European descent will be able to engage in science or engineering. No more white Catholic priests… they’ll all have to be “Palestinian.” No more black Communists, only Germans. Even the Russians will have to give that up and go back to being serfs to the Tsar. Will there be an underground railroad to provide the consumers of the world with black market Lucky Charms?
Related:
White Author Warned: Don’t Create Black Character in Your Next Book
Jun 142017
The far left went buggo under Bush, but has gone truly insane under Trump. With calls for violence against “Nazis,” and redefining “Nazi” to mean anyone not on the far Left, it was only a matter of time before people like the fascists in Antifa and similar groups decided to step it up from simply assaulting people in the street to gunning people down. Well, here we are.
Lawmaker Steve Scalise critically injured in GOP baseball shooting; gunman James T. Hodgkinson dies in custody
The shooter in this case was a dedicated Bernie Sanders supporter and vehemently anti-Trumper.
And because in this era of social media Everything Must Be About Me, I found these quotes especially interesting:
I met him on the Bernie trail in Iowa, worked with him in the Quad Cities area.”
Orear described Hodgkinson as a “quiet guy” who was “very mellow, very reserved” when they stayed overnight at a Sanders’s supporter home in Rock Island, Ill., after canvassing for the senator.
Yup. Home town area. Joy.
Remember during the 2008 campaign when Jared Joughner shot and injured a Democratic Representative (and *killed* a republican judge, but never mind him), the Dems and the media went through the roof blaming it on Sarah Palin and her supposed rhetoric? it’ll be interesting to see if they do the same here. In fact, I kinda expect they will: in 2008, they blamed Republicans for violence against a Dem. Now, I expect they’ll *still* blame Republicans (specifically Trump, I’ll bet) for this violence. But even if they don’t blame Republicans specifically, they are already trotting out the “blame the inanimate object” argument. As an example, here’s the Democrat governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, informing the public that ninety-three MILLION Americans are gunned down EVERY DAY:
An interesting note: the BernieBro opened fire with a rifle (I’ve not seen a description, but probably safe to assume it’s an AR-15) and fired *many* rounds… and yet, killed nobody. He was a *terrible* shot. These socialist whackos might think they’re going to start a new civil war but, man, I don’t think it’d turn out well for ’em.
Jun 132017
Somehow the twentieth anniversary of “The Fifth Element” skipped right on by me (I was traveling at the time, so…). It premiered May 9, 1997… and it was, and remains, awesome. It’s dumb as a post, it makes no sense, the physics and biology depicted are clearly those of a different universe with some fundamentally different laws… and it’s still awesome. From the era before everything was CGI, the visuals are truly spectacular. New York City in particular is just astounding. It’s eminently quotable. The characters are damned entertaining. It’s set in the future and everything *isn’t* a dystopian craphole, although NYC is even more crowded. And one of the neatest things about it… the Hero and the Villain not only never meet (though they get withing a few feet of each other), they don’t even know who the other is and wouldn’t recognize ’em if they saw ’em.
So… here’s some stuff.
Perhaps the most entertainingly awesome sci-fi personal weapon, the Zorg EF-1:
Jun 132017
In a whole lot of sci-fi – Star Trek, Stargate, just about everything – first contact is always pretty easy. Not only do the aliens look like otherwise normal people with ill-conceived rubber makeup appliances stuck to their foreheads, they also conveniently either speak English or some form of alienese that the Universal Translator immediately grasps a command of. Communications, in other words, is a snap. The aliens dress funny, have a few weird practices, worship some ridiculous gods, but otherwise, they are understandable.
Of course in reality if we ever come across intelligent aliens, they will almost certainly be *alien.* Billions of years of wholly unrelated and unconnected biological evolution, ethics and beliefs and customs created under wholly alien circumstance. No reason to even assume that our sense of time will even be within orders of magnitude of each other… it might take them a week to say a single word, or they might be just a blur to us.
The main thing about “alien” is that it is essentially inconceivable and un-understandable. There have been relatively few truly alien aliens in sci-fi, and for some good reasons… they’re hard to create, and harder to depict. But if you want to get just a hint of the sense of just how alien an alien culture may well be, take a look at this. This video keeps popping up as “recommended” by YouTube since I watched that Japanese “Name Seal” vid. It’s a collection of Japanese… stuff. I honestly can’t make heads or tails of most of it. It’s as if it’s from a wholly alien culture,and here we’re dealing with a civilization that has been in contact with the West for half a millennium, really close contact for 160+ years, the people are fully human with barely detectable genetic differences from western Europeans (rather than entirely different genetics based on XNA)and with a language that is separated from English by probably no more than 5,000 or so years. And yet… WTF am I looking at?
Now imagine that *this* video was the first message the aliens were to pick up from Earth. WTF would *they* make of it???
Jun 132017
From the very early 1960’s, this piece of Hughes artwork depicts a hot-cycle “Helibus.” The “hot-cycle” was a briefly studied form of helicopter that did not mechanically drive the rotor, but instead ducted hot exhaust gas from a turbojet up into the rotor hub and then down through ducts in the rotors, exhausting out nozzles near the tips of the rotors. The exhaust gas would then push the rotor blades directly. The advantage was that since there was no direct mechanical linkage between the rotors and the fuselage, the torque that a helicopter normally needs to counter with a tail rotor would be largely eliminated. Thus this “Helibus” has no tail rotor, but it would still need to have some sort of reaction control thrusters at the tail to provide directional control at low speed.
Note that every row of passenger seats has its own door. This would greatly facilitate passenger loading and unloading, at some considerable weight and cost penalty. it would also firmly lock in seat pitch… as the engines are swapped out for newer, better, lighter, more powerful and less fuel hungry versions, the airlines drive would be, as we’ve seen, to pack more and more passengers onboard. But here the doors on the side have to precisely match the seat rows.
A vehicle like this would probably be used mostly to transport office drones from rooftop heliports in urban city centers to transport hubs out in the burbs or the sticks.
Jun 122017
Probably not. But maybe…
Wrath of Khan Director Nicholas Meyer Says He’s Working On a New Star Trek Project
The headline contains just about all the actual information that’s available. Maybe it’s a series. Maybe a movie. Maybe a video game, maybe a comic book, maybe a pack of trading cards.
Still, lack of data is never a good enough reason to not speculate wildly. One possibility: Paramount has finally realized that STD is promising to be such a disaster that they’re already looking at ways of rapidly recovering by doing something that, unlike STD, won’t irritate the fans. Possibilities include the obvious such as a series set 15 years after the end of Voyager in the “prime” Star Trek universe. If it covers such stuff as the trashing of the Romulan empire and twenty years of post-Dominion War changes, it could be pretty interesting.
But for some reason, the suits think it’s a good idea to keep setting Star Trek series in the “past.” Enterprise, the NuTrek movies, Discovery. It seems they have an obsession with it. So… fine. I have an idea.
How about a series that covers *two* eras? Deep Space Nine showed Reliant-class vessels and Excelsior-class vessels all the time. These ships could well be pushing a century of service life. This it not that unlikely… the B-52 has been in service more than 60 years, for example. If things were only slightly different, Iowa-class battleships might still be in service, three quarters of a century later. So a starship a century old? Sure, I can buy that.
So here’s my notion: Star Trek: Rand, say. The adventures of the USS Ayn Rand (because why the hell not), a Reliant-class vessel that was first built around the time of “The Motion Picture” and was the pinnacle of high tech for its time. And… it’s still around a century later, with upgraded everything. No longer front line, but still doing a job. So show two entirely different crews: an early crew wearing “Wrath of Khan” era uniforms, the top of their class , in a ship that’s still new, out doing a 5-year mission. And alternate that with episodes featuring a post-Voyager crew… *not* the best of the best. You can use a lot of the same sets, and maybe even go to a lot of the same destinations, a century apart.
Have a *few* overlapping characters. Ensign Skippy is Early Rand’s enthusiastic young Vulcan science officer-in-training. Commander Skippy is Old Rand’s curmudgeonly, cranky first officer or Chief Engineer. “A century I’ve spent on this same damn ship, serving under a succession of increasingly dumbass human captains. Sigh…”
You could throw some real curveballs in there. Voyager showed a lot of new propulsion technologies, stuff pushing well past warp drive. Most of the time they didn’t work well or reliably, but they’ve had a generation to perfect what Voyager brought back.So the warp nacelles have been removed and replaced with… what? Tiny nacelles? Landing gear? Cargo pods? Empty space? Given the possibilities of the new propulsion system, then perhaps the Rand is a technology testbed, being sent to the Magellanic Clouds.
Jun 122017
Here’s an interesting thing that is, in fact, A Thing, in Japan: “Name Seals.” It seems that instead of scribbling their signatures on everything, the Japanese custom is to use a little stamp. I guess it’s half a dozen of one, six of the other… someone could copy your stamp (or steal it), but someone can forge your signature, too.
In general they are about half an inch in diameter. At one point in the video the presenter shows a display in a Japanese shop that has a whole bunch of stamps that have Western first names, transliterated into Japanese characters… not exactly precisely, given the one he looks at, but probably about as close as you’re going to get (and probably about as close as you’re going to get in writing down a Japanese name in English).
Me, I’m all in favor of “cultural appropriation.” If your people have something I think I might find useful… I’m’a gonna take it and modify it to suit my purposes. And the “Name Seal” thing is something that I think *could* potentially be interesting in the West. The problem, of course, is that in order for it to work, it would have to be pretty much universally accepted. I have no doubt that more than one Japanese businessman has come to Los Angeles for a business meeting and at the end they break out a contract and everyone gave him dead-eyed stares when, instead of signing it, he stamped it.
Still, there is a somewhat obscure precedent in Western culture: the Code Cylinder.
Now, imagine this: some years down the line, people might have their own Name Seal/Code Cylinders. The stamp would be at one end, but instead of being a simple piece of carved rubber, wood or metal, the stamp would be a moving mechanism, composed of, say, rotating or extruding bits. When not in use, the stamp does *not* form the necessary geometry. In order to get the stamp working right, the owner would need to set it. This could be done with:
1: A small metal key, in a fairly straightforward lock
2: A conventional number lock
3: Similar to the number lock, but whole sections of the cylinder twist
4: And for the high-end, a small biometric scanner like a fingerprint reader
I’d get a kick out of one of these things that was a combo of 3 & 4. You twist it to the proper orientations, apply your thumb, and *then* the stamp is mechanically produced.
To be really useful, the code cylinder would need to do more than just make a simple ink-stamp. Setting the stamp correctly also correctly sets an internal RFID chip; so when it comes time to sign that all-important contract, in full view of everyone you set your code cylinder, apply thumb, make your stamp, pass the cylinder over an RFID reader… and, because why not, you turn the cylinder around and scribble your signature because, like some of the name seals in the video, it has a pen built into the other end.
Getting such a thing into the culture at large would be a chore. But one area where I bet it might work: city, county, state government offices. The DMV. Courts. Hospitals and doctors offices, with a stamp for every prescription or referral. *That* might work.
And the beauty of it: when an SJW starts screaming at you about cultural appropriation and how you stole the name seal from the Japanese, you pummel them about the head and shoulders with your light saber and yell at them that your code cylinder was actually handed down through your family from the glory days of the old republic, before the dark times. And then you can mash some cheap gas station sushi into their hair.
Jun 112017
Interesting times on a Chinese highway when a truck shoots into oncoming traffic, leading to a series of unfortunate consequences. probably due to wet road conditions.