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Feb 112017
 

Played by Mel Gibson in “We Were Soldiers.”

Lt. Gen. Hal Moore dies at 94

I have a tenuous connection here. The movie depicts one hell of a battle between US Army forces and NVA forces in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. The NVA had been dug in to that valley for a long while, with considerable stores of supplies and troops underground in tunnels. The NVA *owned* that valley. And several days before the battle, my fathers platoon just… wandered right on through the valley. Never saw the enemy, never engaged them, never had any indication they were there. But most assuredly, the NVA was aware of the small group of American GIs. But they let them pass unmolested; presumably in order to keep their presence secret. Had a slightly different course of events happened, Mel Gibson wouldn’t have been in that movie and you wouldn’t be reading this blog.

 Posted by at 9:53 pm
Feb 112017
 

Apparently the makers of Star Trek: Discovery think that Klingons look like this:

 

Star Trek: Discovery is supposed to be set about ten years before Kirk took command of the Enterprise, in the “original” timeline. And it has been established that in that timeline, and at that point in time, due to the “Augment” virus introduced in season four of “Enterprise,” the Klingons look like the swarthy humans of the original series. So WTF is going on here? Are we going to get some explanation that these are mutant Klingons who reacted weirdly to the virus? Early experiments in fixing the virus? or is this just the usual “I know TV producers… they love to change things?”

 Posted by at 9:14 pm
Feb 102017
 

NASA has just released a report on a Europa lander mission. I haven’t read all the way through it (in fact, I’ve just glanced through it), but it seems fairly extensive. The lander design itself seems pretty preliminary. It also looks like a walking “rover,” but the legs are just long in order to allow the lander to safely come to rest on whatever terrain it happens to land on.

The lander would have instruments meant to look for the signs of life. Pretty obviously, the chances of life appearing *anywhere* near the surface of Europa are as close to zero as you can get. However, assuming that many, many kilometers below there is a liquid water ocean, and assuming that there is recognizable life swimming or floating around in the water, chances are fairly good that bits of it, everything from biochemicals on up to actual critters, would get trapped in the ice. Over extremely long periods of time the cold, icy equivalent of geological processes might drag that stuff up to the surface, where it might be detectable.

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You can download the report here:

Europa Lander Science Definition Team Report

Some of the illustrations:

Europa Lander Image1 Europa Lander Image2 Europa Lander Image3 Europa Lander Image4 Europa Lander Image5 Europa Lander Image6

 

 Posted by at 7:54 pm
Feb 102017
 

Tucked behind the Aviation Week paywall are the details on what seems to be a proposal for the next Air Force One to be a modified B-21 stealth bomber. The idea is, on one hand, terribly cool… but on the rational hand, makes approximately no sense. I would normally suggest that this is an April Fools thing, but unless I slipped into a coma for a number of weeks, we don;t seem to be anywhere near April first.

Presidential Bomber? Report Touts B-21 For Air Force One

No details – like who actually wrote the report – are available on this side of the paywall. But hey, at least there’s some Shotophopped art…

 Posted by at 7:18 pm
Feb 102017
 

Last year I made mention of two short phrases that for as long as I can remember have always stirred uncomfortableness in me… “come and see” and “come with me now.” Neither is inherently a statement that should cause unease, but they nevertheless do in me. There is another such phrase, one I’d long forgotten. In the 1935 movie “Bride of Frankenstein, the new character of Dr. Pretorious convinces Dr. Frankenstein – who had sworn off his life-creation experiments as a blasphemous and bad idea – to get back on the job. Dr. Pretorious at one point offers a toast to their project… “Here’s to a new world of gods and monsters.”

A modified version of that line, “Welcome to a new world of gods and monsters,” has been used in some of the promotional material for the forthcoming “Universal Monster Cinematic Universe,” which is to kick off with this summers “The Mummy.” (It was apparently supposed to have kicked off with “Dracula Untold” a few years ago, but since it kinda bombed…)

Anyway, “a new world of gods and monsters” is a phrase that, like “come and see,” kinda sets my teeth on edge. What’s interesting: I hadn’t thought of “a new world of gods and monsters” in *years* until I saw it revived for “The Mummy.” And yet, now that I am well into a series of interlinked stories set in the universe of “Mass Disappearance” and “Going to Gimli,” being perhaps halfway through what might be a full-up novel, “Welcome to a new world of gods and monsters” would be a fantastic tagline. And while I doubt that the makers of “Bride of Frankenstein” had H.P. Lovecraft in mind when they wrote that line, it fits well into his Cthulhu mythos as well.

My stories, without intending it, would actually almost seem to bridge the Frankenstein and Lovecraft worlds. The world is something that Lovecraft would have recognized, apart from the technology; but the gods and monsters are, unlike HPL’s incomprehensibly powerful beings from Beyond, largely the results of mankinds own efforts, intentional and otherwise.

I have no doubt that there are other such small phrases that have similar impacts upon my tiny little mind. There are some that have virtually the opposite… rather than inspiring vague nameless dread, “ashes of our fathers” inspires pride. Of course, for that to happen, one has to know the fuller context of the phrase, and even then it may well be that emotional links depend on a wide range of circumstances. Had I not seen “Bride of Frankenstein” until five years ago, or never heard of “Come and see” until it was used in season one of “Sleepy Hollow,” they might have no more impact on me than “Yes We Can” or “I Like Ike” or “Make America Great Again.”

So: what have y’all got? What little snippet of religious text, literature, lyrics, poetry, etc. can you hear and immediately feel  a sense of dread that seems excessive to the small little phrase?

 

 

There’s also always “BWOOP BWOOP Pull. Up. BWOOP BWOOP Pull. Up.” Hearing that in a movie never fails to give me the willies.

 Posted by at 3:23 am
Feb 082017
 

From the standpoint of solar irradiation, the recently announced Proxima b planet seemed to be in the “life zone.” Small problem: while the total amount of sunlight falling on the planet approximates the amount Earth gets, it also gets other stuff far more abundantly than Earth does. In particular… nasty stuff. Stuff that would trash an Earthly atmosphere in a geological blink of an eye. In short: every two hours Proxima would send a storm of X-Rays and ultraviolet from superflares blasting into the atmosphere of Proxima b, ionizing the oxygen and accelerating its escape into space. It’s estimated that the oxygen atmosphere would last about 10 million years.

NASA Redefines Life Zones for Alien Planets –“Nixes Earth-Sized Planet of Our Closest Neighbor Red Dwarf Star Proxima Centauri”

Bummer.

Seems red dwarfs, the most common stars out there, are likely not going to be terribly good places to find Earthlike worlds. It *may* be that roughly Earthlike worlds might be found further out from the stars, Of course they would be frozen iceballs… unless they were in close enough orbit to massive companions, gas giants perhaps, that tidal forcing would pump enough energy into their cores to keep them warm. This would present its own set of troubles, such as being tidally locked to the gas giant, and common and likely astonishing earthquakes.

 

 Posted by at 9:08 pm
Feb 072017
 

In December of 1948, American media outlets reported that Defense Secretary Forrestal had announced that the US wanted a space station for military purposes. The US had, in fact, been working on space for military applications since the end of World War II with both the US Navy and US Air Force studying space launch systems as early as 1944. However, the 1948 space station was most likely just a talking point, something that the Pentagon would *like* to have for any of a number of military purposes. So far as I’m aware, no actual designs produced by relevant government or corporate design bureaus have come to light. Still, the lack of anything firm to base an artists impression on didn’t slow down the media; a number of newspaper and magazine artists impressions were produced. Many of them, such as the one below (from the December 31, 1948, Washington Daily News, via an EBay auction), demonstrate a substantial lack of understanding of, well, *everything*. They tended to be a weird mishmash of Flash Gordon sci-fantasy with the V-2 and similar exotic and half-comprehended technologies.

Note that this cartoonish “space station” seems to have it all… radar, giant cannon barrels and a square mirror to reflect sunlight to set the enemy alight. This, of course, would not work.

 Posted by at 9:40 am