In short: a contact binary star system (KIC 9832227) 1800 lightyears away in Cygnus has been found to have a possible end-date. The period of the two stars in their mutual orbit has been decreasing (currently about 11 hours), meaning that the stars are spiraling in on each other. If the trend holds, in 2022 they’ll merge, and BLAMMO. This will produce a “red nova” which will be naked-eye visible, perhaps one of the brightest stars in the sky.
The Expanse will shortly be returning for Season 2. If you haven’t seen season one or you’re a little rusty since it’s been so friggen’ long, here is a handy recap video:
This OSS film from 1944 shows something pretty odd… a method of building a “runway” that is just a suspended cable. A light aircraft can hang from the cable and accelerate, detaching just before the end and flying away; it can also fly low and slow and catch the cable, slowing to a stop while hanging. The idea was that this system could be set up by a truckload of guys in a forested or jungle area without the need to clear out the trees or create even a crude runway. One imagines that someone could set one of these things up over a shallow river or across a narrow canyon; the mind boggles at the possibilities. And the mind boggles at the myriad failure modes, which may be why this system didn’t seem to amount to much. Especially since helicopters were just coming on the scene.
I suppose like most people, the vast majority of the dreams I have are utterly forgotten when I wake. A few stick around for a few seconds and quickly fade, leaving nothing but a frustrating “feeling” of memory. But about once a year I have a dream that really sticks with me through the day, with the memory of it reasonably bright and clear. A dream like this about a year ago I scribbled down in story format; it will eventually make its way into my fiction, as it fits in quite well there. But Thursday morning just as I woke up I had another one. Normally I imagine people would have little enough interest in the dreams of others, but this one might amuse readers of this blog.
So: I’m in a lab coat. It is definitely me; while I don’t see me (it’s all first person, seen through my own eyes), I know it to be me. I am in a hurry and moving quickly. Not running, just sorta speed walking. I know that I am late, though it’s not immediately clear what for.
Where I am moving quickly *through* is what’ll be interesting: a giant factory. Brightly lit, mostly painted bright epoxy white, it is a vast facility for the production of a range of rocket vehicles, everything from (seemingly) small space launch vehicles to things bigger than the Saturn V. It’s clearly a mishmash of places I’ve actually been, such as United Tech, ATK and the VAB, along with places I’ve seen in photos and concept art. But at that moment there’s nothing much going on. The lights are on, there are boosters on the assembly lines, a *few* people poking around in the distance, but it’s clearly not the busy time. I’m moving from one vast assembly area to another. I go through a door and someone yells at me that I need a hardhat, which I grab off the wall, put on and continue on my way.
I finally enter one last facility, this one largely open space. A few hundred yards away vast hangar doors are open, mountains visible in the distance. I’m moving quickly towards the open doors. Before I can get to them, someone from my past – someone I knew in my college days – comes around the side of the open door, heading my way; when we meet up she tells me I’m late and that everyone is waiting for me. When we get to the open doors I see a large audience in bleachers, and a smaller group of people dressed like me in lab coats seated in front of the larger group.
And then my cat Buttons started jumping up and down on me, ending the dream.
The dream showed me an alternate history… one where I didn’t go to university at some place off in northern Iowa where Aerospace Engineering was one small subset of a vast array of disparate fields of study, but instead I obtained my education at a giant rocket production complex, seemingly in eastern Colorado (Wyoming? Montana?). Instead of an aerospace education that was almost purely theoretical, with the hopes of maybe finding someplace to put that education to work, here was an alternate history where the work is being done and students get to be surrounded by it while being educated. A place where you graduate in a lab coat and hardhat, not a robe and mortarboard. And likely a place with a *terrible* football team, but that’s ok because who the hell wants to play sportsball when they could be working on rockets? A place where the SJW’s find no purchase, where STEM is dominant.
Sigh.
So, for most of Thursday I was torn between being slightly elated at the basic idea of Just How Awesome That Vision Was… and being horribly bummed out that that not only it didn’t happen, but it couldn’t happen and likely never will happen.
But just imagine: The Musk-Bezos-Drax Industries factory complex northeast of Denver, cranking out interplanetary colonization ships and boosters and spacecraft for the orbital and lunar tourism industries and solar power satellites and asteroid mining, a facility so large it is its own small city with its own university. Students from around the world come there to Space City to learn aerospace, mechanical, electrical, chemical and nuclear engineering, surrounded by actual ongoing work in all those fields, with daily launches and landings from the Fort Morgan launch site.
Awww. I think I just gave myself a sad.
And because why not, here’s “Damnation Alley” from 1977. That year 20th Century Fox had two sci-fi movies for release. “Damnation Alley,” a post-apocalyptic yarn about some schmoes trying to cross the continent to reach safety after a major nuclear war had somehow knocked Earth off its axis, was expected to be the big moneymaker. The other one? A little film that Fox apparently had much less faith in. Something called “Star Wars.”
While “Damnation Alley” is justly forgotten these days, the Landmaster remains one of the most entertainingly badass vehicles ever built for the screen.
When I was ten I thought this movie was awesome. Well…. kids is teh dum, I suppose. In short, a Space Shuttle launches a satellite, which promptly smacks into a flying saucer, which promptly crashes in the Arizona desert and is scooped up by the Air Force and transported to… Hangar 18. Standard government conspiracy/1970’s-style Ancient Aliens hijinks ensue. It’s… it’s just terrible. Enjoy!
Modestly amusing (especially the music at the end):
I was recently poking around in an antiques store when I came across a binder full of notes on space science. Hand written stuff, seemingly a bit above basic college level… a proposal for a communications satellite, what looks like a long essay or perhaps the beginnings of a manuscript on extraterrestrial intelligence, some math on interstellar travel. I found a *single* date on the handwritten pages, sometime in 1962. There were also a few early 1980’s issues of “the Planetary Report” stuck in the back. The store only wanted 2 bucks for it, so, what the heck. I bought t with the possibility that the writings might prove interesting even if only academically, sort of a look back to 55 years ago.
The magazines still had their original mailing labels, to a feller in Ogden, Utah. Gave first name, last name, middle initial. Obviously impossible to say if the writings from 20 years earlier belonged to the feller the magazines were mailed to, but it seemed a reasonable supposition. So, off to Google I went, looking the name up with “Ogden, Utah.” And it actually turned up a guy, born in 1925, which would have put him in his late 30’s when he (apparently) wrote the space stuff. Since the age is appropriate and the name is an exact match, chances are *real* good that I found the guy, and he’s still alive.
Small problem. I didn’t find him online as “noted space scientist X receives lifetime achievement award.” Nope. I found him on a database. Guess what kind of database. Go on, guess.
Gah.
Some people think that electronic devices that sit around just waiting for you to talk to them are a neato-keen idea. Some people think these devices are tools of Satan or the NSA or the IRS or the Illuminati or the Mickey Mouse Fan Club, listening in on you and recording everything you say, mutter or grunt. Well… whatever the full truth is, the basic fact seems to be that these things just aren’t quite ready yet. A little more tweaking would seem to be needed. Behold:
Short form: a little girl got her family’s “Alexa” device to order her a doll house, because Alexa is really good at understanding human speech but not so good at knowing who it should actually listen to. So, this made the news. And then…
… today during CW6 in the morning when Jim Patton and Lynda Martin were talking about a child who accidentally bought a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies
“I love the little girl, saying ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse,’” said Patton.
As soon as Patton said that, viewers all over San Diego started complaining their echo devices had tried to order doll houses.
Whoopsie.
Maybe having a system set up in your house that will automatically spend money based on sh*t it hears on TV is not the wisest of all possible things.
Ok, so I’m not exactly going to be breaking news to people on the story out of Chicago about the kidnapping and torture of a (presumed) Trump supporter by four anti-Trumpers. This is halfway all over the place… it’s all over the right-wing side of the media, anyway, perhaps less so on the left-wing side. The reason for that should be obvious… that a guy was kidnapped, held for 48 hours, burned, beaten, berated and cut because he was white and because the assailants were anti-white and anti-Trump just doesn’t play well into the current narrative that Trump voters are the nexus of racist evil in America today.
But even though I’m not Breaking News, I think there are aspects of this story that deserve comment. And particularly, there are three separate cultures that should be pointed out:
Former Bernie Sanders campaigner Symone Sanders opined:
“… we cannot callously go about classifying things as a hate crime.”
“If we start going around and anytime someone says or does something egregious or bad and sickening in sense in connection with the president-elect Donald Trump or even President Obama for that matter because of their political leanings, that’s slippery territory. That is not a hate crime.”
And CNN’s Don Lemon leans back on that hoary old trope, It’s Society’s Fault:
“I don’t think it’s evil. I think these are young people and I think they have bad home training. I say, who is raising these young people? I have no idea who’s raising these young people. Because no one I know on Earth who is 17 years old or 70 years old would ever think of treating another person like that. It is inhumane. And you wonder, at 18 years old, where is your parent? Where’s your guardian?”
But worst of all was the Chicago Police. Early on, after watching someone being tortured *explicitly* because of his race and perceived politics, Chicago PD Commander Kevin Duffin said:
Now, here’s the thing. I think “hate crimes” is one of the stupidest, most panderingly corrupt ideas ever to spring from the decaying minds of lawmakers in recent decades. I don’t care if Joe tortured Bob because Joe didn’t like Bobs race or religion, or if he was just after money, or he was doing it for the sick thrills. Bob was tortured the same regardless; Joe was equivalently evil regardless, and the end result in the legal system should be the same regardless. But so long as we *have* “hate crimes” laws, then they should be applied equally across the board. Fortunately, the Chicago prosecutors did eventually decide to pursue “hate crimes” charges… but why would there have been any doubt?
The “hate crimes” charges should allow the legal system to throw these scumbags away for a good long while. But you have to ask… why shouldn’t that have been the case regardless? I’m seeing estimates of thirty years in prison, which sounds like a lot… but as they are 18 years old, that means they could be out by the age of 48. They could, in principle, still reproduce at that age. They should at the very least be locked up so long that there is no possibility for their gene codes to be propagated.
And for clarity: I don’t use the word “evil” terribly lightly. I don’t believe, as many religious people do, that “evil” is an actual force afoot in the universe, some malicious intelligence out to cause a ruckus. But then, I also don’t believe that “tall” is something that can be considered a personifiable force, either. Like “tall,” “evil” is something that someone can be that someone else can recognize. And kidnapping and torturing someone? That’s evil. After a proper, fair trial and if found guilty, feeding them feet-first into a woodchipper would *not* be evil comparatively. What *might* be *argued* as evil would be to switch the chipper off and on during the process. But I’m uncertain of that. May require testing.
