South Korea has their very own bipedal robot you can get in and pilot, complete with proper arms and five-digited hands. Some rumbling about putting these on the border with North Korea…. but honestly, cool as they may be, one decently placed rifle-launched grenade should topple it. They’re big, slow, cumbersome, clumsy. As military systems…. meh. As industrial systems? Hmmm. Possibilities.
Long ago, what is now the Great Salt Lake in Utah was much, much greater, stretching north of the Idaho border. But about 14,500 years ago, a natural dam broke loose at the north end and the lake spilled out, and through drainage and drought over 500 years it receded to more or less what we see today.
The former extent of Lake Bonneville can still be easily seen around here in the form of the level “benches” several hundred feet up on the sides of hills and mountains. The uppermost bench is about a thousand feet high.
Yesterday morning weather conditions were such that from certain vantage points the lake almost seemed to return. The temperature was around 15 degrees, and a vast fog formed in the region; down in the valley it was just an obscuring mist, but if you went up a few hundred feet on the local hills you could see the fog from above. Not a perfect match for what the lake must have looked like, of course, but still, quite a thing to see.
This is looking east towards Tremonton, Brigham City and the Wasatch Mountains from just west of Thatcher.
Recently sold on EBay was a sizable (something like 4′ long) wind tunnel model of the Curtiss Wright Model 90 AAFSS submission. This was a derivative of their X-19… more or less a quad-tilt-rotor. The Model 90 would have been fairly highly armed, designed to fulfill the same role that the winning AAFSS design – the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne – was designed for: transporting troops and tearing up ground targets. The US has not had an operational vehicle like this; the Soviet “Hind” helicopter is the closest, though substantially slower, analog. EDIT: Senior moment. Not a troop transport, just a blowin’-up-stuff-on-the-ground-real-good vehicle.
The Model 90 wind tunnel model was formerly on display at an aviation museum in Teterboro, New Jersey. No idea where it ended up, but hopefully it found a good home. I made a half-assed effort to crowdfund this one, but I think the lack of a good way to split the spoils among the funders doomed the concept. How *do* you reward funders for a purchase like this? Best idea was to have the thing 3D scanned, and distribute the scan among the funders, but unlike a scan of a drawing or a document, that’s not going to be readily useful for most people.
What I’d hoped to do was to disassemble the model, male fiberglass molds of the components, reassemble and restore it to like-new-ish condition then send it on to an appropriate and willing museum, possibly Ft. Rucker (since they’re all about Army aviation and have themselves an AH-56). Then make a few fiberglass copies from the molds, converting the “wind tunnel models” into detailed display models. Alas.
Mentioned yesterday was one of the Left’s newest darlings, George Ciccariello-Maher, a guy who thinks that “white genocide” is just a peachy-keen idea. As a phrase, “white genocide” is something I’ve not thought about too much or too often, but apparently it is popular with both the far left and the far “white nationalists.”
The far left thinks of “white genocide” as a mythological concept, something that isn’t happening. The white nationalists think “white genocide” is happening, but rather than whites being rounded up and executed, it’s white people being bred out of existence by brown people.
Both groups are in error.
More blather after the break.
Well, that blows. 2016 has been killing off celebrities for just about a year, and finally got to one that I am actually annoyed to lose. She had a rough life after Star Wars, but ended up being pretty damn entertaining as a writer.
Having a fatal heart attack at 60 is not something most rich folk do… unless their systems have been screwed up with chemical abuse of some kind. And as Carrie showed us, drugs is a hell of a drug.
Fark has a surprisingly respectful and wholly appropriate headline:
Carrie Fisher has become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
With some appropriate images…
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She’s snorting cocaine with Jesus now.
Live long and prosper, brave hobbit. |
If you somehow have failed to catch the 1998 movie “Deep Rising,” go do so now.
It is one of those rare unabashedly goofy horror movies that is just plain entertaining. And it’s really entertaining for one reason… the banter from Finnegan (Treat Williams) and Joey (Kevin O’Connor) is at times “Firefly” level.
The short form: Finnegan is the captain/pilot of a privately owned PT-boat (or something like one), hired to transport a team of mercenaries out into the middle of nowhere in the South China Sea. The destination is a giant cruise liner, with the plan being to raid and loot the joint. But when they get there, they find that the ship has already been attacked… by initially unidentified sea monsters. Essentially the entire load of passengers and crew are most distinctly dead. Eminently quotable hijinks ensue.
The critters are CGI, and the passage of nearly 20 years does show some weaknesses. But on the whole they are servicable, and there is one especially ick-tacular scene with a not-quite-dead victim that is entirely effective and presages Two-Face from “The Dark Knight.”
I’ve been a fan of this flick since I first saw it nearly 20 years ago. It is one of the inspirations for at least some of the tone I shoot for in my Zaneverse tales.
Ah, universities. Where young adults can go to get wholly screwed up by people who are already wholly screwed up. Witness assistant professor of history at Drexel university George Ciccariello-Maher, a self-described Communist, who recently tweeted:
“All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”
Now, it turns out that this was a bit much even for a modern American university, so Drexel just came down with a horrifyingly harsh response: a strongly worded letter. As a result, George Ciccariello-Maher has claimed that his tweet was “satire,” that “white genocide” is not a real thing and that only white supremacists talk about it. The Snopes page on this issue covers his response to the Drexel rebuke in some depth, leaving one with the impression that, just perhaps, George Ciccariello-Maher really is just bad at satire.
However, the Internet has a memory:
We can read some of George Ciccariello-Maher’s previous statements, such as:
“To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” Note: some 4,000 white folks in Haiti were ethnically cleansed/genocided in Haiti in the 1804 revolution.
“Yacub made a lot of white folks.” Note: Yacub is the fictional evil scientist who created white people in the back story of the Nation of Islam’s fictional theology.
And of course, “Abolish the White Race,” backed up with his more recent statement of “White isn’t a race.”
Obviously there are some odd contradictions here. A guy who claims that “white genocide” is a myth, yet praises an actual historical incident of it. He wants to abolish a race he then claims doesn’t exist. On one level, you might think we’re dealing with cognitive dissonance. But there is another explanation, one that answers the issue more accurately, I believe. From his recent response to Drexel’s reprimand, he says:
“White supremacy is on the rise, and we must fight it by any means.”
Whether “white supremacy” is on the rise can be debated. But once you say that you “must fight it by any means,” you open the door to, of course, any means. Including lying. So, sometime in the past he told what he saw as the truth: that white people (of which he is one) should be exterminated. Now that he has been called out on it, and his career *perhaps* put in some jeopardy (most universities supposedly officially take a dim view of calling for genocide and such), he’s saying “just kidding.”
So is “white supremacy” on the rise? I dunno. But I can be fairly certain of this: people like George Ciccariello-Maher saying that whites should be exterminated… well, that’s not exactly going to drive people away from white nationalism. One wonders if perhaps, just barely perhaps, George Ciccariello-Maher and his ilk are agents of the American Nazi party or some such.
Normally “How do we get more boys to take ballet dancing classes” is exactly the sort of NPR radio topic that would have me complaining “I can’t change the channel fast enough,” but today it was different. Today it was belly-laugh inspiring.
Driving down the road, this came on the radio:
The short form is: boys aren’t signing up for ballet dancing as much as people who care about ballet dancing would like. This, to me, sounds like the absolute embodiment of “first world problems,” but I suppose if ballet is your thing, it might be an issue. They described the incredible cost of ballet classes, pointing out that a girl taking such classes from an early age with the aim of going pro might have $100,000 worth of tuition and fees and such by the time she finishes high school. That… seems like a lot.
Given the social stigma of boys ballet dancing, it should hardly be surprising that the idea of spending $100K *before* high school graduation seems like an unlikely way for a family to spend money on their son, especially when that $100K could be used to put Junior through some sort of trade school to learn a skill that’s actually useful to society, like plumbing or contract assassination or computer repair. So, how do ballet schools entice boys into signing up? One approach: make the classes free for boys.
This approach should sound familiar. “We have an unwelcome imbalance between the sexes in this class. So we’ll adjust tuition (and, presumably entrance requirements) in order to build up the population of the Chosen Identity Group.” But lo and behold, some people who seem like they’d be just fine with this in other contexts somehow have a problem with it here. Interviewed for the piece was Gwen Young, director of the Global Womens Leadership Initiative (“and an expert on gender issues”): “I don’t think it’s fair. It distorts the incentives and it’s not based on skill, it’s not based on qualities and interest. I do not think it’s just and I don’t think it’s the right way to get at the gender balance that these schools are desiring.”
Huh. How about that. Using ballet to make the case *against* affirmative action or gender (and by extension, racial) set-asides, quotas and the like.
And a following piece was on people fighting against meme images. I guess these folks haven’t heard of the Streisand Effect.
With any luck, Carrie Fisher dodged the curse. But that means two more are on the hook…
“Unexplained but not suspicious.”
The first trailer appeared today. Looks kinda “meh” to me. Which might be a good thing: I thought the first trailer for “Prometheus” was fan-bloody-fargin-tastic, and made it look like the bestest thing ever. And we all know how *that* turned out.