Short form: there’s a supervolcano in Italy, Campi Flegrei, and it’s showing hints of life. It went off 200,000 years ago and 40,000 years ago, possibly contributing to the extinction of European Neanderthals. This is an 8-mile caldera under the bay of Naples.
So every so often I post a bit of fiction. Not too often, just now and again. Most of what I’ve posted has been set in my (for lack of a less annoying name) “Zaneverse,” a period 500 or so years down the line featuring the characters of Zane, Sarah, Loff and George as they wander the spacelanes. The most recent thing I posted was the multi-part yarn “Going to Gimli.” Well, it seems that a blog reader read this, liked it and passed it on to a Famous Science Fiction Author Y’all Know Of, who apparently also liked it enough that he communicated back to the blog reader that he thinks that it could be expanded out into a novel, and he’d be willing to write a letter of recommendation to a publisher about it. So… huh.
After Analog magazine shot down my earlier effort “Mass Disappearance” without comment, I gave up on the notion of my stuff being published, and now I just write in order to, well, write. “Gimli,” while being a stand alone story, was considered to be the first of three parts that would tell a longer, more complex story, and it is this that I think could be made into a novel. Since posting “Gimli” I wrote another complete story that takes place shortly afterwards and would, I guess, actually be Part 1.5 of the three parts. I am now banging away on Part 2.
So… who knows. Maybe I might actually publish a Zaneverse novel one of these days.
If interested, see my first story “Mass Disappearance,” followed by “Going to Gimli,” and then two story fragments, “Launch” and “A Matter of Some Gravity.”
Someone actually thinks this is a good idea…
The roadway shown looks like exactly the sort of thing I wouldn’t want to actually drive on… much less drive a snowplow over.
I remain stumped as to why these make more sense than simply putting the same solar panels, without all the “roadway modifications,” on rooftops.
There are a bunch of YouTube channels that I look at from time to time. I figured I might as well point them out… these channels will probably be of interest to a great many of the blog readers. Some are history, some aerospace, some humor, some politics.
First up: Forgotten Weapons. This channel is pretty much what it says on the box… videos are uploaded ever day or so that show some unusual and/or rare firearm. Often these videos are shot in an auction house where the firearm is soon to be sold, so, at least theoretically, if your pockets are deep enough you can end up owning them.
https://www.youtube.com/c/forgottenweapons/videos
Some recent videos include this one of the M134 minigun (which, contrary to popular opinion, you *could* legally own, you just can’t afford it… much less afford to feed the thing):
And this one of an entirely odd “chain gun” (the Guycot chain pistol) I bet you’ve never heard of… I sure hadn’t. It’s very, very clever: a double-action “semi automatic” pistol from the 1870s with a built-in 40-round capacity. The downside was that it fired a round that would have had a hard time taking down a rabbit. Sometimes cleverness isn’t enough. Sometimes you need brute force.
So the UN finally got to pass an anti-Israel resolution. This sort of thing usually doesn’t happen,because the US is usually there to veto this sort of thing… but there’s only a month left to the Obama administration, and I guess he figured he has to stick as many knives in as many backs as he can in the time he has.
The summary of the resolution is that Israel is bad and wrong for building on “occupied territory.” Where this sort of thing *really* fails is that people who want to see Israel destroyed consider Israels own capital city, Jerusalem, as “occupied territory.” The US abstained from the vote because according to the current administration Israel building on territory that is not a part of any recognized nation is against the “two state solution.”
Here’s my solution: A “three state solution.” Israel should just go ahead and build settlements. But those settlements would *not* be a part of Israel if they are built on territory that wasn’t part of Israel *after* the 1967 war (which means that Israel keeps Jerusalem, duh). They would, instead, be a *new* nation. “New Israel,” or “Israel-Two,” whatever. This would have two benefits:
One potential business opportunity for the New Israelis would be mining operations. The settlements might dig *big* moats around themselves, perhaps 20 feet deep by 20 feet wide (potentially filled with genetically engineered crocoboars or some such). The dirt and rock could then be shipped through Israel to the Mediterranean, where it would be used to help build Israel out *westwards* and increase the land area.
Looks like 2016 continues trying to kill celebrities: Carrie Fisher had a heart attack on a flight from the UK to LA. At this point there’s no word on her condition other than she’s in intensive care.
And that job is “history.” You know, to actually know what happened or, failing that, to make some minimal effort to look it up. Seems simple enough…
So there I was, minding my own business, watching the latest thrill-packed episode of “Hunting Hitler.” For those who have somehow missed out, this is the latest iteration of the “Ghost Hunter” and “Bigfoot Hunter” phenomenon… overpaid idjits use hyperbole and fairy tales to go run around in the woods and poke around in some abandoned properties looking for mythical entities. in this case, Our Heroes are stomping around Argentina attempting to prove that Hitler survived WWII and wound up there. The most recent episode was focused on the bullcrap notion that the Nazis actually got an atomic bomb up and running and set it off in Thuringia during the war, and then attempted to set up another A-bomb program post-war in Argentina to further the aims of the Fourth Reich.
Yeah, I know. “I’m not saying it’s Nazis… but it’s Nazis.”
Shows like this are really only good for two things: background noise while you’re working on something, and hate-watching. Now, I don;t know a whole lot about Argentina, so I don’t throw things at the TV when they undoubtedly make howleriffic errors about that country and it’s history. But there are a few things I *do* have some knowledge of. Some things I recognize right off the bat. And they trotted one of these things out and repeated a decades-old lie about it.
Early in the episode, someone who I guess is supposed to be one of their researchers pulls out a page from a German document, a piece of evidence meant to show that the Nazis were planning on nuking Manhattan. This page right here:
I bet there are more than a few reading along who saw that and went, “Hey, I recognize that.” And of course y’all should… I’ve brought it up before. It’s from Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report on his global-range rocket bomber. And, yes, it shows the bombardment of New York City. But *not* with atomic weapons. It’s simply a bell curve… a statistical representation of the distribution of bomb damage if a *lot* of bombs were dropped on a target and the bombs had the usual sort of circular error probability. There’s not a single damn word in Sangers report about nuking New York, very likely because Sanger probably didn’t know a single thing about atom bombs. If there was one thing the Nazi system was good at, it was compartmentalizing programs. If there was another thing the Nazis were good at, it was screwing up atomic physics, what with their hatred of Jews and their reliance upon Werner Heisenberg who either wholly misunderstood what is needed to make an A-bomb or who spent his time on the German A-bomb program busy designing faulty exhaust ports in it.
Way back in 2009 I posted about this map and how it has been misrepresented by charlatans and lazy authors for years. The abuse continues, it seems.
Now this is just plain spiffy (see what I did there? Where else can you get this quality of high-larious wit?), an electric remote control airliner meant to be flown indoors. I don;t know what the wings are made of, but they are clearly low mass… and the fuselage is inflatable, and probably filled with helium.
Related:
It’s an old, old complaint that MTV is no longer what it was. Of course, in the Old Days – you know, back when I was a kid and Things Were Awesome – MTV was all about the music videos… and in the years since it has stopped being about music videos. it became about reality shows and game shows and… well, I don;t really know, since I don’t watch MTV anymore.
Like most media outlets, MTV has blursted forth onto Teh Internets with their own little videos and such. And here is where MTV seems to have really gone off the rails. They seem to have become the “white people suck” network. I don’t know if this is because MTV’s leadership actually believes that white people need to be taken down a peg or three, or if they’ve simply made the business decision to suck up to those sweet, sweet social justice warrior dollars, but the end result is the same. They keep cranking out videos that smugly proclaim that anyone who doesn’t agree with this or that SJW position is an Evil Alt-Right White Supremacist.
They recently vomited forth one of their little efforts that was *so* insipidly racist that MTV actually yanked it off YouTube after it received virtually universal negative response. Fortunately, a number of people downloaded the video before MTV deleted it, and then they made mocking reaction videos about it. They make for decent entertainment… something that MTV seems to have forgotten how to accomplish.
Note that the full array of Anglo-Saxon colorful metaphors is on display in these videos. So, NSFW, I guess.
