The current suspect in the Berlin truck-ramming terrorist attack is a Tunisian asylum seeker. He had been on the authorities anti-terrorism radar, and his request for asylum had been rejected. What kept the Germans from deporting him back to Tunisia? He didn’t have a valid Tunisian passport. Let me put it another way: he got to stay in Germany – he got to evade the legal repercussions of his actions – because he *didn’t* have his papers in order.
Huh.
Makes me wonder: if a German gets likkered up and heads out onto the Autobahn and causes a wreck that kills a bunch of people… does he get to go free if he doesn’t have a valid drivers license?
A recently sold item on EBay was this piece of artwork depicting a Boeing concept for an airliner powered by two propfans. These engines, popular items of study in the late 70s and into the 80s, were somewhere between turbofans and turboprops, with contra-rotating unducted fans using blades of complex design and contours. The advantage was, of course, fuel efficiency; the shape of the blades meant that they could spin with tip speeds closer to the speed of sound compared to turboprop blades, and could push the plane faster than normally practical for a turboprop.
Given the NASA logo on the tail, this piece of art undoubtedly depicts a proposal for an unducted fan test vehicle. The gray areas on the wing upper surfaces may indicate laminar flow control via suction, as with the Northrop X-21; this would all conspire to make this a very fuel efficient, if also very complex, jetliner.
I don’t know what the story is on the driver and passenger in this vehicle, but I can understand why they decided that backing the frak up was a good idea. This is the fireworks market in Mexico that went FOOOM yesterday, with, last I heard, more than 30 dead.
I’ve never been anywhere near an inadvertent pyrotechnic event on this scale. I’ve been not quite this close to *advertent* pyrotechnic events of greater scale than this… Shuttle boosters being tested, old propellant and explosives being burned off, that sort of thing. Close to 20 years ago when I lived near Denver I happened across a truck on fire on the road up to Boulder… a small pickup truck with a crappy fiberglass camper. Normally such things make a lot of smoke and some fair flames, but this one was a rampaging inferno. It had some sort of high energy accelerants toasting it along. I don’t know what, exactly… but there was one of those fly-by-night fireworks revival tents just a few hundred yards down the road behind the truck. And *that* fire was sufficiently energetic that it was like the laws of physics had taken physical form and set up a “do not approach” sign. Interesting, as I was inching my way past it (note: I wasn’t first on the scene, but probably half-dozenth, so it would have been counterproductive to stop), the first official “first responder” showed up: a fireman tear-assing down the road in a fire-engine-red Porsche with the fire department logo on the doors and emergency lights permanently bolted to the roof.
No great surprise I’m a fan of Star Trek. But there are some things about the world that has been built in Trek that are a bit disconcerting. This should not be a surprise given the sheer volume of Trek that has been put on screen, and how little control there has been over the “canon;” one movie or show will merrily steamroll the events or history put forward in another, so tryign to come up with a consistent narrative is pretty much impossible. Heck… watch the Original Series. What was Spock? For pretty much the first season he was a Vulcanian. Then he became a Vulcan. The ship ran on lithium crystals. Then it ran on dilithium crystals. It was an Earth vessel run by the United Earth Space Probe Agency, until suddenly it was a Federation vessel run by Starfleet.
Tack on another 50 years worth of writers cobbling together their own ideas and it’s no wonder than things don’t necessarily mesh. But one thing that has remained consistent: the only people you really get to know are Starfleet officers. So the world is seen from their perspective. This will of course color things. A long-running series based around the day to day doings at Vandenberg Air Force Base might lead people to think that the United States is all about launching satellites and missiles and little else.
Still and all, the glimpses of the world outside the various Starfleet vessels does often show a world that is a bit… disturbing. This video covers some of that. Note: the “pecan” joke right near the beginning made me laugh *far* out of proportion to jsut how funny I suppose the joke really is.
One thing the video seems to completely miss: the Maquis. Coupled with a whole lot of Deep Space Nine, the Maquis showed that a lot of humans, Starfleet and civilian, just didn’t like the Federation and wanted to be rid of it… and that the Federation didn’t want to let them go.
My own “Zaneverse” stories have a problem that “Star Trek” has: both are set in post-scarcity economies. Both feature essentially unlimited free energy, both feature machines that can replicate/fabricate anything you like from clothes to firearms to food at the press of a button. While these would be great to have, and would, at least theoretically, dispense with a lot of the motives for war and crime, they might also tend to make the world of storytelling pretty dull since they do away with many motives for conflict. Star Trek seems to deal with the problem by strictly rationing the technology. The only Federation citizens you ever see traveling are Starfleet members of Federation officials/employees; you get the impression that the rest of the Federation is populated by what are essentially serfs, but serfs believing they’re in paradise. That is one way to keep the peace, I suppose.
Where it is pointed out that the “feel good” Christmas movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” is really more of a story of a man’s fall into madness and misery, where the “happy ending” is just a prelude to an inevitable utter collapse into failure and probably jail time, where the villain of the piece ends up not defeated, but empowered. Where all the Good And Moral People are shown to be one minor twist of fate away from being moral reprobates… and given the inevitable “what happens next” after the credits roll, chances are good that’s where they end up anyway.
In a way it’s similar to the original “Wizard of Oz.” What happens at the end of that? Dorothy finally gets to go home to her family. Huzzah! Her dirt-poor family. Living in a region of Kansas that is so poor they can’t even afford *color.* Where instead she could have lived in the lap of technicolor luxury in Oz, very likely insulated from the poverty and illness and, lets face it, madness that likely will kill Dorothy Gale in relatively short order (assuming, or course, that the whole Oz sequence isn’t a delusion caused by endorphins flooding the grievously and terminally tornado-wounded brain of young Ms. Gale).
So I turn on the news channels for some breezy background noise while I work, with the faint possibility of maybe something newsworthy happening. And all they’re droning on about is Trump getting that electoral college vote landslide that the activists have been trying to prevent, an apparent terrorist attack in Germany where a large truck plowed into a crowd at a Christmas fair, and the Russian ambassador to Turkey being assassinated by a Turkish cop. So… a pretty hum-drum day, news-wise.
It tells the story of how a few people kept data that NASA planned to toss, in the form of old, unreadable videotapes with Lunar Orbiter imagery, and how those tapes were eventually re-read and re-processed to bring out much more data and vastly better imagery… images that rival the best of modern lunar photography.
