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Dissolving in boiling hot acidic water is no way to go through life, son

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, news, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
Nov 172016
 

Report: Man died seeking place to soak in Yellowstone park

In short: a tourist in Yellowstone decided it would be fun to “hot pot,” or go soak in one of the many hot springs in Yellowstone. This is, of course, an illegal practice. The feller reached in to one to test the water and lost his balance and fell in. Turns out the water was juuuuuuust a little warmer than he might have liked and he boiled to death. Due to a lightning storm, park rangers couldn’t immediately retrieve his body; when they came back the next day there was nothing left, having been rendered down to broth.

Added fun points: the guy was with his sister and she apparently caught his slip’n’fall and subsequent no-doubt screaming death on cell phone video.

I’ve been to Yellowstone a few times. Not as many times as I’d like, but what’re ya gonna do. Every time I was there, the “step off the designated boardwalk and yer a’gonna DIE” signs were in clear evidence pretty much everywhere.

 Posted by at 11:16 am

Trumpsgiving looks like it’s going to be a hoot

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  8 Responses »
Nov 162016
 

Political Divide Splits Relationships — and Thanksgiving, Too

Several tales of people cancelling Thanksgiving/Christmas family get-togethers because they cannot stand to be near someone who voted differently. My favorite is the woman who moved her wedding from Chicago to Italy so that her fiance’s family cannot attend.

Yeah, that’ll help heal those familial bonds.

Similarly, here’s a surprisingly insightful piece from an avowed Leftie at Cracked:

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

This one starts out with some cultural references that help explain things:

  1. Star Wars: Farm boy fights elitists who literally live in orbital splendor
  2. Hunger Games: Rural folks rebel against evil urbanites who dress funny
  3. Braveheart; Farmer rebels against foppish castle-dweller

The point being that in our culture, it’s ingrained that not only are “urban” and “rural” people different, but the rural people are the relatable heroes. Well, one question not really answered is why that might be. We are, after all, a more urban than rural culture now. So why are the farm folks the heroes and the city folk the villain? There is one line in one movie that I think really does explain it:

4: Serenity: Rural outer worlds rebel against civilized dominant worlds. Why are the rural outer planets upset with the urban central ones?

In the world of Serenity, as in the United States, the urban areas dominate the rural. I think the US would be a happier, less fighty place if these regions were politically separate to a larger degree, but as things are, the laws that urbanites find appropriate for themselves they want to impose on *everyone.* Because high density cities cannot well tolerate firearms, farm folk shouldn’t be able to have them. Because city dwellers apparently have real short fuses, *everybody* needs to be controlled. Because you can’t really do much agriculture or have big powerplants in cities, you can’t do them outside, either, and screw you you privileged racist pig if you are upset that the only industry in your worthless little town pulled up stakes and left you with nothing but debt. Because people in cities are *forced* to be all up in everybody else’s business, anybody who wants their own piece of privacy and quiet out in the sticks is to be mistrusted and accused of all forms of cultural heresy.

It may take a few more decades, but once self-contained manufacturing systems – evolved 3D printers approaching “replicator” capabilities – become available, cities will start to have less need to be centralizing infrastructure will make a lot less sense once there’s simply no need for it.

Thank God we live in the quiet, little, redneck, podunk, white-trash, kick ass U- S- A-!

 Posted by at 7:10 pm

“Pointy Birds, O Pointy Pointy…”

 aircraft, art, Hmm..., models, projects  16 Responses »
Nov 152016
 

Boom Technology, a company working towards a supersonic passenger transport, is unveiling in Denver the mockup of their “XB-1,” a 1/3 scale technology demonstrator.

A supersonic jet faster than the Concorde will get public design debut in Centennial

See the link above for some hugenormous photos, but here’s what the thing looks like:
xb-1-b

xb-1-a

To me the XB-1 looks like the Rose Mach Buster and a T-38 got a little drunk and made the plane with two backs, then slathered the baby with Bondo and sanded real, real smooth.

Boom Technology is working towards a commercial SST with a cruise speed of Mach 2.2, 44 passengers and transAtlantic range. They are hoping to reduce sonic boom to levels low enough that the FAA will let them fly overland, but as the law is currently written I don’t think they could legally do it if their plane was utterly silent. Getting the bureaucrats and politicians to change the regulations that stifle progress is probably a much bigger chore than designing a supersonic jet that’s actually commercially viable.

 Posted by at 1:18 pm

Reichsbürgers. Mmmm, bürgers….

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, history, Hmm..., politics, ಠ_ಠ  8 Responses »
Nov 122016
 

Y’all have heard of “Sovereign Citizens,” I assume. In the US there are two basic types:

  1. Nutty white folks living out in the boonies on their farms and such, who claim that US Federal laws (such as income tax and the like) don’t apply to them.
  2. Nutty black folks living in urban areas, typically squatting in other people homes and apartments, who claim that US Federal laws don’t apply to them because they are Moors.

Both groups are nutty and tend to make a mess of the courts, tying up the system with bullcrap lawsuits and claim filing sand such. Both groups also tend to get a pretty thorough whalloping by the legal system, though it takes some time and taxpayer dollars to get it done.

Here’s the good news: it’s not a uniquely American form of nuttiness. Gentlemen, behold:

Hundreds of Germans are living as if the Reich never ended

Here we have the German equivalent, the “Imperial Citizen.”

The so-called Reichsbürger are convinced that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) does not exist. In its place the old German Empire endures, which in their telling was never properly abolished and persists in the borders of either 1871 or 1937.

There is one way in which the Imperial Citizen is even whackier than the Soviereign Citizen. In the US, the SC’s believe that they are, as one might expect, sovereign. They have no ruler (though I suspect there’s a lot of cultishness and leaders probably exist). But in Germany…

it is not clear even to the Reichsbürger who the true imperial government-in-waiting is. There are about 30 rival imperial chancellors, several princes and at least one king.

Oy.

Ya gotta wonder about the sanity of people who deny the reality of the world.

 

 Posted by at 4:25 pm

Go see “Arrival”

 art, awesomeness, blather, science fiction  15 Responses »
Nov 112016
 

It’s a really, really good movie. There are Important Plot Twists that I won’t get into, so this’ll be lean on details.

It’s a rare *smart* science fiction movie. The plot is driven by the effort to communicate with a species that communicates very, very differently from humans. There is little of the usual interpersonal drama… yes, there’s the standard “Army Guy runs the Show, with CIA Spook in the corner, in charge of Science Guys. But the Army Guy *isn’t* the angry, blow-em-up dumbass; the Spook isn’t there to screw people over, and the Science Guys aren’t flighty dimwits.

One of the problems people had with the trailer some months back was that it showed Chinese fighters on US ships. This makes sense… not that it’d make sense for that to actually happen, but the scene in the movie lasts about *one* second. The budget for the flick is less than $50 million, so doing some quick digital tinkering makes a lot more sense than building a complete navy.

The aliens are, indeed, alien. You do eventually get a reasonably good look at them, and they make sense in the context of an utterly alien evolution in a low gravity environment. They are not A Guy In A Digital Suit. While they are not explicitly Lovecraftian, I don’t think he would’ve sneered at their design.

There aren’t really any Villains here, apart from some random jackasses here and there… which you’d certainly have.

The characters on the whole don’t do stupid things to advance the plot. Interestingly, one character does something almost exactly like something that brought out howls of “that’s friggen’ stupid” when people watched “Prometheus,” but here it was done not because the character is an idiot, but because the character sees it as a necessity, and does so with full knowledge.

The aliens technology is not explored. Very little is shown… about all we find out is that they’re pretty good at manipulating gravity. They also have something one might consider a superpower, and this plays into the Big Twist. The science-guy in me grumbled a bit at that ability, but willing suspension of disbelief is juuuust possible here.

The movie is subdued. No chases, dogfights, running around with hair on fire. It is also pretty melancholic… there is a personal tragedy that runs through the movie from beginning to end.

So if you like splodey, this isn’t really your movie. If you like a good solid effort at serious sci-fi… here ya go.

 

PS: one of the characters who really helps sell the mood of the movie is the setting. Supposedly Montana, I believe this was actually somewhere in Quebec. It would surprise me not at all if this place winds up a tourist spot like the Field of Dreams in Iowa.

 Posted by at 4:29 pm
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