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“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

Let the autopsies begin

 blather, Forward!, Hmm..., politics  13 Responses »
Nov 102016
 

After Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the Republican party had an “autopsy” to try to figure out why a popular and successful candidate lost to an incompetent boob. One of the big conclusions drawn was that Republicans were the “party of white people” and that they could not win if they were perceived to support enforcing immigration laws; in the future the only way a Republican could win would be if he or she supported amnesty. Well… Tuesday kinda took a dump on that conclusion, obviously. But not as much as some might suppose… Trump got 59,937,338 votes against Hillarys 60,274,974 (these numbers are subject to modest adjustments), and only won the White House due to the magic of the Electoral College. In 2012, Obama got 65,915,795 to Romneys 60,933,504. Trump got fewer votes than Romney… and that’s not even taking into account the increase in population since then. Don’t get too puffed up, Trump fans… Trump didn’t so much *win* as Hillary *lost.* It would be a good idea for Republicans to start figuring things out.

Of course, Democrats are also trying to figure things out. A lot of them are leaping to the absolutely wrong conclusion… that Hillary lost because White Americans are racist, sexist, Islamophobic, transphobic monsters who somehow though Obama was just neato. The more thoughtful Dems are noting that Hillary got more than five and a half million fewer votes than Obama ’12… and about eight and a half million fewer than Obama ’12.

People on both sides can rightly say “How is is possible that my candidate lost to/got fewer votes than *that* candidate, who is so clearly terrible?” And the answer, of course, is that both candidates were terrible. Either candidate, put up against a generic, bland version of the sort of candidate the opposing party would normally put up, would have lost *badly.* Either candidate should have been easily defeated, because they both sucked.

As I said, some Dems are putting a bit of thought into the analysis, beyond “white people are teh eebil.” Such as here:

The Democratic Party Deserved To Die

The commenter there points out that both sides looked at places in the midwest/rust belt/flyover country that have lost industrial jobs and are cryign out for help. Both sides responded to those un/underemployed poor white folks with utter BS. But where Trumps BS at least *kinda* sounds good (we can fix the problem through sheer force of will), the Dems basically insulted those people:

Well, those jobs are actually gone for good, we knowingly told them. And we offered a fantastical non-solution. We will retrain you for good jobs! Never mind that these “good jobs” didn’t exist in East Kentucky or Cleveland. And as a final insult, we lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege.

An honest assessment of the situation is “your jobs are gone… not so much to offshoring but to robots. They are not coming back.” Neither side wants to face that. For the Republicans, answers such as a basic universal income or enforced Luddism are anathema. For the Democrats, deporting illegals so that the bottom rung of Americans can have jobs is equally unpalatable.

I think Trump is kinda up the creek here, if he actually wants to win re-election in ’20. Making better deals and setting up tariffs isn’t going to do a damn thing to restore jobs that are now technologically obsolete. The Dems are up the creek if they continue to insist on their culture of sneering at the middle of the county (i.e. “white people,” since there’s no chance they’d sneer at People Of Any Color Other Than White).

Either the whole thing is going to collapse, or someone will come up with a workable solution. As much as the ethics of the situation gives me the uncomfortables, I expect that, long term, the answer will come in the form of a welfare state that embraces slavery… a universal basic income with highly advanced humanoid robots doing many of the jobs currently being done by lower and middle income people today.

 

 Posted by at 6:36 pm
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