Yeah. Their precious little snowflake – in cahoots with two other people – attempted to rob a Pizza Hut and got himself shot (while he himself was brandishing a gun) in the process. OK, so Junior was a dirtbag, but I could still scrape the barrel and find *some* sympathy, right? Well, the parents make sure that that outcome is impossible:
“Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” questioned Hairston about the employee who shot her son.
Gee, lemme think, lady. Maybe because you were such a gawdawful parent that your son thought armed robbery was a good idea, and the Pizza Hut employee *correctly* surmised that there are scumbags such as your kid out there in the world?
She then demands that the employee should be in jail.
Sadly, Darwin is not fully satisfied here. Junior is dead and the world is better off… but he was 29 and had already reproduced at least once.
Something else to ponder: there were three criminals involved in the robbery. Since there was a homicide in the process, under many state laws the *other* criminals are to be charged with murder. So, perhaps some extra good will come of this and two more horrible little monsters will be removed from society for a good long while.
And the relevant Fark thread is *filled* with some awesome insights and one-liners…
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes…. in 30 minutes or less.
i expect employees getting in gun fights with robbers to be more of a little ceasars affair
If you don’t want to get Zimmermaned then don’t Trayvon.
It’s entirely up to you whether you trust your life to a felon. C’mon, take a chance.
Damn. And my sympathy machine is in the shop this week.
Apparently there’s been some forward motion on making a new “Starship Troopers” motion picture. Tentative “yay…?” on that. The 1990’s movie was ok as a stand-alone action/satire flick, so long as you separate it in your mind from the novel Heinlein wrote. So a new movie could be good, could be bad. If it’s a remake of the earlier flick, then the chances of it being good are minimal. Think about it. RoboCop. Red Dawn. Total Recall. Ghostbusters. Arthur. Poltergeist. The Omen. Carrie. Recent years are filled with remakes that run the whole spectrum, from forgettable to execrable. But if the movie makers forget the earlier movie and go right back to the book, it could be good.
The studio is not remaking the film but is said to be going back to the original Heinlein novel for an all-new take. No personnel from the 1997 film are involved.
And here’s the “Ummmm…” news:
Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, the writing duo behind the upcoming Zac Efron-Dwayne Johnson ‘Baywatch’ movie, will pen the script for the alien-bug war film.
I remain unconvinced that a remake of “Baywatch” is necessarily a good jumping off point for “Starship Troopers.” But I guess we’ll see.
A few days ago, I updated the webpages for my cyanotype blueprints and the digitally printed large format prints to indicate that they are no longer available for sale. With my magnificently effective advertising system, it’s generally months between orders, so I figured it was time to wrap ’em up. The electronic downloadable stuff all remains as available as ever, of course.
I still have some stock of the digital prints and the cyanotypes. I imagine I’ll try ebaying them individually and see how that goes.
A video apparently produced by or for the Pentagon discussing the military nightmare of the future: megacities.
Megacities are themselves necessarily threats to humanity. Breeding grounds of disease and insanity and socialism (but then repeat myself) these gigantic human-scale “Universe 25” analogues are of dubious stability. A bit of a power outage and the tens of millions of inhabitants will soon begin to not only set upon each other, but will spill out into the surroundings and will consume and destroy the natural and agricultural environments. But from the Pentagons point of view, there is the further complication of “how do you fight a war in a megacity? And the Pentagon has this problem because you have a city of tens of millions of noncombatants that you want to protect, interspersed with hundreds of thousands of enemies who blend right it.
I suspect that within a few generations the DoD might give serious consideration to abandoning the long-held American viewpoint of trying to minimize collateral damage, and take up the Russian approach: carpet bomb the whole damn thing. Surround the enemy megacity, put it under siege, and utterly destroy it. While this could be accomplished with many bombing runs of B-52s, B-1s, B-2s and C-5s all loaded with dumb bombs, it can also be accomplished by a small number of tactical nuclear weapons. And even more easily accomplished with biowarfare. Given how strained the systems are in *current* high population density megaslums, a little bit more time, population and resource strain could easily make a city of tens of millions ready to be virtually exterminated with a small outbreak of a disease that could be easily explained as entirely natural in origin. And once the outbreak becomes public knowledge, shipments of food and medicine into the megacities will slow, because who’d want to go there, and things will rapidly progress.
The recently released movie “Inferno” (a staggering bomb domestically, but doing fairly well overseas) touches on this. A James Bondian villain has spent his fortune developing a virus that will kill half the population of the planet, and Our Hero needs to find the bioweapon and prevent it from going off. The plot is entirely ridiculous, and some of the supervillains math is dubious (he assumes a planetary population of 32 billion in something like 30 or 40 years), but he does have something of a point: overpopulation is a serious problem *now* and will only get worse in the future. From the military’s perspective, fighting a war in a megacity where they’re constrained by current notions of preventing collateral damage must be an unwinnable prospect. I have my own preferred solution (get the hell *off* Earth), but in the end a good dose of Vegan choriomeningitis might be the only solution, especially in the megacities.
WestWorld continues to intrigue. While they haven’t made it obvious, they’ve made it unavoidable that the show actually takes place in at least two different eras. One era has the human “Guests” Billy and Logan going on adventures with the android Dolores; the other has Dolores being interrogated by park overlord Ford, with something going kinda funny with the robots due to the latest update and the park being stalked by the Man In Black. In the later era with Ford, a few hints as to the past have been dropped… something like 35 years earlier one of the two park founders killed himself; something like 30 years earlier something went *really* wrong at the park. In the earlier timeline with Billy, the founder has already offed himself, but there has been as yet no mention of something going really wrong at the park. So presumably the two eras are separated by between 30 and 35 or so years.
Billy is a “white hat,” thinks himself a Good Guy and tries to behave as such. Logan is a “black hat” and indulges in all forms of debauchery and robo-murder at the park. Billy likes Dolores; Logan thinks of her as a toaster. And then years later the Man In Black annually returns to the park, where he tortures and “murders” Dolores. You’d think that that wouldn’t really be the sort of thing that Billy would become. But in the most recent episode, you see the start of Billy becoming a different person. So what are we heading towards?
My speculation: sometime in the near-ish future, we’ll see that massive screwup at the park. My guess is that something happens to the robots so that they no longer are inhibited against killing the Guests. Perhaps they will become self aware and will actively try to exterminate the Guests. Billy obviously survives but is changed by it; perhaps Dolores, who we saw starting to undergo some pretty substantial personality changes, does something pretty nasty to Billy (have we seen the Man In Black without a hat? Perhaps there’s no scalp there…). Maybe she murders Logan, who is at least nominally some sort of friend of Billies.
But then… perhaps all that, but Logan actually becomes the Man In Black. It would seem a straighter course. Perhaps Dolores leads the Bot Uprising and kills Billy; that could easily set Logan on the course to becoming the Man In Black.
An episode or two back there was a brief sequence set clearly in the “past,” with a much younger Ford. This was done via computer trickery, presenting a youthenized Anthony Hopkins. So perhaps we will see more of that. And I kinda hope so: one of my favorite character actors, Michael Wincott (he played Malcolm Reynolds in “Alien: Resurrection” and Donald Trump in “The Crow”), plays an early model robot kept in storage. It’d be nice to see him out and about… and if he’s shown out and about with Billy and Logan, it’ll pretty well nail down the fact of the different eras being depicted.
Due to just how amazingly awesome aerodynamic design development, materials science and aeropropulsion systems have gotten, some airliners can stay in the air for about a day on one tank of gas and fly halfway around the world. This is both great for the passengers, because it gets them their pretty quickly (compared the travel during the other 99.9% of human history) for a reasonable fee; and it sucks, because the passengers are jammed into too-small seats for nearly a full day. But you know who else is on the plane the whole time? The crew. And unlike the passengers, they have *got* to get some sort of adequate rest during the flight.
In order to make sure that the flight crew isn’t either dead on their feet or hopped up on amphetamines during landing, the larger jetliners have sleeping areas for the crew, usually above but sometimes below the passenger cabin.
You will occasionally see click-bait headlines yammering on about the “secret rooms on jetliners you never knew about” or some such (the YouTube videos below dabble in this), even though these rooms are not secret, and a great many people know about them. Sure, the airlines don’t exactly advertise the things… but why would they? If the full load of passengers were fully and actively aware that there are actual *beds* on airplanes, you can bet that on every trans-Pacific flight there’d be at least one drunken businessman belligerently trying to storm the castle.
I’ve always liked the phasers of Star Trek more than the blasters/turbolasers of Star Wars. Ship to ship: phasers are computer controlled and seem to always hit the target (even if they don’t necessarily damage the target), while turbolasers are manually targeted and can’t seem to hit a damn thing. Same with hand-held weapons… phasers are zero time of flight weapons that non-professional soldiers can wield accurately, while blasters seem to travel slower than bullets and the biggest, most expensive and advanced military out there has troops so poorly trained that they can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn.
But there’s one area where blasters are better than phasers: total energy usage per shot. If you get shot with a blaster, it’s like getting shot with a firearm. *Perhaps* an extra powerful firearm… a 12-gauge filled with buckshot, perhaps, but still roughly equivalent to a conventional gun. But phasers have a top setting that will *vaporize* a human. That’s not just overkill, that’s an *insane* level of overkill. It’s like using a TOW anti-tank missile to target an individual.
And this is one of the things that Star Trek got wrong. Not that it’s necessarily impossible for a weapon the size of a keychain to vaporize a human, but that the process of vaporizing the human wouldn’t utterly trash the surroundings. Face it: you’re converting, oh, 180 pounds of water to steam, and converting the calcium in the bones, the metal and plastic in his clothes, tools, weapons, etc. into plasma. And if the target is also holding a phaser, you’re converting *that* into vapor, which means that its battery (or whatever the power source is) is going to explode.
Phaser-vaporizing someone on board a spaceship is going to be a disaster, because by converting 180 pounds of water into steam, you’re increasing the *volume* by a factor of around 1,000. Imagine if the room the target was in suddenly found itself loaded with 1,000 more people. The pressure will blow the hull apart. While a blaster will simply poke a hole in the target, maybe burning their clothes.
Star Trek always made the result of someone getting vaporized pretty… well, sterile. Zap, bright light, gone. But it wouldn’t be like that. If you want to know what someone getting phasered at full power would look like, YouTube provides. Behold the phenomenon of the “Arc Flash,” where enough electrical energy can be dumped into a human to convert said human into a steam explosion. Obviously, this might be considered slightly grisly, so gather the kids around (occurs at 1:14; you can adjust settings to .25 speed to watch the guy go from “normal” to “Hey, he’s a glowing blob, just like in Star Trek” to “Where’d he go?” in three frames):
It’s kinda unclear just what the hell happened here, but it sure looks like the guy was converted into mostly a cloud and a bit of a spray. In any event, there’s no missing the fact that something really quite energetic happened to the guy. The captain of the Klingon scout vessel vaporizes one of his crew on the bridge, they’re going to be scrubbing it down for *days,* assuming that the steam and overpressure doesn’t kill everyone else on the bridge.
In the later Star Trek series, the “vaporize” setting seemed to fall out of fashion. More often than not energy weapons were used as “simple blasters” of roughly firearm-power. And that’s all you need. Firearms are as powerful as they are because that’s Good Enough. You don’t *need* a weapon that essentially turns the target into a suicide bomber.
It might be interesting to actually show accurate phasering on some future Star Trek movie or episode. In one scene, out heroes board a wrecked space station. They go in a room where someone was shot with a phaser set to Blaster Mode: the doctor rushes over, applies hand to carotid artery, looks up sadly and says “He’s dead.” Then they go to the next room, where someone was vaporized. All the furniture is smashed up against the walls; the floor, ceiling, walls, furniture are all covered in gore. Blood sprayed everywhere, teeth embedded in the ceiling, small bits of burnt, semi-burnt and unburnt eviscera scattered about, bits dripping from the ceiling. Doc stands there in the door, slack jawed; Ensign Redshirt looks in and promptly doubles over and upchucks the Tribble Surprise he had for lunch. Captain Hero looks looks in, turns a shade of green and asks “So, Doc, who was it?”
Doc looks at Captain Hero like he’s a freakin’ mo-ron and replies with something like “How the hell would I know?”
I’ve been running the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon project for a bit over two years now. Every month, Patrons get rewarded with sets of aerospace history stuff… currently, one large-format diagram or piece of artwork, three documents and, depending on level of patronage, an all-new CAD diagram of an aerospace subject of interest. More than two dozen such packages have been put together so far and distributed. Given that you can get in on this for as little as $1.50 a month (for 125-dpi scans… $4/month for full-rez 300 dpi scans) and you get at least four items, that’s a pretty good bargain compared to the individual aerospace drawings and documents.
Patrons who signed up after the process got underway can now get “back issues” of the previously released rewards packages. A catalog of more than the first years worth has just been posted; each month will see an updated catalog posted for Patrons to order from. So if you are interested, check out the APR Patreon page to see how to sign up; if you are already a patron, check out the catalog here.
This YouTuber makes quad-drone and other flying RC Star Wars vehicles. In my opinion, it’s a toss-up whether his best is the Imperial Probe Droid or the Imperial Shuttle. I can see both being turned into successful commercial products. The probe droid needs a way to land other than being grabbed…
The tires used on the SR-71 had aluminum integrated into the rubber to help reflect the substantial heat produced by cruising at Mach 3. This was fine aluminum powder *in* the rubber, not just *on* the rubber, so as the tires were worn down from use they remained somewhat shiny. The Hill Aerospace Museum has one of the SR-71 tires on display. Enjoy.
