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Oct 252016
 

I must admit, when I first saw GoPro cameras some years ago, advertised as the sort of things that surfers or skiers would attach to their equipment to get videos of themselves, I didn’t think too much of ’em. Glorified selfie machines, of little real value to the world. But damn if some people haven’t done some interesting stuff with them. Such as this video, with a GoPro on an aerobatic biplane. That is not new… but  gyro-stabilizing the GoPro is new (at least to me).

 

GoPros and similar cameras have proven themselves sufficiently that a good case can be made that they should be prit near *everywhere.* Two on each jetliner wingtip… both looking inwards at the whole aircraft, one above the wing, one below. Two or so in the cockpit, watching the crew & instruments. One at the tip of the vertical stabilizer, looking forward at the whole aircraft. One in the nose looking forward. One in the belly looking down. Heck, one in the underside looking aft & down to record any Russian anti-aircraft missile coming in.

 Posted by at 1:02 am
Oct 242016
 

Jack Chick Passes Away

Jack Chick was 92 and the creator of a large number of downright loopy comic-book-like “tracts.” They railed against anything he felt wasn’t supported by or was in opposition to his extremist Christian views… Muslims, Jews, atheists, Catholics, evolution, Mormons, Jehovahs Witnesses, and especially the occult, including Dungeons and Dragons.

On one level, Chick Tracts are funny. They are eminently mockable, and for those billions of us who don’t agree with their worldview, they are just plain silly. But there is a substantial dark side. Chick started railing against D&D in the mid 1980’s, convinced that role playing games were actual portals to dark forces. This contributed to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and early 1990s, a shameful period when many lives were ruined by panic-mongering charlatans.

 Posted by at 5:39 pm
Oct 242016
 

Consider:

 The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids. Molecular diagnostics will have been available for the rest by a single day and a good day to the rest have a wonderful time and aggravation for the rest day at home time for the two of us will have a great place for the rest to be great for you tomorrow and tomorrow after all and I am a very happy boy to the great day and I hope he is wonderful.

Nuclear energy is not a nuclear nuclear power to the nuclear nuclear program he added and the nuclear nuclear program is a good united state of the nuclear nuclear power program and the united way nuclear nuclear program nuclear.

Atoms for a play of the same as you can do with a great time to take the rest to your parents or you will be nucleus a great time for a great place. Power is not a great place for a good time.

Huh. Reads like Deepak Chopra to me. But what is it? Is it a badly translated foreign treatise on nuclear physics? Is it indeed the latest brain droppings from some newage “thinker?”

In fact, no. It is actually an accepted scientific paper for the upcoming International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics. And it was indeed a creation of science. Specifically… an iOS autocomplete.

Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference

This is *not* how peer review is supposed to work. But it is interesting how corrupted science is indistinguishable from New Age metaphysics.

 Posted by at 5:01 pm
Oct 242016
 

“Doomsday” covers a lot of turf. A virus that is 100% communicable and 100% lethal against humans, and only humans, would be a perfectly acceptable “Doomsday,” even though the sudden extinction of Mankind would leave Earth just fine. From there you can move up to, say, a major global nuclear war or a substantial asteroid impact… not only humanity wiped out, but the biosphere of Earth damaged for a good long while. Then you can move up to things that would physically destroy the planet itself, and if you are really enthusiastic, you could blow up the Sun. But even then, blowing up the sun and vaporizing all the planets of the inner solar system is just going to be a pretty light show in the skies of planets orbiting Alpha Centauri, with maybe some damage to their ozone layers. And even if you could destroy the entire galaxy, there are still uncounted trillions of other galaxies that’ll get along just fine. If you want a really comprehensive “doomsday” you need to trash the observable universe.

 

There are not currently a whole lot of ways, even in theory, to do that. A Big Crunch. Wait long enough for Heat Death. Perhaps Phantom Energy will cause a Big Rip. A brane collision between this universe and another, resetting everything. These are all fine, but they are natural functions of the universe rather than something an evil genius might bring about… like threatening the world with “in 5 billion years the sun will expand and roast the world! MuAHAHAHAHA!!!” Not that much of a threat, as threats go. You need something that can be brought about, rather than something that will just eventually happen on its own. And here we get to “Vacuum Decay.”

The video below explains it nicely. But in short, it’s the idea that the Higgs Field (or some other basic value of the nature of reality) is not currently at its ground state, but is currently at a higher potential level. With a push, some small sector of space could be pushed out of the current “false vacuum” and collapse down into the true vacuum. In doing so, the fundamental constants would change in unpredictable ways. Chemistry wouldn’t work right anymore. Atoms could well fly apart. Particles could dissolve. In short, *everything* would be utterly destroyed. What makes this into a true Doomsday system is that this doesn’t just happen in some discrete volume of space, but it expands outwards as a spherical shell moving at the speed of light. If it began in a galaxy a hundred million light years away, that galaxy would appear to be perfectly fine for a hundred million years. The expanding shell moves at the same speed as photons, so there would be absolutely no warning. One second everything is fine; the next, the shell gets to you and you cease to exist in the time it takes for light to cross you. So there would be no way to detect it coming, and no way to protect yourself even if you knew it was happening.

 

From a science fiction perspective, here we have a Universal Doomsday Device that could, hypothetically, be the product of a sufficiently advanced Evil Genius. To destroy the universe you don’t need to actually destroy the entire universe. You just need to tick over a small spot of false vacuum. A spot no bigger than a proton would be perfectly adequate. And then the process will proceed from there, encompassing the observable universe.

But if you put this into a science fiction perspective, this is a doomsday that could be survived. If you run into the expanding shell, you’re boned. There’s no surviving it, and no reversing it. But you could outrun it.

Warp drive, hyperdrive, jump drive, etc. all allow science fiction spacecraft to travel faster than light. So you could fly away from the zone of destruction faster than the lightspeed expansion. Of course you’ll need to know to do this in the first place. If, say, the Klingons accidentally began a vacuum decay in one of their research facilities 200 light years from Earth, it will take 200 years for the shell to get to Earth. No radio messages will be able to alert you. Any ships you send towards the research base will not be able to alert you to the problem… they’ll simply vanish. But if you happen to have a large enough mesh of sensors in the area communication with FTL subspace radio, you should be able to get a heads up. The sensor net will simply start shutting down; the individual sensor probes won’t give you any useful data other than their subspace radio transmissions suddenly stopping. Probes sent to check on them will also vanish. But if you figure out that the probes are disappearing based on their distance from a central point, you should be able to guess what’s going on. From there you’ll send a ship loaded with “pingers” to somewhere ahead of the shell. Scatter these devices, simple subspace radio beacons, in advance of the shell, and listen to them shut down.

Once you have determined what’s up, you need to start planning. Earth has two hundred years. But you already have warp drive, capable of traveling hundreds or thousands of times faster than light. Spend then next one hundred years evacuating the population to a fallback position, say, 2,000 lightyears downrange. You now have 2,100 years before the shell gets to you. By which time you will doubtless have greatly improved warp drive. Perhaps capable of velocities millions of times the speed of light, moving whole worlds or even entire star systems. With this you can pull up stakes to another galaxy, tens of millions of lightyears away. If your propulsion systems are really good, you could move tens of billions of lightyears away, beyond the edge of the observable universe. Due to the expansion of the universe, this would put you out of reach of the expanding vacuum decay shell. The distance is so vast that the rate of expansion exceeds the speed of light. You are now permanently safe.

Well, maybe. If those dumbass Klingons were able to make a vacuum decay doomsday device a few thousand years ago, it’s a safe bet that the technology is now available to any morose emo teenager in your society. Vacuum decay bombs might be popping off with the regularity of DDOS attacks today. Additionally, you need to make sure that that far distant galaxy you want to colonize hasn’t already been consumed by its own vacuum collapse, and that there aren’t any in progress between here and there. It might be that the universe is filled with expanding vacuum decay bubbles, and that older civilizations are flying torturous paths between the galaxies in warp drive equipped Dyson spheres.

This, just maybe, might explain the Fermi Paradox. Where is everybody? By all rights the galaxy should be filled with networks of civilizations. Especially if they have FTL propulsion, the aliens should be everywhere. But they seem to be absent. Well… perhaps 30,000 years ago a vacuum decay bomb was set off in the galactic core. Over the next 10,000 years all the spacefaring races got their affairs in order and then took off for Andromeda. Civilizations millions and billions of years old vanished essentially overnight, leaving behind those who did not have starflight capability. You know, us.

One wonders how a vacuum decay and a wormhole would interact. Chances seem good that a vacuum decay event would cause a wormhole to simply collapse. But perhaps the event would transition through the wormhole, spitting out the other end and starting another expanding sphere, unknown lightyears away from the original. If the universe is filled with tiny but exceedingly long natural wormholes, then this would be a way for a vacuum collapse to wipe out the entire universe in relatively short order. It would also be an incentive for an escaping spacefaring race that uses wormholes to be pretty bloodthirsty. Once *you* are through, it’s in your interests to promptly shut down the wormhole behind you lest you let the vacuum decay through. Screw those schmoes behind you…

 Posted by at 12:33 pm
Oct 232016
 

There’s no horrible concept that can’t be so over-applied by the easily offended and the social justice warriors that it becomes meaningless. Witness “racism.” We’ve all seen how, over the last few decades, “racism” and “racist” have been thrown around so much that the words have become almost totally meaningless. When you can be called “racist” because you don’t like the tenets of a universalist religion… the word doesn’t mean much. Well, it has taken another step down the ladder of irrelevancy:

Angry clowns confront store owner over ‘racist’ ‘No Clowns Allowed’ sign in London, Ont.

Short form: if you dislike clowns, yer a racist.

A generation or two ago, even clowns would not have made that leap. But thanks to the SJWs, *anybody* can claim “racism” for *anything.* Don’t like “Star Wars?” Racism. Don’t like broccoli? Racism. Don’t like Country & Western? Racism. Don’t like the font I’m using? Racism.

 Posted by at 7:50 pm
Oct 222016
 

You ever heard of “reverse psychology?” A lot of SJW’s don’t seem to have. For example, Brock University in Ontario, Canadia, has an annual Halloween party. And they have a handy-dandy instructional page that orders you what*not* to wear, Because Reasons. “Vetting Halloween costumes isn’t a matter of telling people what to wear.” Except, of course, that it’s telling people what not to wear, or otherwise they won’t be allowed in the door.

Isaac’s Halloween Costume Protocol

And who will be doing the determining if a costume doesn’t rise to the standards proposed?

…and can enter Isaac’s once the costume has been deemed appropriate by team of Isaac’s Bar and Grill Management and Student Justice Centre Staff.

So, you know, staff that have been roped into doing this, overseen by footsoldiers from the universities Junior Fascist League.

There is even an infographic:

It would be somewhat entertaining if a large group of people showed up early dressed *exactly* wrong, weren’t allowed in, and decided to hold their own impromptu party just outside, accidentally blocking access to the entrance.

Of course, this sort of thoughtcrime is not restricted to this one university:

University of Florida offers counseling for students offended by Halloween costumes

Remember how a week or so ago the question came up of “what makes a man” and/or “what does masculine mean?” If you are so weak in mind and integrity that someone wearing a Halloween costume drives you into counseling… you ain’t a man.

 Posted by at 8:05 pm
Oct 222016
 

First:

McMullin surge threatens to squeeze Trump’s already narrow path to victory

Short form: Independent Presidential candidate Evan McMullin is well ahead of Clinton and essentially neck-and-neck with Trump… here in Utah. Chances are currently *really* good that Utah will go “independent” this year. McMullin doesn’t actually expect to become President this time, but part of his strategy is to win enough electoral votes –  in Utah, perhaps Idaho, Arizona, Idaho – so that *neither* Trump nor Clinton garner enough electoral votes to automatically become President. In that case, the decision will go into the hands of the House of Representatives. And perhaps they will produce a better President than either of the two freakish losers who are our current choices.

Second:

Fans watching fewer NFL games cite protests as primary reason

NFL ratings are down about 10% from last year. Something like 40% of those polled who said they were watching less NFL said their reason for watching less was annoyance at the constant anti-America protests by privileged snowflake millionaires like Kaepernick. At some point the NFL might start looking at the protests as a money-losing proposition.

Third:

Danish nationalist charged with racism for ‘refugee spray’

Apparently Denmark is one of those lands where simply expressing unpopular opinions can get you arrested, fined and jailed. In this case, for handing out cans of “refugee spray” that are supposed to help Danes feel safe against “refugees.” Seems to me that in a rational world, the guy who handed these out would only get in trouble for the false advertising… the cans are simply relabeled hair spray. To be effective, you’d think the cans would have to be pepper spray.

 Posted by at 10:04 am
Oct 222016
 

So today some hackers displayed their power and took down Amazon, Twitter, PayPal and others for some amount of time. Everything *apparently* got all cleaned up, we’re back to normal, it’s all good, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

Here’s my cheery thought for today: just wait until they get into important online data storage systems. Imagine that they manage to lock up The Cloud with ransomeware and demand One Hundred BIIILLLLLION Dollars. Or they simply corrupt it all. Move all the zeroes to one side of the server, all the ones to the other. And stack up the twos in a small pile right up front.

Amazon goes down? Bad. PayPal goes down? Really bad. Online stored data becomes unavailable? Economies collapse. Careers are destroyed. Authors life works vanish. Billions of man-hours of in-progress effort vanishes like a fart in a hurricane. A few dozen million families photo and video albums disappear.

What do *you* have stored in “the Cloud?” Do you have it backed up offline?

 Posted by at 12:21 am
Oct 212016
 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Extremely Cool cartridge conversion of the cap-and-ball LeMat revolver in WestWorld is somewhat fanciful due to the engineering requirements revolving around the central shotgun. Still, a LeMat was made into a cartridge gun for the old TV series “Johnny Ringo,” though apparently only blanks were fired. And there was a true cartridge LeMat, as shown in the vid below, but it was a fugly failure. One wonders if clever modern engineering and modern materials such as titanium alloys might allow for a truly functional LeMat cartridge pistol.

 Posted by at 8:02 pm