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Three unrelated news items

 Hmm..., news, politics  10 Responses »
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.

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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.

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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

Welcome to the future

 AARRRGH, blather, Forward!, Hmm..., ಠ_ಠ  8 Responses »
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

The WestWorld LeMat

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., science fiction, weapons, youtube  17 Responses »
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

Sad, but impressive:

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, news, photography, science, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Oct 212016
 

The ESA’s Schiaparelli Mars lander failed to land on Mars yesterday. That’s not to say it didn’t make it to Mars… it just made it there a little faster than it should’ve. Ten parachutes were cut loose too soon and the braking rockets didn’t burn long enough, so it fell out of the sky with an Earth-shattering kaboom. Well… Mars craft have had a pretty unfortunate record.

What’s impressive is that there are enough satellites orbiting Mar that the crash site has already been spotted:

Camera on Mars Orbiter Shows Signs of Latest Mars Lander

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted both the parachute and the scorch mark using its low-rez “Context Camera.” The high-rez “HiRISE” camera will be trained on the site in the near future.

 Posted by at 5:10 pm

Great. Now there are asteroids made of frozen blood.

 AARRRGH, blather, news, science, spacecraft  23 Responses »
Oct 202016
 

Well, this is just super. On January 1, 2019, the New Horizons probe will pass remarkably close to Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69, a chunk of something about 19 to 28 miles across. Telescopic examination has shown it to be reddish, redder than the splotches on Pluto and Charon. The scienticians will tell you that the redness is due to the presence of tholins, reddish-brown chemicals produced when simple organic molecules like methane are exposed to ultraviolet light. But come on, we all know the score… this is a chunk of frozen blood left out in deep space by the fungi from Yuggoth or Yog Sothoth or the Ogdru Jahad or Scientologists. The only question is, what’s the blood *from?* Will New Horizons provide the answer… and will that forbidden knowledge drive everyone *insane?* Personally, I suspect not. The flyby won’t occur until 2019… by which time I expect that the Earth will be a smoking radioactive ruin. Nobody will be manning the radio receivers to hear what New Horizons has to say. Those few who survive will be too busy trying to scratch a living out of the blasted Earth under a smoke and ash filled sky, daily battling hordes of mutated social justice zombies and Kardashidemons.

 Posted by at 3:16 am

Be a man

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., politics, reshaping the world, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  10 Responses »
Oct 192016
 

Students told term ‘be a man’ represents toxic masculinity

The dumbth continues…

According to the trailer of the film, it teaches that the “three most destructive words” a boy can hear growing up is “be a man.” Experts quoted therein also suggest that violent outbursts are prompted by masculinity pressures because “respect is linked to violence.”

Oy.

OK, so telling a male to “be a man” is bad. Since a man is what the male would normally be or become, what they’re basically saying is that being normal is bad.

You gotta give these people props for having done a *magnificent* job on tearing down boys and men in the US. By working to eliminate the role of fathers in the education and maturation of whole populations of boys, they have eliminated proper role models for boys, leaving them with either no guide on how to become civilized men, or guides like the anti-male “feminists” that have become so prominent in recent decades. Is it any wonder, then, that so many boys and men have emotional and/or psychological issues?

If full knowledge on the source of all this was ever found, I wonder if it might turn out that a good chunk of this originated as a plan by the KGB to destroy the US from within. This would not surprise me. It would also mean that the people who support this nonsense are actually committing treason.

 Posted by at 2:30 am

STEM vs. Art, in Art

 art, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., science, science fiction, spacecraft, wisdom, youtube  11 Responses »
Oct 182016
 

A few years ago, Jamie XX’s song “Gosh” had an official video released. And then a few days ago, it had another completely different official video released. The music is pretty much the same, some very slight alterations, but the videos are entirely different.

The first video shows what STEM could theoretically achieve. The second video… I dunno what the hell is going on there, if there’s some sort of message, or what. Take a look at the both of them… and see if, like me, the one focusing on the power of science and engineering doesn’t come across as by far the most appealing and inspiring of the two.

Even in the context of art like music videos… what’s more inspiring? A STEM vision, or an Art vision?

Earlier video:

 

New video:

Now… which one presents a world you’d like to see made real, that you’d like to be a part of? That makes the least bit of any sort of sense?

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For those anti-science trolls out there, this post is not saying that art should be done away with. But it *is* saying that an understanding of science and engineering allows you to dream dreams not only vaster and more beautiful that you would be able to without science… but those dreams could be made *real.* Without science and engineering and math, nothing you dream will likely be possible or meaningful.

 Posted by at 12:42 pm
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