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Sep 042016
 

I mentioned this film a mere five and half years ago. “Universe” is a black and white documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1960, and gives a general overview of the universe as revealed by astronomers. Some pretty spiffy visual effects are used; as a result, this film was one of the inspirations for the film “2001.” Additionally it was narrated by Douglas Rain… HAL 9000 himself.

It’s now available to view on and download from YouTube:

I’m generally not a fan of colorized films, but it’d be interesting to see what a skilled colorizer could do with this.

Another film that helped inspire “2001” was “To The Moon and Beyond,” made by Graphic Films for exhibit at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. That’s one I’ve *never* seen, sadly, but much of the work done by Con Pederson and Douglas Trumbull on “Moon” was of great value for “2001.” “Moon” was projected onto a spherical screen, apparently something like an early Omnimax. The technical requirements for this might explain why the film doesn’t seem to have been shown since the 64 Fair. I don’t know if a copy even exists anymore, though it seems probable.

 

 Posted by at 5:25 pm
Sep 032016
 

Several days ago word hit of someone with six file boxes of their fathers stuff, wondering what to do with it. Not an unusual occurrence. But in this case, the father was an important engineer  at North American Aviation, worked on the XB-70, B-1 and Shuttle, and the files all related to that. In the end, the archive wound up on Craigslist, and sold shortly afterwards. It is now being shipped… to me.

I would not have been able to afford the archive – never mind the shipping costs – on my own. However, by working with the patrons on the APR Patreon , we were able to pool funds so that the total cost per person is *trivial.* When the archive gets here – all 300+ pounds of it – I will go through every single page and catalog it; the best stuff will be scanned and, barring ITAR & classification issues, all of the crowdfunders will receive the complete set of high-rez scans. And then when I’ve gleaned from it what’s worth gleaning, it will be donated to an appropriate archive… the Smithsonian, the SDASM, the National Archives, Edwards AFB, whatever seems best in the end.

The door to sign up for this crowdfunding project is now closed. It followed shortly on the heels of a similar project that scored an admittedly much smaller but definitely fascinating  collection of F2Y Sea Dart documentation and diagrams, including much about operational follow-on attack aircraft meant to operate from ships and subs; and a similar archive that was crowdfunded a year or two back that scored a whole bunch of 2707 SST stuff. I’ve grown sick of seeing amazing stuff appear on ebay and then vanish into a black hole, never to be seen by anyone again; this way, aerospace history is preserved and shared.

If you’d like to be involved in this sort of thing, sign up for the APR Patreon and you’ll not only get the monthly aerospace goodies that comes with membership, but you’ll also be able to get in on these crowd funding efforts. You’ll save aerospace history, get a bunch of amazing stuff, and not have to spend a whole lot to do it.

 Posted by at 8:05 pm
Sep 032016
 

And from the looks of it, someday soon.

Drone footage showing the flood of people dying to get into the “Ark Encounter” five minutes before opening on August 28, 2016.

 

So what will the reworked casino/hotel version be called? “Trump Titanic II” seems obvious. TrumpTanic? Looking at the shape of the “Ark” I’d recommend making it into an Exxon Valdez tribute. Slight reworking of the island at the rear and a new coat of paint and you’re good to go.

That is one *hell* of a parking lot. The amount of carbon dumped into the air during the process of chopping down the forest, grading the terrain and laying down the asphalt, coupled with the solar radiation that will be absorbed by the blacktop and converted into straight-up heat… that parking lot alone will be responsible for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the flooding of Florida.

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 Posted by at 10:39 am
Sep 022016
 

For a long time many people thought that life on Earth was less than 10,000 years old. With discoveries in the 19th century, that got pushed back to tens of millions. Then hundreds of millions. Then a billion or more years. Guess what:

Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures

Fossils of 4 centimeter stromatolites (mats of “biofilm,” or cyanobacterial scum) have been found in the Isua supracrustal belt in southwest Greenland dating to 3.7 billion years ago. This is 220 million years older then the previous record holder from Australia. This pushes the estimate of the beginning of single cell life back to more than 4 billion years ago, during the Hadean period. This is backed up by discoveries in late 2015 of traces of carbon in 4.1 billion year old zircon crystals that hint at a biological origin. Given that the Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, this is a remarkably short period for life to arise, and in one hell of an environment (Get it? See what I did there? “Hell” of an environment? “Hadean” period? Huh? Bah.)

Life, it seems, arises quickly in terrible places. Fossils may well exist on Mars, and possibly on Venus. Complex multicellular life, however, seems to take a bit more effort. Life on Earth peaked with bacteria for around three and a half billion years. The universe may be filled with planets coated in scum, with only a few advanced up to worms and bugs.

 Posted by at 7:44 pm
Sep 012016
 

This is a vision of the cosmos made The Old Fashioned Way… analog, not digital. A lot of the visuals don;t seem terribly accurate, but they sure are pretty. And they’d fit in quite well at the end of “2001,” which makes it worth the few minutes right there.

 

 Posted by at 11:21 pm
Sep 012016
 

UPDATED: See more at the end.

Sure, “crazy” and “stupid” are obvious. But I’m thinking more along the lines of “vapid.” There’s something about the woman’s voice here that I find to be *really* grating. Not just the insane worldview on display, but just the voice itself, the speaking style that seems… I dunno. Like, omigawd, old-school Valley Girl but with a dash of stoner thrown in, so that her *voice* sound… what? Lazy? How to describe it?

Take a look at the video after the break and despair.

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 Posted by at 11:58 am