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Aug 102016
 

The FAA recently approved plans by the company “Moon Express” to send the MX-1E probe to the lunar surface. This has garnered some press, a lot of it focused on plans to land human ashes on the moon (with some outlets being spectacularly wrong about some aspects of human ashes in space, such as claiming that this will be the first time ashes have been launched into space). Moon Express is claiming that once proven, they will be able to send missions to the moon for $10 million a pop. Included here is requisite verbiage about mining helium 3 from the moon for fusion reactors, though that of course remains a market without a market.

Moon Express has apparently contracted with Rocket Lab to launch their small lunar lander atop Rocket Lab’s “Electron” launch vehicle. If, like me, you reacted to that sentence with “Who? What?” it’s because Rocket Lab, a New Zealand company, hasn’t actually launched one of their Electrons yet.  Electron *looks* like a smaller Falcon 9 made out of carbon fiber.

 Posted by at 9:44 am
Aug 092016
 

Remember the leak of those Democratic National Committee emails, publicized through Wikileaks? Remember how Russian hackers did that under orders from Putin in order to aid the Trump campaign? A challenger arises:

In short, Julian Assange, darling of the Left, strongly suggests that DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was killed in a “robbery” a little while back (where the robbers didn’t take his wallet, watch, phone, money, credit cards or *anything*), was the actual source of the leaked emails.

In other words…

 

 Posted by at 11:42 pm
Aug 092016
 

The latest line of attack on Hillary is that she’s suffering from ill health, some sort of seizures. I dunno, seems unlikely; she’s been in the spotlight for decades now, you’d think someone would have noticed before this point. I suspect the “seizure” recently caught on camera is just an attempt at humor, a concept that, not being a fully sentient AI with an emotion chip, she has a difficult time in replicating. Still, some interesting things:

PHOTOS=> Hillary’s Handler Carries DIAZEPAM Pen for Patients Who Experience Recurrent Seizures!

And…

PHOTO: Multiple staffers help unstable Hillary up stairs

If nothing else, this’ll give Trump something to needle her with during the debates. Assuming, of course, that Trump doesn’t just outright take a dive during the debates as a way to assure that his old friend and donation-recipient wins handily. But if there is truth to Hillary having these sort of health issues, it just might be that Trump acting like Trump on stage just might trigger Hillary to melt down. And if that happens… how will the electorate react? Rationally, with “well, can’t have *that* hand on the nuclear trigger, so I’m’a votin’ for Johnson,” or sympathetically? I guess we’ll see.

 Posted by at 4:01 am
Aug 072016
 

This is definitely worth a watch:

Also of some interest: Ghostbusters has been out for about four weeks, and according to Box Office Mojo has made about $116.7 million domestically, out of a $144 million budget. That’s pretty much “bomb” status. In comparison, Star Trek Beyond, open about three weeks, has made $127.9 million domestically. Which also means it’s more or less a bomb, because of it’s $185 million budget.

However…

Suicide Squad is a movie we were told to hate, what with the Batman v Superman heritage hate and the misogynistic stuff that happens to Harley and what not. It’s only been open for one weekend… and it’s made $135 million domestically. Ghostbusters and Star Trek both have modest foreign receipts, enough to take them over their production budgets… but given advertising costs and Hollywood accounting, they’d both have had to have made several times their box office just to break even. Suicide Squad almost made as much in the foreign market as in the domestic, so that it has made $267 million to its $175 million budget. In THREE DAYS. If another ticket is never sold, it’ll still wind up being fantastically successful compared to Ghostbusters and Trek.

Theatrical Star Trek, I’m sad to say, seems to have run its course for now. They’ve announced another one, but I’d bet that that’ll be the last Trek movie for a good long while.  And is anyone saying that the reason Trek flopped was because of misogyny?

 Posted by at 11:33 pm
Aug 072016
 

Why do people refuse to learn from history???

A Mormon Tycoon Wants to Build Joseph Smith’s Mega-Utopia in Vermont

Some feller name of Dave Hall has a bucket of cash and a dream: to build planned utopian town-like properties based on some “vision” that Mormon church founder Joseph Smith imagined nearly 200 years ago. These would be square “plats,” with a square “ring wall” made up of buildings with farm-like area in the middle, and surrounded by a narrow bit of “nature.”

Hal wants to build a thousand of these sites in Vermont, moving 20 million people into a state with a current population well under one million. Oddly enough, the people in the area where he’s buying up property have a problem with this.

Some of the “features” of this planned community:

each person will be allotted just 200 square feet of living space

No.

A plat, says Hall, will be subject to state and regional laws, but will also be overseen by a board and hierarchies of leaders with, it appears, strong Mormon family values. “Each [multi-family] house has house captains, which are a team of one man and one woman,”

NO.

Families and individuals who wish to join must invest their net worth and be employed either outside the communities or by a NewVistas company, or Vista Biz. Those who start Vista Bizzes will be given startup funds by the community but must surrender their IP rights. They also must agree to put nearly all their profits back into the community in exchange for what Hall calls “dividends”—payouts from overall wealth earned by the plat businesses.

AW HELL NO.

To make all this work, some as-yet unavailable or generally unused technologies are needed. Robots that rearrange your furniture. Storage containers that rise us out of the floor. Small elevators. Toilets with built-in medical tricorders. But over all of this is the fact that since the basic plan of this “plat” was produced by Joseph Smith, it thus has the taint of prophesy and divine inspiration. And we’ve all seen how successful communities built on religious ideas can be.

The goofiest notion of all is that he’s buying up properties that are already happily occupied. Why not set up shop where people *aren’t*? I’m sure Detroit has some room for something like this. The Midwest has *single* farms bigger than his whole planned community. So why build right where you know you’re going to annoy the locals by changing *their* environment?

All that said… there’s something about this idea that makes me nervous in a very real sense. Not about the “plats” themselves… if they are roaring successes or the first generation born there tears the place apart during Festival, I don’t really care as such. But what does this sort of thing say about space colonies?

Initial small colonies – say, a few dozen people on Mars – will be run like military establishments. They’ll pretty much have to be. But what about town-sized orbital habitats? Here, the territory is strictly limited. An inhabitants options will necessarily be somewhat limited… a good terrorist could shut off the sun or evacuate all the air. So will such settlements need to be run in the soul-crushing collectivist manner suggested for the “plats?” A horrifying thought.

 Posted by at 4:25 pm
Aug 072016
 

This is sad, but not altogether surprising:

Historic replica airplane, the Bugatti 100p, crashes near Burns Flat, pilot and designer Scotty Wilson dies

On its third test flight it took off normally, but suddenly banked to the left and crashed nose-first. The Bugatti 100p was a remarkable design… and remarkable designs have a history of being rather finicky.

As yet no news on the cause. But given that there were likely a number of cameras operating on the aircraft, and numerous cameras on chase aircraft and hand-held by ground observers, the cause probably won’t stay a mystery.

The third flight was apparently to be the last. After this it was to go to a museum in Britain.

 Posted by at 10:10 am