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Star Trek Beyond

 art, awesomeness, blather, humor, science fiction  11 Responses »
Jul 222016
 

On the whole it was pretty enjoyable. It was a *lot* funnier than “Ghostbusters;” how can it not be when Spock learns and properly applies the term “horsesh!t” in reference to something McCoy says, or using The Beastie Boys as a weapon of mass destruction. I laughed my ass off at that bit.

 

As with all of the NuTrek movies, there are some logic problems. The Enterprise is now three years into it’s 5-year mission, hell and gone away from home. And yet they easily find themselves near the Yorktown, which is a new starbase. Which would be ok, except that this Starbase is much more impressive than Spacedock. It’s more like something the Galactic Empire would build. If the Enterprise is Way Out There, should they be, you know… Way The Hell Out There BEYOND Every Damned Body, rather than right next to a massive Federation engineering project?

About the Yorktown: it is a *funky* design for a space station. It is, to be blunt, roughly the sort of thing that I would have thrown into *my* sci-fi as the sort of project built by a bunch of rich artsy types who are trying to show off. It makes substantial use of the apparent ease with which the Federation can manipulate gravity.

The movie dealt with the fact that Nimoy died in a good, logical and appropriate manner. McCoy and Scottie seemed to get more screen time than before; Karl Urban continues to kick substantial ass in getting McCoy just right. Especially his little freakout after being transported by a 100-year-old transporter. Snerk. And giving Spock hell for… well, a gift that Spock gave Uhura that McCoy points out has some questionable connotations. That one scene made me laugh more than the entirety of “Ghostbusters.”

At one point there is a throwaway reference to a “glowing green space hand” having snatched a starship. If you stick around during the credits, there is, as with the previous two NuTrek flicks, a “tour” through some bizarre planetary systems, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it view of a Glowing Green Space Hand.

Not perfect, but much better than “Into Darkness.”

 Posted by at 11:56 pm

So how’s the “Reset” going? Let’s check…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  2 Responses »
Jul 222016
 

Russia Bombed a U.S. Base in Syria

Oh, neato.

A Russian aircraft last month bombed a base in southeast Syria secretly used by American and British forces in order to pressure the Obama administration to better cooperate in the stricken country, U.S. Defense officials told The Wall Street Journal.

Huzzah. And guess what: it worked.

 

 Posted by at 5:47 pm

Oh, boy! Der Mayhem!

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Jul 222016
 

So a few days ago somebody went a little silly on a train near Wurzburg, Germany… took an axe and  knife and went after the passengers, injuring five before getting shot. Today in Munich someone (potentially up to three someones) opened fire in a shopping mall in Munich, Germany, killing at least 8. The motive for the latest attack has not yet been determined. It is far, far to early to begin even guessing what might have caused this.  Disgruntled Tea Partiers? Self-hating closeted homosexuals? Trump voters? We may never know:

A witness who will only be identified as Lauretta told CNN her son was in a bathroom with a shooter at the McDonald’s. “That’s where he loaded his weapon,” she said. “I hear like an alarm and boom, boom, boom… And he’s still killing the children. The children were sitting to eat. They can’t run.” Lauretta said she heard the gunman say, “Allahu Akbar,” or God is great. “I know this because I’m Muslim. I hear this and I only cry.”

Nope. Got nuthin’. Maybe it was some kid who was driven to kill because he played too much Call Of Duty or Grand Theft Auto or Pong or some such vile murder simulator. Perhaps he was a fan of heavy metal and backwards-masked exhortations by Satan to shoot up a McD’s twisted his fragile little mind. We may never know.

So yet again another terrorist attack in the west, with many, many people making expressions of sadness and horror. But in even the darkest times, there are those who find such things to be the cause of levity:

 Posted by at 4:39 pm

Beasts of the Mesozoic

 art, awesomeness, critters, history, Hmm...  4 Responses »
Jul 222016
 

The irony is that at the same time I bemoan the loss of stores that sell interesting stuff, more and more interesting stuff is being made. When I was a kid, a “dinosaur toy” was a cheap, stiff hunk of plastic. Nothing moved; it was merely an immobile statue… and not a very accurate one. Half my lifetime ago, the movie Jurassic Park came out and the marketing juggernaut that came with it produced a vast pile of new dinosaur toys… these were more accurate, had more moving bits. And now with the combination of rapid prototyping and the rise of nerd culture (specifically the rise of people willing to spend a whole lot of money for “toys” that are incredibly detailed and complex, filled with features, that will probably not leave the box but instead will be put on a shelf and never played with), there seem to be some damn fine dinosaur toys out there. Behold:

Beasts of the Mesozoic: Raptor Series Action Figures

Twenty years ago, I thought it was pretty neat to find a toy of *one* type of raptor, in no particular scale, certainly not in scale with anything else. Now… a whole range of 1/6 scale raptors are in development.

 Posted by at 10:08 am

Babies having babies

 cats, critters, photography  1 Response »
Jul 222016
 

So last night around midnight I dragged the garbage can out to the road for pickup this morning.  I swept the area with my flashlight, on the lookout for things like coyotes and wild dogs and raccoons and shoggoths and socialists and other such rabid monsters, but only found one cat. This I took as a pleasant surprise, given the dearth of cats around here the last few years. He’s a juvenile siamese-patterned cat, and was *reasonably* friendly: he came to within about 4 feet when I called to him, and didn’t overly object as I accompanied him as he hunted the wheat for mice and such. He was.n’t interested in letting me pet him, so I went about my business

WP_20160721_004

This evening I had a rare visit from Junior, who’s looking rather the worse for wear… pretty skinny. He wants *nothing* to do with me, though he will of course eat free food when available.

WP_20160721_009

Tonight around midnight I went out again to check the weather and look at the stars; the sky kept flashing from lightning so I hoped there’d be a show (there wasn’t, sadly… the lightning was much too far away). But I saw the pseudo-siamese from last night, and realized that he was a she, and that she had at least three kittens… one all-black, two more siamese-colored. One of the siamese skittered off and didn’t come back, but the other two were reasonably brave. Mom there is barely bigger than her kittens.

WP_20160721_024 WP_20160721_023

While I was out there watching the cats I heard a nearby rustling sound in a tree near where the one kitten had skittered off. I figured it was the kitten coming back… but it was actually a full grown racoon. I don’t know if it threatened the kitten (or maybe even got it), but lil’ mommacat wasn’t having it, and the two rumbled. And even though the racoon outmassed the cat by several times, I’m happy to report that she successfully drove off the racoon. It was a short battle, but in the end the racoon hightailed it for the tree and the cat stood there hissing at it.

 Posted by at 1:33 am

Change sucks

 AARRRGH, books, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  16 Responses »
Jul 212016
 

Out here in the Mountain West there’s a chain of stores called “Hastings.” They carry books, comic books, magazines, DVDs/Blu-Rays, video games, board games, collectibles, action figures, pop culture memorabilia. There are two within range of me that I visit on a  fairly regular basis looking for magazines and books and such. Quite good stores.

Correction: There *used* to be a chain called “Hastings.” A month ago they declared bankruptcy, and today it was announced that they’ve been bought out by liquidators who will sell off their stuff and be done with them. When they are gone there will no longer be any book or magazine stores within a reasonable distance of me. Logan, Utah, a fairly major college town, will have no more book or video stores of any consequence. Logan used to have a Borders; that’s of course long gone. Used to have a really good hobby shop with long rows of model kits; long gone. Used to have one hell of a used book store; vanished like a fart in a tornado a few years ago.

Hmmph.

Get off my lawn, kid.

 Posted by at 6:10 pm

No, that’s *not* a Geodetic Satellite Model

 art, history, Hmm..., models, nukes, projects, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Jul 202016
 

Bonham’s just wrapped up another one of their “no you can’t afford these” space history memorabilia auctions. Among the interesting stuff I looked at, sighed over and wished I lived in a world where somehow I was rich enough to afford, there was this item:

Lot 75
GEODETIC SATELLITE MODEL

The other items listed all have their sales prices listed (like the $269,000 Sputnik model… yow), but this item seems to still only have it’s estimated price of  $1500-$2500. My guess is that that means it didn’t sell. And if it didn’t, maybe it’s because it was advertised as being something far less interesting than it actually is. Consider: the description goes thus:

GEODETIC SATELLITE MODEL

Large scale model of a Geodetic Satellite. 37½ inch tall plexiglass pole topped with 16½ inch tall conical satellite with ten 21 inch long folding blue panels.

Employed by the United States Navy, the GeoSat was an Earth observation satellite launched in 1985. The goal of the GeoSat mission was to provide information on the marine gravity field.

Which, yeah, I guess that’s nice, but it’s not really one of the more exciting satellites out there. By the way, here is a geodetic satellite rendering:

And here is the model that was up for auction:

sp-100 model

Are there similarities? Sure. But you know what that model *isn’t* a model of? A geodetic satellite. It’s a model of this:

Yup. That there is the business end of an SP-100 space nuclear reactor.

Now, I don’t know that the model is *really* anything special… the payload it’s attached to is dreadfully small and dull. It’s not like it’s attached to a neutral particle beam weapon or something similarly intriguing, and the SP-100 was hardly a classified program. But still a nuclear reactor powered spacecraft has *got* to be more interesting than a geodetic satellite, yes?

See also:

SP-100 art

 This is what happens when people and institutions do not contract with me to vet all their aerospace stuff. Reasonable rates, people!
 Posted by at 4:27 pm

This would seem to be about the limit

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, science  5 Responses »
Jul 182016
 

Yumpin’ Yimminy!

Record-Setting Hard Drive Writes Information One Atom At a Time

It is a lab demo, which means it’s not ready for practical application. But it’s amazing data density: the entire Library of Congress in a cube 0.1 mm on a side (a very small grain of sand). One atom = 1 bit.

It’s not user friendly. A one-atom-thick grid of chlorine atoms is laid on a surface of copper; individual atoms are removed to create the ones and zeroes. Read/write speeds are slow, and the system needs to remain at liquid nitrogen temperatures. However… give it time and development. Compare the fractional-terabyte micro SD card in your phone with the “core rope memory” storage system from the 1960’s.

Using individual atoms as bits would seem to be as small as you can go. I don’t doubt that people are studying subatomic data storage, but that seems dubious to me. I suppose a way to improve the data density further might be some form of quantum computing… the actual physical data density might have reached its limit, but theoretically a quantum computer accesses a very large – potentially infinite – number of computers in alternate realities. So you could, maybe, have infinite data storage. Maybe. Of course, if you are accessing an infinite amount of data, you are probably accessing an infinite number of lies.

Assuming this system can be made reliable and stable over a range of temperatures and over time, the possibilities for data archiving become astonishing. If you could record all of human knowledge onto a grain of sand… stamp ’em out by the trillions. Use cement to form these memory-grains into bricks and build edifices. Paint space probes with these things. Record DNA strands onto them and record the DNA of many individuals of many species; use these to recreate whole species on distant worlds or in the future when species have gone extinct. A large number of copies can be carried at minimal mass; if there is data corruption, such as from cosmic ray impacts, the many backups allow a high probability of keeping the data clean.

 Posted by at 2:03 pm
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