Giggity!
May 202016
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May 192016
This is unlikely to occur, but you never know. This go-round has been the “you never know” election cycle.
Get Ready for a Third Party Run from Bernie Sanders
If Bernie runs third party against Hillary, it’ll open the door for a conservative/libertarian third party candidate to take on Trump. If that happens… yeesh, get ready for some post-election squabbling on par with the 2000 election, just with more street battles and riots.
May 192016
Got a spare $54 million laying around? Then you should invest $1 million of that into the Tip Jar you see right over there —> and use the other $53 million to buy an Embraer Lineage 1000E with the sunroof package.
The standard plane (click to really, really embiggen):
And the sunroof package:AA
And the sunroof package:
Private Jets Get the Door-Sized Windows They Always Needed
May 192016
This video explains the limits on how far humanity can go in space, assuming that we never figure out FTL but are restricted to sublight speeds. You might at first think that we should be able to go just about everywhere, even though it might take a ridiculously long time to get there… but you’d probably be wrong. In short, the Local Group of galaxies is gravitationally bound together, so we should be able to go where we like among the nearest hundred trillion or so stars. But the more distant groups of galaxies? The expansion of the universe is not only moving them away at a good fraction of the speed of light, that rate of expansion is increasing. A sublight ship might be capable of reaching speeds faster than the current rate of recession, but the starship will not be able to catch up with those distant galaxies as they accelerate away. At some point in the distant future, the other galactic groups will have receded so far that no light from them will ever make it here, and the skies at the edge of whatever remains of the local group will be utterly dark, without even cosmic background radiation. Some far-future observers will look out into the universe and see nothing… and so they won’t see evidence of the expansion of the universe, and thus won’t understand anything about the Big Bang. For them, it really will look like the universe is eternal and static.
Best to get on that hyperdrive program, I guess.
May 192016
Not using transgender pronouns could get you fined
Employers and landlords who don’t use pronouns such as “ze/hir” to refer to transgender workers and tenants who request them may be subject to fines as high as $250,000.
The Commission on Human Rights’ legal guidelines mandate that anyone who provides jobs or housing must use individuals’ preferred gender pronouns.
Nope.
New York City: not even once.
Is it rude to not use someone’s preferred personal pronoun? I suppose, maybe. Is it the governments job to use force and violence to force people to speak in certain ways? F&*k no. Any government functionary attempting to enforce this guideline should be fired, sued into permanent poverty on 1st Amendment grounds, never be allowed to be employed by any branch of government ever and be put on the same sort of “don’t let this person anywhere near your children” list as rapists and murderers. Any attempted enforcer of this rule needs to be doxxed and shamed online and in real life to a degree that even Trigglypuff might express some sympathy.
And anyone so self-centered and needy for attention that they would actually whine to the government that someone isn’t calling it “xe” needs to be publicly mocked and publicized to the point that random people passing it/him/her/xe on the sidewalk recognizes it/him/her/xe, and promptly calls out, “hey, it’s that asshole.”
May 192016
So, if you read a news report saying that a recently-deceased 16-year-old girl in Britain had suffered from racism, what image pops into your head? Was she an immigrant from Syria? Nigeria? Nicaragua? India? Pakistan? China? You know, someone you could look at and say “that person is clearly not ethnically British?”
Nope:
Ummm.
Polish girl, 16, found dead at school ‘had suffered racism’
Sure, her name might have been an unpronounceable consonant-salad (“Przybysz?”), but to my eye she doesn’t look like a different race than some form of Brit. Perhaps as an American of Euro-mutt ancestry I’m not as keenly aware of the fine gradations of ethnicity that people can kill each other over (remember Serbs and Croats whacking each other? Put ’em in the same outfits and I sure couldn’t tell them apart.
May 192016
American B-52 bomber crashes in Guam
The article is pretty lean on details, but given that all seven crew managed to escape unharmed from the plane *after* it crashed (“shortly after takeoff”), and the lone photo shows the plane on fire but not scattered across the landscape, I’d guess it had some sort of engine trouble and either flopped off the end of the runway or tried to go-around but didn’t quite make it.
Whatever the cause is, I would almost certainly be unsurprised. These planes are about twice as old as the pilots who fly them. Remember the XB-70, the Mach 3 superbomber from the early 1960’s? It was intended to *replace* the B-52.
May 182016
A few minutes ago – call it 20 past midnight – I was quietly reading “Abaddon’s Gate” when I heard an explosion outside. More specifically, a distant explosion. Not a single “bang,” but more of an extended “crackle.” And the direction was “up.” Took me a minute or so to get outside, but nothing further out of the ordinary. Cloudless night, so it shouldn’t have been a reflection (though the sound could have bounced off of different thermal layers, I suppose). It made me think that *maybe* I heard a small rock break up in the upper atmosphere during entry. Probably not, as that would be just too damn interesting.
May 182016
Now CNN doesn;t have to cover stories about how Bernie Sanders supporters are the actual violent whackjobs that the Trump supporters were supposed to be… there’s an airliner missing! Expect wall-to-wall coverage, with hours going by with no actual new data being relayed in that time.
EgyptAir Flight 804 disappears with nearly 70 people aboard
An Airbus from Paris to Cairo has vanished like a fart in the wind over the Med, just inside Egyptian airspace. Feel free to speculate… the journalists certainly will. Was it a black hole? Aliens? Did a rift in the space-time continuum swallow the plane and send it back to pirate days or dinosaur times? Sure these are the most reasonable explanations.
May 182016
CBS will air the premiere of their new Star Trek series in January 2017. The few details that have leaked out in rumor-form make it sound intriguing… it will, reportedly, be an anthology series, with each season covering an entirely different cast in a different Star Trek era. The rumor is that the first season will be set between Star Trek VI and the TNG era, on a non-Enterprise vessel, with lots of doin’s with Klingons.
Too bad you probably won’t be able to see it, because after they air the premiere, CBS will promptly *not* air any more episodes but instead stream them online behind a paywall. This right there will keep the regular viewers from tuning in, leaving it only to the actual pre-existing Star Trek fans to pony up the six bucks a month for the online access. But you know what Star Trek fans tend to be good at? Computery things. Star Trek will be pirated at a rate not seen since Game of Thrones.
I expect that I’ll watch the premiere when it airs, then pick up the “complete series DVD set” about six months later.