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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.

 Posted by at 10:47 pm
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.

 Posted by at 6:26 pm
May 182016
 

We’ve been hearing for some years now that the police have been unfairly targeting and killing black men. Hence the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Well, numbers, data, the facts, are the important thing in *any* discussion. Not feelings, not anecdotes, not beliefs. Not what you want to be true, but what is true. So, the Washington Post has been collecting data on police shootings and has released their 2015 findings. So, what we got?

990 people were shot dead by the police in 2015.

494 of them were white (49.9%)

258 of them were black (26%)

172 were Hispanic (17.4%)

66 were other&unknown (6.7%)

OK, so, blacks, who comprise 13% of the population, where shot dead by the police at twice the rate you’d expect based purely on population. Racism, right? Slam dunk?

But then there’s the FBI, with *their* database, “Crime in the USA, 2014.” Specifically Table 43A, Arrests by Race. Here we find that blacks make up 51.3% of those arrested for murder and non-negligent homicide; 55.9% for Robbery; 33.1% for Aggravated Assault; 30.2% for Burglary; 30.7% for Motor Vehicle Theft; 40.7% for Weapons. These all seem to be the sort of crimes that would put the criminal in the crosshairs of the cops, and properly so. This says nothing about *why* these people are committing these crimes… whether it’s due to social ills, poverty, lack of playgrounds, crappy edumacational systems, bad parenting, lead in the water, lead in the air, rap music, drug abuse, listening to the likes of Al Sharpton, or whatever, the simple fact certainly seems to be that black men seem to commit violent crimes at an elevated rate. And the interesting thing here is that they’re getting shot dead by the cops at a rate *below* what you’d expect given the crime rate.

An interesting writup on this, focusing on the category of “unarmed black men shot by cops,” is available here.

 Posted by at 4:46 pm
May 172016
 

From back when General Motors was studying spacecraft, here’s an early 1960’s video showing tests of three means of surface propulsion for lunar vehicles:

The Archimedes Screw system was interesting, but it seems to me that there’s virtually no chance that it would be a good idea on the moon. The rough, razor-sharp regolith would seem likely to sandblast those shiny metal screws in little short of no time.

 Posted by at 11:45 pm
May 172016
 

A 1977 Rockwell concept for how to expand the utility of the Shuttle system: move the payload from the Orbiter and put it in a shroud ahead of the External Tank. This would have allowed for much larger-diameter payloads to be carried. The ET would of course have had to go into orbit with the Orbiter itself. More info and diagrams of this are in US Launch Vehicle Projects issue 1.

uslp 01-07-1

 Posted by at 8:33 pm
May 172016
 

While I realize that I am often rather flabbergasted by peoples motivations, I can’t be the only one to be stumped at why some people claim to be so terribly upset that someone else won’t take their money to bake them a cake. Go somewhere else. Or go on a damn diet. Are these solutions really that difficult?

But if the motives of the Social Cake Justice Warriors are difficult enough to figure out in their most basic form, imagine someone who *fakes* a minor bit of offensiveness and then sues the supposed offender, demanding not only millions in cold hard cash but the firing of innocent people.

Remember The Fake Whole Foods ‘Hate Cake’? Pastor Apologizes, Admits He Lied

In short, a black gay pastor (I might be wrong… maybe he’s a gay black pastor. I’m not up to date on the current hierarchy of victim groups) bought a cake decorated with “Love Wins” on it, and then added a three-letter slur word, claiming that the Whole Foods he bought the cake from did it. Specifically, the “victim” claimed the gay cake decorator added it. (Surveillance footage revealed that the added word wasn’t there when he bought it.)  The “victim” then proceeded to file a lawsuit. The company sued him right back. The “victim” has now admitted that he lied, and has dropped his lawsuit…and for some reason the company has dropped their counter-suit.

Now, again I may be wrong here, but generally when Person A sues Company X, it is because they have been harmed in some way by a faulty product or fraudulent behavior or some such. I’m at a loss as to how this guy, even if his claim of a vandalized cake was true, could claim any sort of injury. If the courts were to have been insane enough to let him win because someone wrote a naughty word on his cake, rest assured that someone *saying* a naughty word would become lawsuit bait… and since that would be simply a matter of hurt *feelings,* then someone telling this pastor that his religious beliefs are wrong (because he’s worshiping God wrong, or worshiping the wrong god, or worshiping a mythical god, or… whatever) would seem an invitation to a lawsuit.

Whole Foods, on the other hand, *has* been harmed by this guy. Even if their reputation ends up intact, they still had to spend a lot of manhours dealing with this… internal investigators, PR flacks, lawyers, the whole thing. Plus the poor schmoe who the “victim” claimed scribbled the acronym for the Film Actors Guild onto his cake undoubtedly suffered considerable *real* stress. The “victim” here should, IMO, be sued into the permanent poorhouse. I’d be interested in what criminal laws can be brought to bear. With luck, someone will send him a Whole Foods cake in prison, with a file sculpted on it in frosting.


And for those on the other side: if someone comes in and wants your cake baking company to make them a cake that says something your religion disagrees with it, I have a simple suggestion: mask your contempt and take their money. Put your B Team on the job and get on with life, secure in the knowledge that you have drained their bank account slightly while filling them up with sugar and empty calories, shortening their lives.

 Posted by at 7:12 pm
May 172016
 

Home again. Would have been home slightly sooner; it’s my own fault for not pencilling in, in advance, the blizzard I ran into. Silly me for thinking mid-May might be a tad late for such things.

Anyway, much to take care of before things return to normal. So in the meantime, please to enjoy this trailer for “Son of Zorn,” which when I first heard of it I thought sounded stupid, but now the 10-year-old Thundarr The Barbarian fan in me is laughing his ass off. Yeah, yeah, it’s probably more a “He-Man” parody, but I never got into that, and have to fall back on what I know.

 Posted by at 5:08 pm