Dec 092022
 

I am going forward with the return to cyanotyping. I’m gathering the supplies needed to rebuild the capability; learning some lessons from before, this setup should be a little better and a little bigger. I should be able to make prints 24 inches by up to 7 feet. It’s a bit of a chore and certainly an expense, but the end results will, I hope, be an improvement over what I produced before.

 

As before, I plan on taking commissions. I don’t care what it is… aerospace diagrams, ships, architectural diagrams, sci-fi movie prop diagrams, gay wedding cake layouts… if it can be blueprinted, I’ll do it (for a fee). So if you have anything along those lines you’d like blueprinted in the old-school cyanotype fashion (white lines on a Prussian blue background), made by hand using chemicals, sunlight and effort rather than hitting “print,” let me know. Something I will try again is blueprinting onto linen. I ran off a few back in the day; interesting, but perhaps a bit niche.

 Posted by at 9:17 pm
Dec 092022
 

Not so much for the US.

WNBA star Brittney Griner released from Russian detention in prisoner swap for convicted arms dealer

She is an *acknowledged* drug-transporting criminal. Whether you agree with Russia’s laws on such things or not, those were the laws. And while the US went to the bizarre extreme of returning to Russia an arms dealer for Griner, the US has done doodly squat for other prisoners currently languishing in Russian penal colonies. Why? because Griner has various and sundry privileges that others don’t. see, for example, Marc Fogel. Very similar circumstances of bringing in a small amount of pot; almost no public outcry, no celebrities or TV NPCs shrieking about how the US needs to bring him back. Why? Feel free to guess.

But hey, at least the Russian get “The Merchant of Death” back.

 Posted by at 6:40 am
Dec 082022
 

I’m conflicted:

Big cat bill unanimously approved by Senate, heads to Biden’s desk

The legislation prohibits any “import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce” and the breeding or possessing of such wildlife. Possession of big cats and cross-breeds would be limited to wildlife sanctuaries and state universities, as well as certified zoos. … Current owners of big cats will be able to keep their animals but are prohibited from breeding, selling or acquiring any of the prohibited wildlife species. They are also banned from allowing their animals to engage in contact with the public and must register the cat with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within 180 days of the bill’s enactment.

Hmmm.

Big cats are often owned by people wholly unable to care for them correctly. But on the other hand, there are more tigers in private hands than in the wild. On the gripping hand, legislating “you can’t own that” is never a good thing. The passage of this law will doubtless be used by some to say “Well, we can ban the ownership of assault rifles. We can ban the ownership of standard capacity magazines. Internal combustion engines. Bitcoin. VPNs. Books we don’t like.” Etc.

It’s unclear to me what exactly will happen with all the privately owned big cats, especially the ones used in crappy “attractions” for some sort of income. I suspect at least some will be simply driven into the sticks and let go. Which won’t be good for anybody.

 

Perhaps the thing to do would be to start off by walling off Central Park in New York and turning it into a free-range sanctuary for one particular species of big cats… tigers or lions or some such. Won’t be able to sustain a lot of them, but it’ll be a start. All of those gigantic and horribly expensive sportsball stadia built at taxpayer expense might also serve.

 Posted by at 6:25 pm
Dec 072022
 

Some years ago I produced a range of cyanotype blueprints of a number of aerospace subjects. The hardware needed for this was disposed of when I left Utah at the end of 2019, so starting again seemed unlikely. However, someone has expressed interest in a special commission. Rebuilding the hardware needed will be an expensive chore, and sadly getting the large format transparencies printed looks like it will be much more difficult here than it was in Utah. Nevertheless, at this point it looks probable that I will restore that capability sometime in the next few months, assuming one further detail can be ironed out.

You can see my now-defunct catalog here:

https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/catalog/cyan.htm

 

When I get back to it I will probably focus on the larger format stuff rather than the smaller prints. I have plans on how to improve upon the prior hardware to make things work better and more efficiently. If there are any of the former large format prints you’d like to see returned to production, or you have any prints you’d like to see, let me know. And once this is up and running I plan on trying to take commissions, working with a local print shop to find customers interested in this somewhat unusual and certainly obsolete form of art.

 

If you have a diagram you’d like me to turn into a cyanotype, contact me. Commissions aren’t going to be restricted to aerospace subjects; naval, architectural, movie props, whatever you’ve got, so long as it *can* be blueprinted, once things are in place I should be able to do it.

 

 

 Posted by at 11:54 am
Dec 062022
 

… of just what constitutes this garbage. What fraction is paper? How much plastic? And how much is just sticks and weeds, stuff not normally considered “garbage” in the ecosystem?

 

 

In any event, this mechanism seems to be working quite well. I wonder if it could be made actually productive, though, rather than just harm-reducing: instead of shipping the garbage off to be landfilled somewhere, run it directly into an incinerator. Use the heat and the water to spin a turbine; use the turbine to drive a generator. Use the generator to power not only the mechanism, but feed excess power – if any – into the grid.

 Posted by at 7:15 pm
Dec 062022
 

BREAKING: Army Chooses Bell Textron’s V-280 Valor Tiltrotor to Replace Black Hawk

… the V-280 Valor tiltrotor beat out Sikorsky-Boeing’s bid — the Defiant X coaxial rotor blade platform — in the years-long competition to design the future long range assault aircraft, or FLRAA, a key part of the Army’s plan to modernize its aviation platforms. 

 

While I’m pleased to see the Valor going ahead, I *also* hope that the Defiant goes ahead in some fashion. There’s no reason why we should only have one VTOL transport. The Defiant would be spectacular in different ways than the Valor.

 

 Posted by at 11:36 am
Dec 062022
 

This is weird. And if this is confirmed, it’ll mean… something.

 

Asymmetry Detected in the Distribution of Galaxies

As if playing a cosmic game of Connect the Dots, the researchers drew lines between sets of four galaxies, constructing four-cornered shapes called tetrahedra. When they had built every possible tetrahedron from a catalog of 1 million galaxies, they found that tetrahedra oriented one way outnumber their mirror images.

Huh.

 

Might be related to why the universe has more matter than antimatter. Or maybe it’s just that Azathtoth is right handed. Who knows.

 Posted by at 7:16 am
Dec 052022
 

Looks like the Ukrainians are taking the war home to Russian military forces, this time hitting Engels Air Force Base and potentially destroying two TU 95 “Bear” bombers. Unknown as yet *how* the Ukrainians pulled this off.

 

I remain unconvinced that hitting Mother Russia is necessarily the wisest course for Ukraine; it could will be used to feed the Russian propaganda machine, to say that Ukraine actually is a threat. On the other hand, taking out Russian military assets like strategic bombers costs Russia *real* money. So long as the Ukrainians strictly stick to military targets, this is potentially a good thing for them. Now the Russians will have to redeploy their air defense systems.

 Posted by at 8:42 am
Dec 022022
 

Rap music is, by and large, talent-free, devoid of artistic or cultural value. So how the hell Kanye West got to be a billionaire, I’ve no Earthly idea. But being a billionaire with years of fandom behind him, every time he does or says *anything* the news media makes a big deal of it. And so lately he has been losing his mind, going off on weird anti-Semetic rants. This has culminated with being interviewed by noted crazy person Alex Jones and, from the looks of it, *Jones* comes off looking like the sane one. Just Some Guy has about the best response to the thing: mockery.

 

I don’t know why people are acting like this is something new. They seem to forget his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” conspiracizing nearly 20 years ago.

 Posted by at 11:40 pm