Aug 242023
 

First, good news from the world of medicine:

UK’s first womb transplant deemed ‘massive success’: ‘Over the moon’

One woman (40) donated her womb to her sister (34) who was born with a malformed womb. So both women can have kids. This is good news. The first uterus transplant was in 2013 in Sweden, so this has been going on a while, if not widely.

 

But since we can’t have anything nice, here’s where this will go:

Trans womb transplants ‘10 to 20 years’ away after UK’s first successful operation on cis patient 

Weird enough that some people want to transplant wimminbits into biological dudes. But it gets weirder:

 

Taxpayers should fund $300,000 UTERUS transplants to help transgender women get pregnant, suggests authors in AMA Journal

 

The curious thing is that the Venn Diagram of “people who support taxpayer funding it so guys can get pregnant” and “people who thing we should reduce the population if western nations” probably overlaps a *lot.*

 

Besides the basic insanity of using surgery to affirm delusions, there’s the issue of what it’s gonna do to the prospective offspring. At the least they’ll know that they’re the product of Mad Science; they will also be raised by someone claiming to be their mother, but who does not have the upbringing of a woman. *THEN* there’s the issue of… even if the womb works, what’s going to happen to the fetus? DudeMom won’t produce the same hormones a woman does. HShe’ll doubtless have to spend the term of the pregnancy constantly getting shot full of drugs and hormones in a desperate attempt to give the embryo a hope in hell of gestating correctly. And then, there’s the end: the new womb probably didn’t come with a new pelvis. The male pelvis does not have space for a proper birth canal. So any offspring resulting from this will, like French Bulldogs, likely have to be brought about via C-Section.

 

And then there’s this to consider: in the second article above, it’s suggested that it’ll be 10 to 20 years before transplanting wombs into males becomes a reality. But… in 10 to 20 years, chances seem decent that bespoke organs can be produced via 3D bio-printing, cloning, etc. Use the “mothers” own DNA to create a womb with “moms” own DNA.

And then there’s this: in 10 to 20 years, the United Kingdom will be a fundamentally different place. When the UK becomes London writ large, the culture will be upended. It seems a bit unlikely that these sort of surgeries will be performed in a Britain, any more than they’ll be performed in Uganda or Saudi Arabia.

 

 Posted by at 9:29 pm
Aug 242023
 

US Justice Dept sues SpaceX over hiring practices

 

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.

 

How about No. SpaceX is building the future of national security. I say let them be as got-dayum picky as they want to be *especially* when it comes to hiring people of dubious loyalty.

The next time we get a President who is non-insane, non-senile and pro-America, they need to go through the halls of the Federal Government with  leafblower hooked up to a backpack full of pink slips.

 Posted by at 8:18 pm
Aug 222023
 

US citizens urged to leave Belarus immediately

The State Department, in its warning, encouraged Americans still in Belarus to depart the country immediately and categorized the country as a Level 4 risk, the highest security warning.

Two possibilities spring immediately to mind:

1) The US Government knows that something is about to happen

2) The US Government *wants* Putin to think that something is about to happen

 

There are of course less charitable explanations for seemingly random proclamations:

 Posted by at 4:43 pm
Aug 182023
 

Thanks to ebay and my fabulously lean bank account, I have recently procured a number of items of potential interest:

“NASA Earth Orbital Space Station,” a poster-sized lithograph from McDonnell Douglas depicting a space station that tumbles for artificial-G.

“Re-Entry Payload Launch Vehicle,”  A *brief* General Dynamics presentation on a vehicle to launch re-entry vehicles such as MIRV warhead shapes

 

“Proposed Development Program on Rocket-Type Missiles,” a 1948 Convair report on early ballistic/boost glide missile concepts, that would lead to Atlas. Includes some fantastic large format layout diagrams.

 

“Detail Specification for Consolidated Vultee Model 117 Airplane Class VR Transport Flying Boat,” August 1950, all the details on the then-brand new Tradewind.

 

 

“Detail Specification for Class VP Long Range Patrol Seaplane,” Consolidated Vultee 1946, all the details on a proposed flying boat patrol/bomber

32 issues of “Astronautics” magazine from 1957 to 1969, mostly 57-59 and 63 or so.

The lithograph and the reports will be scanned and put forward for consideration for monthly rewards; the magazines will have the interesting bits scanned and made available to the subscribers/patrons.

 Posted by at 11:02 pm
Aug 172023
 

So a lone 23-year old decided to make a Scooby-Doo fan film. To do this, he used computer generated stop-motion to replicate the look of a Rankin-Bass holiday TV movie from back in the day… and an AI voice generator. This latter was due to the fact that this project had no budget to afford voice actors. The resulting dialog is a *little* stilted and stiff, but it really does sound like the original Scooby cast, and if you didn’t know it was done by AI, you might not pick up on it. Well, ok, who cares. It’s just a little fan film. However, some professional voice acting units got in a snit, pitched a fit… and basically ticked off the majority of those who gave a damn. The result of *that* is some blowback against the actors strike. The end result will likely be *more* acceptance of the use of AI for voices.

Heh.

A Fan Wanted To Make a Scooby-Doo Cartoon, But Ended Up Sparking an AI Debate

The fan film in question:

 

Right now the professional writers and actors don’t want to write or act. But they also don’t want the *amateurs* to do their thing, either. This sort of attitude is exactly the sort of thing that irritates the public. This sort of thing will accelerate the obsolescence of actors and writers… and studios as well.

 

 Posted by at 10:50 am
Aug 122023
 

Since I live in the horribly, hilariously politically corrupt state of Illinois, “voting” is something that on one hand, doesn’t really count, and on the other hand, you can do as often as you like. So voting for a guy running for Congress in Texas, for the equivalent seat from Illinois? Sure, why not. Perhaps some of the people who facilitated Gropey Joe’s “win” in 2020 can be persuaded to use their talents to convert votes for Herrera in Texas into votes for Herrera in Illinois. Heck, maybe they can install him not only as an Illinois Congressman, but an Illinois State Supreme Court Justice and also Governor.

 

 Posted by at 4:45 pm
Aug 102023
 

I posted a reply and was *instantly* locked out for twelve hours. Why? Because I pointed out that in Star Trek, society is post-scarcity (not socialist, as was claimed by the guy I was replying to) and that mental illness is largely a thing of the past (as evidenced by “Dagger of the Mind” and “Whom Gods Destroy”) and the whole gender madness we’re currently experiencing is long past (see “Enterprise” episode “Cogenitor” where it is made repeatedly and abundantly clear that humans have a grand total of two genders, and that a third is weird and alien and really kinda disturbing to a lot of folks). The vague Twitter message said something about violating the rules on advocating violence or some such nonsense.

 

So either the sensitive little soul I replied to was lightning fast on his “my feelings are hurt, make the bad man and his opposing viewpoint go away” button, or Twitter has a bot that does it automatically. In either case, the “Twitter is a free speech zone” claim looks a little dubious to me at the moment.

 

Update: Now Twitter says it could take more than a week for my account to be restored to functionality.

 Posted by at 12:53 am
Aug 082023
 

People who have lived in a place for centuries often hold eccentric, old, downright obsolete facilities in higher regard than people who hav4e just moved in and have no links to the place. Example: a centuries-old pub was sold to a developer. It was signed up for historic protection, but before the paperwork could go through a pile of rubble was mysteriously dumped into the road leading to it. And then it mysteriously caught fire, with the pile of rubble blocking the fire department. The brick structure remained standing, opening up the possibility of being restored; it was then very quickly razed to the ground mechanically. Gosh, I guess it’s gone, nothing left for it but to built cheap housing on the very valuable plot of land…

 

Police ‘reviewing all evidence’ on cause of Crooked House pub fire

Mayor calls for Crooked House pub gutted by fire to be rebuilt ‘brick by brick’

 

 

Huh. It’s a mystery.

 

 Posted by at 3:45 pm
Aug 022023
 

If LK-99 pans out as a true room temperature superconductor, it really does seem like it’ll be world changing. That’ll be great: no more need to cryo-cool electromagnets, making maglevs practical and making CAT scanners and the like a hell of a lot cheaper. And making the nightmare scenario of running out of helium much less nightmarish. They’ll make electric motors run cooler and more efficiently and, so I’m led to understand, rings of superconductors can be fed vast amounts of electricity which will losslessy just zip around the ring until called upon. More complex than a battery, but with the potential for *vast* energy densities. At last electric cars might be truly practical: an energy storage system allowing for a thousand miles range and the ability to be recharged in minutes rather than hours, using storage systems based on *lead* rather than rare earths. What’s not to like?

Some preliminary studies by independent labs suggest that at least some aspect of LK-99 are panning out, though nobody is ready to declare victory just yet. And even if the stuff works as advertised, to become truly useful it’ll need to be manufactured at high quality on an industrial scale.We don;t know squadoo about doing that just now. It might turn out to be easy enough for laymen to whip up batches of the stuff. it might turn out to be very difficult.

Here is what I think would be the absolutely best scenario: it’s possible to make the stuff to *adequate* quality on industrial scales, but it’s difficult and expensive. Unless… manufacturing takes place in microgravity. Then the stuff comes in with glorious quality and reliability. This would not only make the world better for all the reasons that the superconductor would, it would kick off space industrialization. Woo.

I would, however, be satisfied with the stuff working and being ground-manufacturable. Decades ago the Shuttle was supposed to kick off space industrialization via microgravity manufacturing of crystals and pharmaceuticals, but people figured out how to make that stuff on the ground.

 Posted by at 10:52 pm
Jul 282023
 

Starships first not-exactly-successful launch was filmed not only from the ground, but from the NASA WB-57 flying at altitude. Apparently at least five cameras were trained on the launcher; video from two have been released, while three remain classified. i would *assume* that the classified three display some combination of:

1) better tracking

2) Better image quality – better sensor and/or telescope

3) Different spectra… IR and the like

Even with the somewhat dodgy tracking and potato-quality images, these are interesting. You really get a sense of how Starship flopped around the sky at the end there. Which was both sad and incredibly impressive… no other rocket would have survived as long flying *sideways.*

 

 Posted by at 4:16 pm