“Strange New Worlds” is not canonical Star Trek

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May 052022

The headline should come as no surprise, since it follows the events of Star Trek Discovery. However, there was always the possibility that the producers would make some effort to rectify the many, many mistakes and oversights of STD, but… nope. While it is too early to judge whether or not the show is any good, given the people behind it are largely those responsible for STD and STP, skepticism about it emerging as anything but lamentable trash is warranted. That said, several details about the show make it perfectly clear that it is not set in the same continuity as “Star Trek:”

1: The Gorn are discussed. Given that this show is set more than a decade before TOS, and the Gorn weren’t known to the Federation until Kirk & Co. ran into them…

2: Some history of Earth was dropped: the January 6 2021 Capitol hijinks are shown, and described as a prelude to “the second Civil War,” which led to the Eugenics Wars, which led to World War III. Since the Eugenics wars occurred in the 1990s, it would be tricky for events from 2021 to cause them.

3: A star chart lists the planet “Sarpeidon,” a world that won’t be encountered until Kirk & Co. get there more than a decade later. Given that the planet has a fully functional time machine program that winds up sending the *entire* planetary population elsewhen, the existence of Sarpeidon would have been either one of the biggest military centers of the Federation, or one of the biggest secrets; all the time travel monekymotions of STD Season 2 could have been dispensed with.

On more subjective fronts, none of the characters that carry through from TOS seem to be at all the same characters, just people with the same names. Nurse Chapel, in particular, seems a completely different person. Spock and T’Pring are shown together… and T’Pring proposing marriage to Spock is shown, an odd thing given that theirs was a marriage arranged by their families when they were children, and then they didn’t really have much to do with each other. T’Pring seems quite un-Vulcan as well. The Enterprise itself is an entirely different ship, far more generic sci-fi-flashy and far less character-filled than the classic. The bridge is unrecognizable… much bigger, with a *huge* window up front rather than the somewhat dinky viewscreen from the original.

All in all… unsurprising.

Nuclear Diamond Batteries

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May 012022

YouTube has for several months kept suggesting videos on “nuclear diamond batteries.” Most of the videos I’ve glanced at looked like clickbaity rubbish about fraudulent pseudoscience… and ever now and then I briefly watch one of the videos, and they kinda don’t disappoint.

The Nuclear Diamond Battery itself seems a reasonable enough idea. Small quantities of some radioactive substance such as Carbon 14 or Nickel 63 are formed into thin films and sandwiched between thin films of diamond semiconductors. The radioactive element emits beta radiation – high energy electrons. The electrons are captured and converted to electricity by something akin to a photoelectic cell. The radiation is captured and prevented from escaping, and in the process converted to electricity… sounds like a winner, right? And apparently prototypes have been built that work. And thus we get videos like this:

The video promises batteries that are safe and last for thousands of years. And while this seems to be true, there is one problem that these sort of videos tend to not mention. From the Wikipedia article on the subject:

In 2018, researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials (TISNCM), and the National University of Science and Technology (MISIS) announced a prototype using 2-micron thick layers of ⁶³Ni foil sandwiched between 200 10-micron diamond converters. It produced a power output of about 1 μW at for power density of 10 μW/cm³.

That’s ten *micro* Watts per cubic centimeter. A battery one meter on a side (which, using the density of diamond of 3.5 g/cm3, would mass 3,500 kilograms) would produce a power output of… ten Watts. Granted, it would do so for thousands of years but… ten fricken Watts. The Tesla Model S has a total motor output of 615,000 Watts. Such a car would require a Nuclear Diamond Battery with a volume of 61,500 cubic meters, massing somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred thousand *tons.* The Seawise Giant, the largest supertanker in history, could carry two of these batteries.

Ummm.

Next.

Someone needs to be yeeted into the sun

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Apr 272022

An eight-year-old poured gasoline onto a tennis ball, lit it on fire and threw it at the face of a six-year-old. The story is of course lean on details, but if you listen to the report, the neighbors sound like real pieces of work. The bully had apparently previously put the victim in the hospital with a physical assault resulting in a concussion, and numbers of kids reported seen playing with gasoline and setting stuff on fire.

Connecticut boy, 6, severely burned in bullying attack, his family says

I don’t imagine this story will get a whole lot of press. The curious thing is that if instead of the victim being a 6-year-old kid, it was a *cat,* there’d likely be more outrage; I know I’d certain be more vociferous. And it’s not because cats are necessarily more valuable than kids (though I’d argue that the worst, angriest, feralest alleycat is worth any number of the bullies in this story), but we as a species and a culture have become rather numb to terrible things being done to children, even *by* other children. Coupled with the fact that cats, dogs, possums, raccoons, whatever, are pretty much by definition “innocent” and incapable of evil… while this story demonstrates that children are perfectly capable of evil and demonstrating the validity, nay, the necessity of some sort of eugenics program.

Art!

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Apr 262022

The third of three pieces of vintage aerospace concept art – the actual paintings, not reproductions – that I recently procured from ebay has arrived. This is a 1960’s Hughes concept for a “Hot Cycle” Rotor Wing VTOL aircraft. The prior two – a 1970’s Bell AMST concept for a four-turbojet C-130 test aircraft and a 1980 Bell concept for a hovercraft to allow fighters to launch from bombed-out runways – were just able to be scanned on my flatbed scanner. But the Hughes painting was much larger, so I digitized it via photography, resulting in a 10,878X7500 pixel (about 36X25 at 300 dpi) image. Several iterations of the image – the stitched-together final image, and a version that was fade-corrected to make it look more like the actual painting – have been uploaded to a Dropbox folder with the Bell art.

These paintings are currently framed and will be hung on my wall… for a time. At some point my plan is to donate them to a good museum. The Smithsonian NASM is the obvious default, but I’m interested in alternatives. A museum that would *want* these and would protect yet display them would be ideal.

If you happen to see other aerospace concept art on ebay that’s not going for *insane* amounts and you’d like to see it preserved… let me know. I now have four pieces (not counting things like blueprints); not a great collection by any measure, but it’s something.

I am going to continue to work on digitizing this painting. I’ve been trying to find a local flatbed scanner big enough to scan the whole thing all at once; if I can get that done, the results will also be uploaded to the Dropbox folder.

If you’d like access to the folder – and thus the high-rez images, as well as some PDF documentation I’ll be adding – here’s an opportunity to do so. These paintings were not cheap to secure, so there’s a bit of a charge ($25):

Procuring these was not cheap, but now they are saved for posterity.

If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.

Top 5 Murdered Franchises

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Apr 252022

I have hopes that at least some of these – Star Wars and Star Trek – can be returned from the dead. But to do so would require both a virtually complete change in “leadership” (i.e. those who are currently in charge of the IP’s) and an adequate passage of time. They should be left to sit quietly for a few years, in which time the hatred that recent misadventures have engendered in the fandom could cool off, and better ideas could be gathered.

I remain of the opinion that what the owners of Star Trek need to do are two main things:

1) Gather all the rights back into one place, allowing *real,* and not “25% different,” Star Trek to be made.

2) Create an anthology series. But *not* one helmed by a bunch of suits. Instead, open it to the fandom. Have anything from lone writers to whole amateur production teams (“Axanar,” “Continues,” etc) give them pitches. Those that seem pretty good get funded to make a small number of episodes… one to four, say. Something that could be a series. Then make a season with up to perhaps ten wildly different stories. One set on a ship at the same time as TOS, using actual TOS designs. One set in the movie era. A Klingon or Vulcan-specific yarn. A post-Voyager show. What-the-frell-ever. If, out of those ten shows, one is a smash hit? It gets turned into a full series. If three or four of the stories are wildly popular? Then great, now you can have four series that are popular right out of the gate.

Sure, there are counter-arguments. One big one is that ten wildly different stories would require ten wildly different sets of costumes and props and actors and starship bridge sets. Granted. But: do them sequentially and repurpose as much as possible. Do as much as you reasonably can with virtual sets. Don’t go nuts with the budget; let it be known right up front that the budget for these sort of things is limited. The fandom will accept that, and perhaps embrace it: I will die on the hill that TOS 1701 is the best starship design to date, and that both DS9 and Enterprise showed that the old-school bridge – which can be rented in New York State, IIRC – still looks awesome. You don’t need STD-level production standards for these little mini-shows. Because what you’re selling isn’t the effects; nobody complains that STD or STP have crappy effects and production standards – you’re selling the concept, the characters, the plots. If just one of these lower-budget short subjects knocks the viewers socks off with characters on par with Kirk and Spock and McCoy, *then* you can lavish an effects budget on it reasonably secure in the knowledge that things should go well.

Hell, I even wrote a short story a year or so ago set on a Klingon tugboat. Is it good? Dunno. Probably not. But if those in charge of Star trek seemed like they actually cared about Star Trek again… hell yeah I’d turn it in. There’s even my odd little “Artifact L-374-Alpha” thing from… holy crap, exactly one year ago today. Weird. OK… Anyway, that would likely make a poor basis for an ongoing series, but a season-long miniseries? Maybe.

Is such a thing likely? Sadly, no. So we’ll have to live with murdered franchises for a while, being dangled before us on strings like marionette zombies.

The Northman

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Apr 242022

This is a strange movie. It’s strange on purpose, though. It is not a fantasy movie like “Conan the Barbarian,” which it has been compared to; but it has a lot of fantastical elements based on Norse spiritualism. Characters get whacked out on shrooms and have visions; Valkyrie show up to carry people to Valhalla; an invasion of a burial mound involves a fight against a draugr; magical seeresses show up and dispense wisdom; dead folk give advice; magical swords. But the way it’s filmed, it can be argued that none of these magical elements are *real,* but instead are the results of imagination and hallucinations.

What’s not hallucination is the rather visceral violence shown. “The Northman” is a violent flick to be sure; lots and lots of people have horrible things happen to them. And most of the people who get hacked and stabbed aren’t villains or warriors, but just regular schmoes who live in a world red in tooth and claw. And that’s not too unrealistic: up until on the order of a century ago most people on this planet could expect to encounter – and perhaps be done in by – violence. The “hero” of the movie is not a saint; he partakes in raids on settlements meant for nothing more noble that stealing people for slaves… and killing their children. He’s not a “good guy,” merely the protagonist. There’s a lot of “Yikes” here.

That said: the movie is in its way damned awesome. The cinematography, the scenery, the badassery and the WFTery are all entertaining as Hel.

It seems unlikely that it’s going to be a blockbuster; it may well not even be a financial success. It cost around $90 million to make, but it has so far made around $12 million (domestically) on the opening weekend. When I saw it on opening day, there were a grand total of three of us in the theater.

Now, one way to determine the value of something is to see who its enemies are. And lo and behold, “The Northman” has people who are opposed to it, as exemplified by this article:

Norse code: are white supremacists reading too much into The Northman?

The problem the author has with the movie is that this movie appeals to “the far right.” That it has Nordic symbols, that the men are masculine, the women feminine, and, perhaps worst of all, a movie set in 9th century Norway, Russia and Iceland features exclusively Scandinavian and Slavic people. Where are the Africans and Indians and Chinese and Mexicans? Not to be seen here… because they didn’t actually exist in 9th century Norway, Russia and Iceland. The author then goes on to say that “The Lord of the Rings” and “Braveheart” are tainted by white supremacy by not having The Narrative-approved stunt casting. The funniest thing of all is that the author despairs that *any* movies might appeal to “the far right,” while apparently either ignoring or perhaps approving of the vast pile of movies and TV shows that are made specifically to appeal to “the far left.” In fact:

By this stage, in fact, film-makers ought to have realised that if the far right doesn’t hate your film, you might be doing something wrong.

A similar hate-piece with a truly entertaining headline:

White supremacists hijack The Northman: Blockbuster starring Nicole Kidman features Nordic lore popular with alt-right groups who hail its ‘all-white cast and pure masculinity’

“Starring Nicole Kidman?” It goes on:

White supremacists have claimed ownership over the new Viking Hollywood blockbuster The Northman, which stars Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor-Joy.

Ummm… yeah, those two are in it, but neither is the star of the movie. The star of the movie is a *man.* You know… the Northman. This article goes on and on, including tweets from random nobodies, to claim that this movie somehow advocates for Nazism and white supremacy… based on nothing other than the fact it has a bunch of white people in it.

A movie that is historically accurate, or accurate to the lore or authorial intent of the original subject, is “catnip” for the far right. This makes it clear that to appeal to the left, a movie should lie, to twist, to distort, to fill itself with leftist propaganda subtle or gross. Perhaps the author should consider that he’s the baddie.

Go see “The Northman” and simultaneously enjoy a few hours and irritate some leftie-loons.

Oddly, the headline isn’t satire

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Apr 172022

Ummm…

Jesus Christ’s Resurrection Is Probably The Best-Documented Historical Event Ever

Errr… no.

One of the “arguments” used here is that the works of Virgil and Horace are known from manuscripts written more than four centuries after their deaths. Thing is, though: the fact that the manuscripts exist indicates that they had authors. Occams Razor would have it that if the author claims to be named “Virgil,” then, great, attribute the work to Virgil.

Additionally: if you claim that you had oatmeal for breakfast… sure. I’ll believe you. If you tell me that you miracled oatmeal out of thin air and that the bowl was made out of Adamantium and the spoon from Vibranium and that the oatmeal tasted so good that it gave everyone in a five meter radius eternal youth… I’m gonna have to Press X To Doubt. The nature of your claim weighs on the believability of your claim. This Virgil talking about the goings-on of politics? Believable. Someone discussing miracles? Gonna need some evidence.

The writer if this dubious screed also claims that:

Additionally, the apostles’ willingness to die for their claims has tremendous evidential value, also confirming the truth of the resurrection. No one will die for something he invented or believes to be false.

Uh-huh. A belief in something that isn’t so is not proof that the thing is in fact so. Joseph Smith, after all, the inventor of Mormonism, died for his beliefs, as did a bunch of other first-generation Mormons… and I’d bet a nickel that the author here does not believe that Mormonisms claims about Jesus wandering around North America are factually accurate. “Heaven’s Gate.” “Nazism.” “People’s Temple.” “Solar Temple.” History is jam-packed with founders of nonsensical movements who were willing to die for their objectively wrong beliefs. And in fact a vast number of Muslims and Hindus are more than happy to die for their beliefs: does the author think that this lends weight to the factual accuracy of their beliefs?

The author claims that there are many “manuscripts [that] preserve the deeds and teaching of Jesus in the New Testament (about 25,000 total).” Maybe… but only the Bible can be considered even close to a primary source document. I often see Flavius Josephus used to back up the historicity of Jesus… but Josephus lived around 37 AD to 100 AD. He wrote about encountering Christians around 93 AD, and described their beliefs. That *they* believed that Jesus had been resurrected is hardly surprising. But there is little evidence that Josephus believed it, and an important bit of evidence that he didn’t: he was Jewish before he met the Christians, and he was Jewish afterwards. A Jew who believes in the New Testament is generally considered a “Christian.”

In the end, the terribly bad reasoning on display in the article linked above does not surprise me: the author is a “senior fellow at Discovery Institute.” The Discovery Institute spends a great deal of time and effort pushing the “Intelligent Design” myth. Anyone who uses the “watchmaker” analogy for how evolution works should never, *ever* be taken seriously.

Maybe Jesus existed, I dunno. Maybe he was nailed to a cross, died and came back. Dunno. Maybe when he died a great big earthquake wiped out a good chunk of Jerusalem, and that somehow got left out of the records. Dunno. Maybe when he died the graves in the area opened up and a whole bunch of zombies clambered out and started spooking the locals, and that rather startling detail somehow got left out of not only all the Roman records but also three out of four of the gospels. Dunno. Maybe it’s all true. But using fraudulent logic and outright lies is not a great way to convince some people.

So… Happy Easter I guess.

One art, please

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Apr 162022

D’oh. My “gotta save money” goal just took some substantial hits… I bought some vintage *original* art, the *actual* paintings, on ebay.

Send help.

First: A 1980’s idea for a small unmanned hovercraft to help an F-15 lift off from a damaged runway:

Second: a 1970’s Bell concept for a C-130 with four turbojet engines as a demonstrator for the AMST program:

My credit card just went “WTF are you *doing?*”

Feel free to hit that “tip jar” or subscribe in order to do you part in enabling this sort of financially dubious aerospace history collection and preservation. What I think would be best is to scan the bejeebers out of these then donate them to a good archive or museum.

There’s another much more interesting piece I’m hoping to hear something good on regarding an offer I made.

Trending towards extinction

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Apr 082022

Gallup polling from February indicates that Americans are quickly heading towards becoming a non-reproducing people:

LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%

7.1% might not sound like a lot, but that’s of the entire population; it’s *far* higher the younger you get, and it’s trending upwards very quickly.

Gen Z’ers have gone from 10% LGBT to 20% in only four years. No reason to assume that that will stop; they might get to 30% by the time they’re mature. But the *next*generation will seemingly start off from there or higher. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Gen Z+1 will be 50% or more LGBT by the time they mature, while the relatively few members of Gen Z+2 might be 75% LGBT.

The trends are there. The obvious question is *why.* “Because humans are naturally that way” really doesn’t seem to comport with any examination of humanity throughout history. Additionally, if the rise in LGBT is due to the increasingly accepting culture, then why aren’t the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers jumping on board? Is there something in the environment? Something in the food, in the drugs, in the drinking water, seeping out of the plastic bottles? The question arises again: if it was found that some chemical produced in the last few decades has caused the rise in LGBT, what would happen if there was a serious effort to *ban* that chemical? Who would protest, and would they win?

There is another possibility. Yes, American culture is much more accepting of LGBT than it was a few decades ago. But we’ve gone beyond “acceptance” and leaped into “advocacy.” Take a look at Libs of TikTok: it is *filled* with public school teachers proudly announcing how they are grooming children as young as kindergarteners to decide that they are gay or trans. Kids are *dumb* and impressionable. If we had armies of teachers trying to convince six year olds that they were in fact unicorns, you bet your ass we’d have lots of kids convinced that they were unicorns. And as those kids grew older, if society persisted in supporting them in their belief that they were unicorns, and that it was cool and preferable to be unicorns, and that anyone who didn’t support their unicornness was evil and stupid, it’s safe to assume that unicornness would increase.

As the native American population fades away, it will simply be replaced by people whose cultures don’t engage in this sort of thing. A hundred years from now, American might be evenly split between the Hispanic Catholics and the Muslims, with anyone else being a statistical rounding error (maybe some Mormons in the Free State of Deseret; I would have assumed some Amish, but they’ll doubtless be wiped out by then). This assumes the US lasts that long.

There is another possible approach: mockery using the Critical Race Theorists words and logic against the groomers. Honestly it’s unlikely to work… but at least we can have a good laugh as we watch western society recede in the rear view mirror.

‘The issue is SYSTEMIC grooming’: Critical Grooming Theory thread mocking principles of CRT is the best damn thing you’ll read today

"Critical Grooming Theory"

When some people hear "groomer," they immediately apply a Western, individualistic lens. But they fail to realize that "grooming" is a systemic, structural problem deeply embedded in our "ways of knowing."

A thread. 1/

— Neil Shenvi (@NeilShenvi) April 6, 2022

A lot of large format scans

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Apr 072022

I just dropped off at the print shop a little over one hundred large format prints for scanning. I usually do this in small handfuls, so this is a new approach. It’s also an expensive approach. In that pile of prints are just over 50 diagrams of early-ish rockets/space launch vehicles, all from the same source; the other fifty-ish are something new: submarines. American subs from the early days to a few decades ago; some are commercial diagrams, but most are official blueprints depicting a wide range of submarines.

Following receipt of the scans, there will follow a long process of going through them and trying to figure out what to do with them all. Some will go into the monthly rewards catalog; some will perhaps go into the “Drawings and documents” catalog, and some, like the subs, will go into a brand-new catalog. A lot of them will *not* be distributed that way, since they are commercial items. Almost all will require a lot of cleanup, a heart-breakingly time consuming process sometimes. A lot of expense and effort, right when I’m broke and busy. So, always on the lookout for a way to make a nickel, here’s what I can do: if the idea of 50 rocket diagrams and 50 submarine diagrams (some of them will be *very* large) sounds interesting to you, I will make them available as a sight-unseen lot for $175 for anyone who responds via the email address below. I don’t know for sure how long the scanning process will take; probably more than a week. At the end of that time I will have a massive block of data uploaded to Dropbox: I’m handwaving a guess of around ten gigabytes. So if you’re interested in the diagrams, or you just want to help a feller out with this rather niche activity (preserving aerospace and now submarine history), send me an email, and when the scans are available I will send out PayPal requests.

A *few* of the submarine diagrams may be deleted prior to being sent out. The ones with the rather interesting “distribute these further and the FBI will come and say howdy” notifications. I’ve seen one such; it was not included in this batch. I didn’t see that on any in this batch, but I will look closer when I can see them digitally.

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