I never quite “got” religion… not until I started reading HP Lovecraft and finally grokked the concept of “Cosmic Horror.” With that understood, I could finally kinda understand religion, just not as most religious folks would prefer it. I read tales of some god or other flipping his marbles and wiping out a family, a city, a world, and I see it as not a miraculous wonder but a Grade-A Cosmic Horror. And then when you get to the idea of a soul that can exist forever… yeesh. Couple that with the concept of damnation, or even just a soul getting twisted up to serve as little more than an MP3 player spitting out “holy holy holy” for all of eternity, and the horror approached mind-snapping levels.
But you don’t even need to deal with “God” to get to horrifically terrifying madness inducement. The Bible, for example, speaks of angels. These are often depicted as men or women with wings, but the Biblical descriptions of at least the seraphim – the highest “order” of angels – read like something Lovecraft would have dreamed up while tripping on an overdose of LSD.
HPL came up with some doozies. But nothing compares with the idea that you have an immortal soul and that you could spend an eternity being tortured because you did not follow rules that not only did you not understand, but were perhaps quite unaware of and perhaps they would have been impossible for you to follow (quick: don’t think of an elephant). In HPL’s world, for humans dead is dead, pretty much. But in religion, dead is just the start of an eternity of madness and agony. For HPL, the “gods” don’t care about you. In religion, the gods *do.* And chances are very high that they despise you. Wheeeeee.
Just as Riverside, Iowa, is the “birthplace” of Captain James T. Kirk, Bloomington, Indiana, is the “birthplace” of Captain Kathryn Janeway, Coffee-Fueled Destroyer Of Worlds. Unsurprisingly, local Star Trek fans are pleased by that; and they’ve erected a bronze statue of Captain Janeway.
So, what do we have here? A celebration of a person who:
1: Celebrated STEM and objective reality such as 2+2=4. This is pure white supremacy.
2: Traveled through and explored regions without the consent of those regions. Colonialism.
3: Wiped out or overthrew several species. Genocide.
4: Spoke English, chose to center old 19th-century European fiction (and 15th century European historical figures) for her recreation, with the local European characters portrayed by and depicted as ethnic Europeans. Erasure!
5: Showed prejudice against certain peoples/races. Racism!
6: Consumed a great deal of coffee without citing and celebrating the fact that it is a product of Arabia. Cultural appropriation!
7: She maintained a conventionally-accepted body mass index. Fat shaming!
Clearly Captain Janeway is problematic.
NOTE: This is sarcasm. Don’t attack this – or any other – statue, ya friggen’ animals.
It’s fairly long (as such things go), but the summary is this: billionaires are working to open the space frontier… and Certain Groups are demonizing them for it. They believe that the Evil 1% will develop spaceships and take off and live in luxury in space while plunging the rest of us schmoes back on Earth into permanent dystopian grinding poverty. Th best evidence that these sort of people can come up with is that space flight will be expensive, that it’ll cost a couple hundred grand just to pop up above the atmosphere, millions to go to orbit, hundreds of millions to circle the moon. And this, for the first generation of truly commercial space tourists, will be true. But this is *always* the way of things. The first home computers? Blisteringly expensive. Now you have a 1970’s supercomputer in your pocket. Jet travel? it was originally so expensive that it gave us the term “jet set,” because it was so expensive that it was *necessarily* fancy. Space travel will start of expensive and, if allowed to progress through the normal course of evolution that the free market provides, will eventually become cheap enough that at least a sizable fraction of the public could at least reasonably consider a trip to Space Station V.
Given the current dismal state of public discourse, I can easily imagine a future where SpaceX gets Starship up and running… and the US government, perhaps under pressure from special interest groups, perhaps due to it’s own grasping nature, will throw up regulations and laws that demand that commercial spaceflight be cheap enough for everyone right then and there (likely impossible thus killing off commercial passenger spaceflight), or that passengers – especially colonists to Mars – demographically match the population (or perhaps some particular politically-chosen ratio), or that spaceflight be proven so safe that it’s impossible to actually be allowed. If this happens, it doesn’t mean that space won’t get colonized… I’m sure the Chinese and Indians will be happy to do it without us. From the standpoint of those who are protesting in the US, that’ll be just as well given how much they hate western civilization.
And given the trajectory that 2020 has been on, I *really* hope that SpaceX has a fantastic security system in place. It would suuuuuuuuuck if the CCP managed to convince their running dog lackeys in Antifa to swarm the place and burn down the Starship facilities.
What I find especially amusing is the title “The Elysium Effect,” taken from the now largely forgotten sci-fi flick “Elysium.” In that, the richest of the rich toddle off to a vast and physics-defying space station while Earth turns to garbage. The general understanding is that this is some sort of critique of capitalism and wealth inequality… but if you pay attention to the movie, it’s anything but. The rich left and live in luxury, yes. But Earth didn’t turn to crap because the rich made it so… but because the *poor* made it so. Los Angeles is depicted as essentially Mexico City North… vast slums, a population probably measured around a hundred million, the English language being a rarity on the ground. Enlightenment values have evaporated. Western civilization, engineering rigor, all the things that Certain People decry but that make a society rich and successful were wiped away in a flood of refugees and unassimilated immigrants. “Elysium” is not a cautionary tale of wealth inequality, but a cautionary tale of a society that doesn’t control its borders. *Of* *course* those who can will flee in the face of collapse. And we are all better off if the means of escape is available.
Summary: gene sequence ROBO1 is found to be associated with the development of gray matter in the right parietal cortex, which is associated with mathematical performance.
Suggested hypothesis: people who argue that 2+2 does not necessarily equal 4, or that “2+2=4 is an expression of white supremacy or the patriarchy or western imperialism or INSERT DUMBASS IDEOLOGICAL NONSENSE HERE” have ROBO1 gene sequence variabilities that lead to *reduced* formation of that right parietal cortex gray matter. Suggested experiment: do some genetic testing and see.
The question would then become what to do about it. If it turns out that genetics leads to a difference in mathematical ability *and* differences in political ideologies, will that mean that people will start voting for candidates based on their genetic testing results? Will that mean that science and engineering firms will not be allowed to “discriminate” by not hiring candidates who fail math tests if they have the gene sequence for bad math abilities? Will it mean that math test results will be driven in part based on your genes… this person has to give mathematically correct answers, that one doesn’t, in order to achieve the same grade?
Gotta admit to some mixed emotions here. So one Steven Gallant beat a firefighter to death and was sentenced in 2005 to 17 years in prison. That seems rather light to me, but then I don’t see why any out-and-out murderer should ever see the light of day ever again. Call me a little strict, I dunno. Anyway, last year he was out of prison on a day release program to help with a conference on prisoner rehabilitation, when another Mostly Peaceful Religion Enthusiast decided to go on a stabbing spree in London. Gallant grabbed a Narwhal tusk and stymied the Cultural Enrichment Practitioner until the Police could get there and shoot him. As a result of his actions, Gallant has been given a *bit* of a reprieve by the Queen of England… ten months off his sentence.
On one hand… someone who does something heroic should be recognized and rewarded for it. On the other hand:
“Gallant had been among a gang who battered his dad Barrie to death outside The Dolphin pub in Hull in April 2005. It was so savage paramedics who tried to revive him couldn’t find his mouth.”
Ummm. Fortunately, the murder victims son seems ok with this turn of events. But if he hadn’t? Had Gallant had a proper sentence of life plus 180 days (an extra six months in his cell to freshen the air for the other murderers on his cell block) and got a sudden *actual* get-out-of-jail pardon, and if the murder victims family had a real problem with that, then there would be a real quandary. In that case, I think the best solution would be to let him out, but to declare him outlaw. Just like the good old days.
I watched the two Presidential “Town Hall” broadcasts last night. There were very VERY clear distinctions between the two:
1A) Trump: The moderator spent a good chunk of the time (seemingly the majority) interviewing Trump, not letting the audience ask questions
1B) Biden: The moderator let the audience do almost all the asking
2A) Trump: the moderator was adversarial in the extreme
2B) Biden: The moderator was friendly
Each approach seemed fine in its way… on one hand, it’s the job of the press to grill the candidate; on the other the “town hall” format is supposed to be for regular people to ask questions. Just interesting to note the stark difference. Also noted: somehow, *nobody* seemed to ask Biden the important and obvious questions, such as “how do you think history will remember you if you try to enact your claimed policies and you incite a wholly unnecessary civil war (with the gun grab) and/or destroy the US economy (Green New Deal)?” or “so just how much money did Hunter make from selling influence to the Chinese, Ukrainians, Russians and who all else?” Every question was a softball.
So… working away on Terribly Important Aerospace History Book Project Number Two today on my ~15-year-old Windows XP laptop when it decided that it needed to take a nap. When I tried to rouse it back to functionality, all it was able to tell me was that some Windows file or other was missing or corrupt, and to fix the problem I needed to reboot Windows using the original CD-ROMs. Which have been missing for at least two states.
This has been my main work computer for many years… all of my Aerospace Project Reviews and USxP’s were written and illustrated on it, most of the CAD models I’ve created were done on it. Most of that work has of course been backed up… but, irritatingly, not the most recent. The two latest as-yet unfinished USxPs, previewed HERE and HERE, don’t seem to have been externally backed up because apparently I’m kind of an idjit.
Fortunately, a local mom-and-pop computer repair place was *apparently* able to convince the computer to open in some minimally functional Windows mode, and is – hopefully – in the process of copying over some 47 gigabytes of data to an external data storage device. With luck tomorrow morning I’ll get a message that it’s done and I’ll have everything back. But even then the computer will be a doorstop; the cost and bother of repairing it would exceed its usefulness.
I used to work in ordnance back in my United Tech days… mostly stage separation and solid rocket motor ignition systems. With those, deflagration and detonation are two rather different concepts that you *usually* tried to keep separate. In short:
Deflagration: something’s burning. A piece of solid rocket propellant, a pile of gunpowder, a handful of boron potassium nitrate pellets, once they are ignited, will burn at a fairly constant rate typically measured in fractions of an inch per second.
Detonation: something undergoing an energetic and *really* *fast* chemical reaction. Your det cord full of pentaerythritol tetranitrate is reacting at around 20,000 feet per second.
The speed of the reaction is the thing that separates the two… slow vs. fast. Detonation typically moves through the material in question at faster than the local speed of sound. You’d think that “a quarter inch per second” and “five thousand feet per second” are far enough apart that the two concepts will never meet, but reality is quite different. That slowly burning pile of gunpower on the tabletop? Light a match to it and it’ll merrily burn away for a few seconds. You’ll get light, smoke, sound and heat. What you won’t get is any meaningful sort of blast or shock wave. Now, take that exact same handful of gunpowder and put it into a sealed, sturdy container and light it off. As it begins to burn, the gas generated has nowhere to go. The pressure very rapids begins to rise. For many pyrogens, the burn rate is proportional to the pressure. So a quarter inch per second at sea level can get blisteringly fast at a few thousand atmospheres. As a result, that gunpowder that would have produced no shock wave now has a burn rate well in excess of the speed of sound. If the container can hold the pressure just long enough, the whole thing will combust and *then* the container falls apart, and you get a cheerful little blast. Congrats, you’ve built a pipe bomb. Expect a knock on your door from the ATF momentarily to tell you what you’ve won.
Some materials, like BKNO3, are largely insensitive to pressure. Their burn rate is pretty much constant where in a vacuum or in a thousand atmospheres. These materials are handy for igniters in rocket motors, since they’ll operate the same in nearly every circumstance.
The stuff they put in bombs, though, can be tricky. The explosive of choice for the Brits and the US in WWII to today, RDX (and the chemically related HMX), is reasonably stable and has about 1.5 times the power of TNT. It’s great stuff if you want to blow stuff up. RDX is a dry crystaline powder (like salt), but when mixed with TNT and a bit of wax you get a castable substance known as Composition B, still used in ordnance today. Somewhat similar to Comp B is “torpex,” a mix of RDX, TNT and aluminum powder. Now largely obsolete, Torpex was used mainly for torpedoes, but was also used in some of the biggest bombs of WWII like the Tallboy and Grand Slam.
Now: shove a detonator (a small device that produces an actual detonation shockwave) into a blob of Comp B and set off the detonator, and the blob of Comp B will happily take that detonation and run with it. Note: Composition B is not the same as C-4 “plastic explosive” which is mostly RDX mixed with a small percentage of other chemicals that serve as plasticizers, turning the dry crystals into something like modeling clay.
Anyway, back to Comp B or Torpex: if, instead of a detonator, you take a blob of the stuff and set fire to it with a match, you will get… a fire. A simple fire does not provide what Comp B needs to proceed from deflagration to detonation, so the fire will most likely remain subsonic. But, like gunpowder, if you contain the burning Comp B in a pressure vessel, the pressure goes up, the burn rate goes up, and at some point the Comp P gets frustrated with piddly deflagration and goes high order. Blammo.
Why do I mention all this out of the blue? Cuz why not, that’s why. I’ve been working non-stop on Illustrated Aerospace History Subject Book 2 for a while, taking a break now and then only to watch civilization being torn apart and cast down by the worst people the US has produced since the Commies and the Klan. So while you might think that watching scumbags block roads and assault passersby and tear down statues brings thoughts of deflagration to detonation transitions to my mind, it was actually a news report out of Poland:
A British Tallboy bomb with 2,400 kilograms of explosives was found in a river and was being defused when it detonated. The story is lean on the details I would have preferred, but it seems that it was being burned in place. This is a perfectly cromulent way to dispose of a bomb: drill a hole in it, set it on fire. If the hole is big enough, the gases escape and the pressure doesn’t rise. Hole *isn’t* big enough, you’ve made a pipe bomb. If the thing is underwater, the pressure of the water will actually make things more difficult if your goal is to keep things at deflagration. What the story leaves out is if that’s what the plan was. Another perfectly valid way to defuse a bomb is to just blow the damn thing up. When you do it that way you are pretty well assured that you’ll get it all, but there is of course the little problem of whether or not the blast is going to fark up the surroundings. In a river… seems like the best way to go is detonation. But as you can see in the video below, there is some nearby property, including some sort of observation tower, that could have been trashed but instead seems to get a bit of a light wash.
The process requires an actor to basically be a “puppet” for the final product, akin to motion capture. With current technology, both the appearance and the voice of the actor can be transformed into those of someone completely different. The line that jumped out at me:
The actor, in other words, serves as a puppeteer, never to be seen in the final product. The person’s appearance, gender, age, and ethnicity don’t really matter.
Huh. Pay attention to that, Hollywood. Here is how you can make non-insulting historical epics and still hope to win an Academy Award. Recall the new diversity rules for Oscar contenders:
STANDARD A: ON-SCREEN REPRESENTATION, THEMES AND NARRATIVES To achieve Standard A, the film must meet ONE of the following criteria:
A1. Lead or significant supporting actors
At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.
Asian • Hispanic/Latinx • Black/African American • Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native • Middle Eastern/North African • Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander • Other underrepresented race or ethnicity
Huh. Well, folks, here’s your loophole. Let’s say you want to make a Viking saga, or something from Shakespeare or something about King Arthur or Peter the Great or Charlemagne or the Thirty Years War or Leonardo da Vinci or… whatever. but you’re pretty sure it’ll be an Oscar contender. What to do? Simple: hire, say, Idris Elba to play King Arthur and Viola Davis to play Lancelot and Salma Hayek to play Morgana and Hari Kondabolu to play Merlin. And then replace them in post: John Wayne as Arthur, Cary Grant as Lancelot, Marilyn Monroe as Morgana and Richard Harris as Merlin. You have, in fact, done what the Academy standards wanted you to do, and yet you’ve also made a reasonably accurate version of the flick.
As the technology improves, the argument for using real – and real expensive – actors to portray their un-deepfaked selves will get weaker and weaker. The world is full to overflowing with perfectly good actors who can portray anyone… they just don’t look the part. Now they won’t need to. We could soon enter an era where “acting” and “appearance” become wholly separate commodities. Actors might be known by name, but not by face. And regular schmoes with no acting chops whatsoever could make a good bit of extra cash by selling the rights to their appearance… go into a booth, strip down to your skivvies (or further, for extra cash) and you are 3D scanned to ridiculously high precision. Perhaps even X-rayed or sonogramed to get the skeleton right. Takes ten minutes and you’re back out onto the street. A year later you get a letter telling you that, hey presto, you’ll be portraying Darth Blarg in Star Wars Episode 15, The Sith Cash Grab. Two years later the checks start rolling in… a few tens of thousands for use in the movie, a few more tens of thousands for all the posters and T-shirts and action figures that use your likeness. Not a lot of money by current Hollywood standards, but all you did was stand there and strike a few poses for a few minutes.
In short… load half the number of passengers onto a cruise ship, set out to sea, pull into no ports, return home. All passengers and crew to be tested for Commie Cough prior to boarding.
I’ve been on a grand total of one cruise, an Alaskan coastal cruise some years ago. It pulled into several ports for excursions, but it seemed to me that the cruise itself was the main point of the exercise. I imagine that a cruise ship around – but not quite to – interesting locales, complete with notably fewer passengers, could sell quite well, even at a substantial markup. Close off the interior cabins, sell only the exterior cabins – the ones with good views and lots of fresh air – test the crew *daily,* go bonkers with the luxuries, and these things seem like they’d do quite well.
