Normally people are impressed with aircraft going higher, faster. And that’s certainly worth getting impressed about. But prepare to be impressed with aircraft going *incredibly* slow…
Someday it will be practical to 3D print structures of incredibly lightness using carbon fiber, with structures decimeters long and hair-thin, while still rigid. With skins of graphene and “rubber bands” made out of… well, I don’t know what, imagine the wondrously impractical ghostlike aircraft that will be built. With equally advanced optics and electronics, such aircraft could have cameras and transmitters. carried aloft by high altitude balloons, they could be released at the edge of space to fly for potentially days, covering hundreds or thousands of miles, their weak signals picked up by ground or space based receivers. I don’t know if cameras and transmitters will be good enough to make them useful intelligence gathering systems, but they are very unlikely to be detected by IR or radar. With their carbon constructions and extreme surface area to volume rations, when they are done they will likely degrade away to almost nothing very quickly.
Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world. There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres of solar panels and fill the seas with whale-confounding wind turbines. But there are issues beyond just what method will produce the volts and amps. For instance… all the batteries will need to be filled with metals dug out of the Earth; electric motors and a billion miles of power lines will need to be processed from all the copper we can scrape up. And the problem seems to be that at current resource extraction (i.e. mining) rates, we’re nowhere near able to deliver those materials.
So it seems we have a few options:
1) Turn Earth into a giant open pit. To hell with the environment… we need to save the environment!
2) Go all-electric… and just tell people to suck it up, they’ll learn to live with less. 15-minute cities will seem like the wildest dream of raving libertarians. Personal vehicles? Gone. Traveling any sort of distance at all? Prohibitively expensive to simply prohibited. Air conditioning? A myth from the Old Ones.
3) Asteroid mining. Everything we might need is available a million times over floating out in space; the effort to retrieve it will open spaceflight to mankind in a way never before dreamed, spreading civilization and terrestrial biology to the furthest regions of the solar system.
Which will it be?
There is physically not enough material at current extraction rates to produce one generation of technology (which needs to be replaced every 20 years or so) to phase out fossil fuels. We either better start ramping up our mining efforts or drop this fantasy. pic.twitter.com/XMNngP9cc3
Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices.
But then there’s this:
It’s not immediately obvious why the owner of a heating & cooling company would use a drone to drop dye packs into private and motel swimming pools. This makes the pools undesirable for swimming and costs the owners large sums to not only flush the pools but clean them. And it does not seem like his business benefits from that; if his company specialized in pool maintenance, it’d make sense. Maybe he just doesn’t like swimming pools.
The dye packs seem unlikely to be much of a health hazard… even if they are somewhat toxic, the sickly green color would dissuade people from getting in the water. But there are other things that could be easily dropped that would be much less obvious and far more dangerous. If the drone operators goal was terrorism or simple mayhem, I can think of a *lot* of things that could be dropped in a pool (or elsewhere) that would be nightmarish.
The goal of *most* crimes is not terrorism. Most criminals, I suspect, would be just as happy if their crimes went un-noticed. In those cases, drones are somewhat limited. They are useful for smuggling… crossing borders with drugs, say, or dropping drugs, phones, weapons, cash into prison yards. Most crime would seem to involve some sort of theft, and, so far, quadcopters seem of limited utility there. Given that shoplifting is not only a largely unopposed crime, in many of the worst districts it’s not even a *crime* anymore, you hardly need to make much effort to technologically innovate in the field.
Maybe there’ll be a bank robbery (or a heist movie) where the thieves get out of the bank and, instead of trying to escape with large sacks of cash, they hook them to waiting drones. The cash flies off, and now the thieves are unburdened as they attempt to make their escape.
And then there’ll be the *darker* bank heist movie: drones are used to make off with the sacks of cash. But that’s not the end: on some sort of predictable basis, subsets of that cash are released by drone over a public area. So people begin to gather in their masses to snag the bills. And then once a big enough crowd is gathered, another set of bills is dumped on them. This time, though, the bills have been soaked in smallpox or some such…
It sure seems like the era of “superhero movies” being a license to print money is over. Granted the DCEU flicks have not had a great track record, but the latest outing, “Blue Beetle,” seems to be shaping up to be a *disaster.*
The production budget was $104 million. The marketing was probably the same, so the cost of the movie was $208 million. As of today, it has taken in $59M domestic, $46M foreign. But the studio only gets half the US box office ($29.5M) and about a third of the foreign ($15.3M), for a total of $44.8M. The movie was released 19 days ago, so it still has time to rake in some more moolah, but unless some amazing miracle occurs I have trouble seeing it reaching $60 in actual returns to the studio. If it does it will have lost Warner bros “only” $148 *million* dollars.
Couple “superhero fatigue” with “Blue Beetle? Who’s that?” and you could have predicted that this wouldn’t do so great. Add in the disastrous marketing (a DC superhero movie that features a prominent character calling Batman a fascist is not a great idea) and this flick was doomed from the get-go.
A sad percentage of my cyanotypes fail… faded, blurry or spotty. Sometimes these failure are due to bad craftsmanship; sometimes to material deficiencies, and surprisingly often, environmental factors (humidity has wreaked havoc, see the “spots”). Mostly these get simply tossed, meaning a lot of material, time and effort are wasted.
But it occurred to me that while they’d stink as proper blueprints, they might make dandy giftwrapping paper. So I’ll try that. I’m thinking of ebaying this lot of A-12 diagrams. These are all about 24X36 inches. Five sheets; if these were all successful, that’d be more than three hundred dollars worth of blueprints. Obviously not worth that, some fraction. And instead of being mailed rolled, they’ll be simply folded and sent in a padded envelope. If interested, send an email. If I get an offer that overcomes my depression at the failure these otherwise represent, that’d be great. Otherwise, ebay.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is justly famed for his role in developing the A-bomb. He is considered to be something of a martyr for what happened later… during the “Red Scare” he was stripped of his security clearance. But was it actually wrong to do so? Was his interest in the Communist Party some minor childish dalliance from his earlier years… or was it more serious? The recent movie, and most modern depictions, portray him in a positive light.
But he *was* a Communist. What’s worse, there’s good evidence – lots of it from the actual Soviets – that he actively worked for them. He apparently slipped them heaps of data to help their bomb program, and then once the Soviets had the bomb, he worked to sabotage the American bomb program.
It’s probably well past time that Oppenheimer be re-examined. And if it’s finally concluded that he was a traitor, which there’s good evidence that he was, his name needs to be appropriately blackened as any Communists should be. We tear down statues of people who supported slavery 250 years ago; we tear down statues of people who supported the CSA for *whatever* reason 160 years ago; we would tear down statues of anyone who supported the Nazis 80 years ago. We should tear down statues and monuments and hagiographies of anyone who supported Communists a hundred years ago, fifty years ago or today.
Communism is every bit as bad as Fascism, and arguably worse; Communists *today* are universally terrible people because they have a century of blood-soaked failure that they *choose* to ignore. Communists, their supporters and their wishy-washy Socialist wannabes need to be called out for the monsters and morons that they are. And that includes historical figures.
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:
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.
It looks like your bog-standard Supernatural Entity Scary Horror Movie, with the twist being that the main characters are Indian immigrant and the Entity is something out of Indian folklore. OK, sure. We’ve all seen this before, with folk monsters from various ethnicities/nationalities/whatever pestering the appropriate people.
Here’s my idea, though.
Main characters are Popular Ethnic Minority Types… Indians, Japanese, Native Americans, Nigerians, whatever. They end up plagued by some magical critter from their homelands folklore. 80 to 90% of the movie is them on the run from Scary Monster, occasionally bumping into Clueless Standard White Americans. You know, the people who in these stories can be relied upon to be of no help whatsoever, because they have no knowledge of Diverse Supernatural Entity. But one member of the Doomed Ethnic Cast – let’s say a small-ish child, willing to talk to outsiders – explains the problem to Clueless White Guy. The Ethic Cast then runs off, leaving Clueless White Guy to look after them with a look of confusion. But then at the end of the movie, when Scary Monster looks about ready to pounce and kill everybody or send them all to Hell, or whatever it does, Clueless White Guy shows up.
I see two possibilities that I’d like:
1) Clueless White Guy shows up and sees Scary Ethnic Monster about ready to pounce. “Huh,” he says. Then he looks to the empty space to his right and says, “Hey, can you help out here?” Then there’s a rumbling sound that transitions to deep laughter. Scary Ethnic Monster Turns to look at Clueless White Guy, turns to eat *him,* but then stops. Because something from Clueless White Guys ethnic folklore, in this case Thor, manifests, whips out Mjolnir, and proceeds to beat Scary Ethnic Monster into a mess of ectoplasm. When Scary Ethnic Monster is finally destroyed, Thor hefts Mjolnir, leans, back, laughs some more. Winks at Little Kid, turns, pats Clueless White Guy on the shoulder (who hands him a bottle of beer), says, “I haven’t had that much fun in ages,” then walks off/fades away.
Or…
2) Clueless White Guy shows up and sees Scary Ethnic Monster about ready to pounce. “Huh,” he says. “You know what my cultural heritage is?” he asks the monster as it begins to pay attention to him. “Science, bitch!” Whereupon he whips out something akin to a proton pack and converts said monster into nonexistence. I would also accept “Doing some basic research,” whereupon he hits the monster with holy water, garlic, salt, holy books, silver, electricity, UV, ashes, tax forms, white oak, a handful of gerbils, a pissed-off housecat… whatever it is that is appropriate for the particular threat in question.
A few years ago a lot of people were blown away to find out that a sizable fraction of the population has no inner monologue. Some people can’t “hear” themselves think or “hear” remembered music, movies, things loved ones said. Related, some people can’t envision things: they can’t see an apple in their minds eye, because they don’t have a minds eye. For those of us who can, this is a bit mind blowing; I honestly can’t imagine how I’d go through my day. But for those who can’t hear or see within their minds, finding out that others can sounds like insanity. “You have voices in your head?”
Now here’s another way in which people differ: “conditional hypotheticals.” Take for instance, if Person A were to ask Person B:
“How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten yesterday?”
Most of us, I would assume, would respond with something like “I’d be hungry,” or “I’d be happy to be on my diet,” or “I’d be filled with an unquenchable rage to destroy my enemies and see their women driven before me.” You know, normal stuff. But there are those people who simply cannot understand the question. “But I *did* eat yesterday.”
In retrospect, over the years I’ve encountered this sort of thing *a* *lot.* For example, a few years after the invasion of Iraq and the taking out of Saddam, I got into a pointless online argument. My argument went along the lines of “What if we *didn’t* invade?” The point being that the inspection regime was coming to its end. Within fairly short order Saddam *would* have been able to restart his WMD programs. That could well have led to a far, far worse war. Or not, who knows, it can be fairly argued either way. But what astonished me was the other guy, when I asked my hypothetical: “But we did invade.” No amount of trying to get him to see alternate histories would budge him past the fixed point of “it happened, that way.” I thought he was just being a jackass. Now… perhaps he was just *incapable* of seeing alternatives.
Perhaps this issue is a feature of lower IQ. Perhaps, like the lack of an inner monologue, it can hit just about anyone. But whatever, such people should probably be kept from important roles dealing with planning for the future, especially when future plans are dependent upon learning from past mistakes. Someone with this issue would seem to make a *terrible* strategist.
“Our heroes aircraft is falling from the sky! Will they pull out in time to avoid a firey crash and bring the episode, nay, the entire series, to a screeching and unexpected halt, requiring not only clever writing but also difficult actor contract negotiations with the attendant risk of turning off the existing fans?”
Bah. No, of course the aircraft will pull out at the last second. Of course.
Lazy.
Those old enough to remember TV from the 80’s will doubtless *vaguely* recall any of a number of the same scene: the *enemy* aircraft, often a helicopter, has been struck. Gun, missile, onboard explosion, someone whacked the pilot, whatever, the vehicle is going down. Will it crash? Well, since these are the bad guys and, what’s more, *unimportant* bad guy characters, yes. It’ll crash. But at the last moment it’ll go down *behind* the nearest hill. You’ll know it crashed because a fireball that sure looks a whole lot like some combination of back powder and gasoline will go FOOOOM from behind the hill. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than crashing an actual aircraft on camera, and slightly less visually awful than using bad scale models or, perhaps worse, stock footage, to depict the event. But it still got to be an incredibly tired and predictable shot.
