$200 a round rocketgun

 awesomeness, blather, history, Hmm..., rockets, spacecraft, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Aug 162023
 

Here’s something you don’t see too often… someone firing *numerous* rounds from a Gyrojet. Each of these .45 caliber rounds are solid propellant rocket units, last manufactured in the 70’s or so. They apparently run about $200 *each,* which makes me wonder if there might be a market for newly manufactured ammo. As a practical  home defense, police or military weapon… the Gyrojet basically wasn’t. It took something like 50 feet for the round to reach maximum velocity, which means at close range it might just bounce off an opponent. But as a range toy they might be fun, especially if the cost per round could be dropped substantially. And there’s no reason why it can’t… sure, each round is more complex than an equivalent conventional bullet, but they are just some basic parts with 1960’s rocket propellant. And that last could doubtless be improved; better propellant, better grain design and better manufacturing of the nozzle plate could *really* boost performance.

The claim is made here that the Gyrojet was designed to be used in space because they were uncertain if conventional gunpowder firearms would work in a vacuum. This is untrue; nobody with the least bit of understanding of the chemistry of gunpowder and how guns work thinks that guns *won’t* work in space. However, conventional firearms do have three major issues for space applications:

  1. Recoil.
  2. Thermal issues: exposure to sunlight and vacuum means that small metal devices like guns heat up *fast.*
  3. Vacuum issues: grease, gun oil and the like boil off quick, meaning they can’t be used in space.

 

The Gyrojet has far lower recoil than conventional firearms. And the Gyrojet is a far simpler mechanism, made largely from stamped metal sheet to far lower specifications. This means it can heat up without jamming, with virtually no need for lubricants. So the Gyrojet seems like it’d make a dandy sidearm for the USSF. Bump it up to .75 caliber and you have yourself a light bolter. And perhaps best: home manufacture of Gyrojets would be *easy.* A 3D printed Gyrojet, with some *basic* metal parts, would not only be easy to make, but with vastly lower forces imparted on it than a conventional firearm, it’d be far less likely to explode.

 

So… where are the new-manufacture Gyrojet rounds? At $200 a round for the vintage stuff, you can start off *real* expensive and still undercut the current market.

 

 Posted by at 6:52 am

So I’ve been locked out of Twitter…

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
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

I’m not saying it’s “The Hunter Biden Story,” but…

 art, blather, Forward!, Hmm..., politics, youtube  No Responses »
Aug 032023
 

A Sam Jackson-starring movie about money laundering via crappy paintings. Hmmm…

 

This is, of course, not a new idea. It’s actually a pretty obvious one; the value of art is about the most subjective form of monetary valuation you could dream up. Even more than a dollar bill, a painting is objectively nearly worthless, with it’s “value” being almost purely determined by what people *believe* it’s worth. A painting that was slapped together in ten minutes could sell for a million dollars if you can persuade someone that it’s worth it. Or it could sell for a million dollars if, say, you want the Chinese government to give you a million dollars without being clearly seen as taking bribes.

 

Hmmm. Can I interest anyone in a million-dollar cyanotype?

 Posted by at 10:23 pm

The best of all possible worlds

 awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, rockets, science, spacecraft  No Responses »
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

Vocal Fry

 blather, Hmm..., politics, science, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 282023
 

A description of the phenomenon, the physics and history. Includes a discussion of the politics of it, how it’s supposedly misogynistic. But included in the video are a number of old movie clips showing how vocal fry (at least used to) feature a lot in depictions of High Upper Class British Dudes… who are every bit as annoying as a Kardashian. Remember: we fought two wars to keep those inbred aristocrats from ruling over us.

Also includes some clips of native Finnish speakers deploying the vocal fry that they seem to have developed to a high art. A high, brain-erasingly irritating art. I think I’d lose my mind listening to that all day. Gah.

Most of this is informative, but there is some virtue signalling. Part of that is self-evidently and unironically dumb. The narrator claims that part of the reason why a lot of people don’t like vocal fry in young American women is because it makes them sound like they’re trying too hard to display excessive confidence. And part of the reason why a lot of people dislike the polar opposite of vocal fry, “uptalk” (where the speaker ends sentences with higher tone, making it sound like they’re asking a question), is because it makes them sound like they have an excess of 8uncertainty* about the statements of fact they’re making. Narrator says something like “Make up your minds, misogynists.” The here’s the thing: “vocal fry = excess confidence” and “uptalk = excess uncertainty” are not mutually exclusive concepts, and thus you don’t need to choose… both can be entirely true and valid simultaneously, since they cover very different things. Kinda like how you can dislike both being doused in liquid nitrogen *AND* dislike being torched with napalm. But other than that sort of thing, it’s an interesting video.

 Posted by at 3:43 pm

No need for the blue monkeys?

 awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, science, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 282023
 

The driving motivation behind everything in the movie “Avatar” was humanity’s need of the mineral “Unobtanium.” It was special since it was a room temperature superconductor, allowing for a lot of advanced technologies. In the movie, humanity would travel light years and wipe out primitive alien civilizations to get it. But recent news suggests that we might not need to… but only if the study turns out to be true. And scientists are dubious.

 

A spectacular superconductor claim is making news. Here’s why experts are doubtful

Korean scientists claim to have created a room temperature superconductor (up to 127 decrees C). The video *seems* to back that up, but who knows. This will need to be tested and replicated. And the chunk they’ve displayed seems kinda cruddy… but the history of prior low-temperature superconductors seems to be that the first bits out the gate are cruddy, with quality following along as production techniques are refined.

*IF* this pans out, there are two fantastic takeaways here. The first is “hey, awesome, room temperature superconductor.” Maglev trains and such become a lot easier. CAT scanners won’t need liquid helium supplies to keep their magnetic bearings working.

But the second thing to note should be noted and noted *hard:* the material is primarily lead, doped with copper oxygen and phosphorus. You know what I *don’t* see there? I don’t see “rare-earth elements that we have to go hat in hand to the Chinese to obtain.” We don’t need to throw money into third-world hellholes to have them scrape vast pits into the ground. Domestic mining and production would seem entirely feasible.

That’s all great. I hope it bears out. But history is full of fabulous press releases that turned out to be fraudulent or simply wrong. That’s certainly possible here. We’ll just need to wait and see.

 

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the material. See how far you get before you go “I dunno what the frak they’re talking about:”

The chemical composition of LK-99 is approximately Pb9Cu(PO4)6O such that—compared to pure lead-apatite (Pb10(PO4)6O)[4]: 5 —approximately one quarter of Pb(II) ions in position 2 of the apatite structure are replaced by Cu(II) ions.[1]: 9  This partial replacement of Pb2+ ions (measuring 133 picometre) with Cu2+ ions (measuring 87 picometre) is said to cause a 0.48% reduction in volume, creating internal stress inside the material.[1]: 8 

The internal stress is claimed to cause a heterojunction quantum well between the Pb(1) and oxygen within the phosphate ([PO4]3−) generating a superconducting quantum well (SQW).[1]: 10  Lee et al. claim to show LK-99 exhibits a response to a magnetic field (Meissner effect) when chemical vapor deposition is used to apply LK-99 to a non-magnetic copper sample.[1]: 4  Pure lead-apatite is an insulator, but Lee et al. claim copper-doped lead-apatite forming LK-99 is a superconductor, or at higher temperatures, a metal.[4]: 5 

 

Here’s a video discussing the “discovery” and the causes of skepticism:

 

 Posted by at 2:40 am

Return of the Automat

 blather, Hmm..., news, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 262023
 

An “Automat” was a style of restaurant that was basically a great big vending machine. A wall, or part of one, was covered in little cubbyholes with locked doors; behind each door was a piece of food that the customer could see and pay for. Feed in your coins, the door would pop open and you’d get your sandwich or apple or slice of pie or whatever. Door closes, and the guy working on the *other* side of the wall puts a new one in the cubbyhole. Used to be real popular, but they faded away a couple generations ago.

They seem to be making a comeback, and it’s really not surprising. The video below is an interview with the owner of an Automat franchise; economics is driving this, as three employees can service 250 customers a day, where a regular restaurant would require six. And of course as the minimum wage continues to be driven higher and automation continues to be driven cheaper, soon enough the production of those individual food items will be automated and the cubbyholes will be filled by a robotic arm.

There is another aspect that makes the automat format attractive: this separates the staff almost entirely from the customers… which makes them harder to rob. Additionally, other than the individual cubbyhole doors and things like windows and furniture, violent morons have little to reach that they could destroy. BLM or Antifa rioters come by to smash up the joint? No cash registers or computers or stoves or anything else to reach, so long as the  staff doors are secure. The food-doors would be small and mass produced in vast numbers; they would likely be both cheap and durable… and stocked in large numbers in a few boxes in the back. A Mostly Peaceful Protest sweeps by, you’re closed for a day while the staff swaps out doors, and then you’re back in business. There are those customers who are provoked to violence not because of politics, but because they are crazy or stupid; they order the wrong thing, or their order is screwed up, and they lose their minds and started screaming and flailing. With an automat, they see what they’re going to get before they pay. So long as the mechanisms work, there *should* be reduced incentive for violence. Of course, some people are just going to go buggo anyway, but here humans are largely removed from the other side if the equation.

So long as we’re bringing back things from the Depression era, can we swap out Brutalist architecture for Art Deco?

 

 Posted by at 11:58 am

Star Trek: Bonkers

 art, blather, My Fiction, science fiction  No Responses »
Jul 222023
 

As a followup to THIS POST, I had a half-formed idea that I posted in comments OVER HERE. I’ve decided to expand upon my idea a bit.

 

In short, people have recognized that in Star Trek, the federation – and in particular the Humans – are essentially mad scientists. Everybody else out there got from early industrialization to spaceflight over a span of millenia, carefully and painstakingly working their way up one reasonable rational step at a time. Humans, on the other hand, said “hold my beer” and charged from “I wonder if I can use steam to do work” to “maybe if I invent a faster than light drive I’ll get to bang a lot of hot chicks” in record time. This feature of humanity has been repeatedly shown in Trek, but I don’t believe it has been really called out as such, except for the occasional throwaway line. Well… what if, instead, a series leaned into the idea? A combination not just of Star Trek, but “Eureka” and “Warehouse 13” with a huge helping of “Stargate: SG1.”

 

“Star Trek: Bonkers” features Captain Liam Shaw, the best new character in Trek since The Doctor and Seven of Nine, unwisely killed off (apparently) in season three of “Picard.” Here, he has been resurrected by Federation mad science, put in command of the USS Rotwang (an Emmett Brown-class “science” vessel) tasked with researching rumors of super-science and advanced weapons that can be used to defend against existential god-level threats such as V-Ger, Organians, Q-Continuum. Episodes include:
* The one where the crew capture a rogue Q and break his mind by exposing him to the most diabolical psychological weapon yet devised: “Star Trek: Discovery.”
* The one where they accidentally shut down all fusion reactions in the Large Magellanic Cloud. That means stars, too. Whoopsie.
* The one where Emperor Kahless attempts to capture the vessel for the greater glory of the Klingon Empire. Captain Shaw zaps him with the new Trans Ray; whereupon the other Klingons tear Kahless into bits and back off from Shaw and the Rotwang, not willing to risk getting struck themselves. There are, after all, fates worse than the dishonor of retreat.
* The one where an invasion fleet of Kelvans from the Andromeda galaxy is intercepted while still 100,000 light years from Federation space… and the cubic lightyear of volume enclosing the fleet is converted from a 3-dimensional space to a natural log of 9-dimensional space.

* Based upon fragmentary documentation that survived without adequate historical context from before the Third World War, the engineers on board the Rotwang create a device that rips a hole in space which leads to a warped realm of chaos and demonic entities. A few probes are sent in, they realize the place really kinda sucks, and they close it up again. “Nope,” says the lead engineer on the project, Engineering Commodore Montgomery Scott.

*Following those events, Scotty goes on a bender. While blind drunk he creates four dimensional whisky. His first thought is “It’s green,” but in actual fact it’s an indescribable color that Man has never before encountered. As an experiment, the Rotwang taunts the Q loudly over subspace radio; one shows up and threatens to snap them out of existence. they offer him a drink first… and get him blind, stinking drunk. Then they interview him, receiving billions of teraquads of new information about reality-bending, and leave him passed out at the side of a nearby neutron star. When he wakes up he doesn’t remember what happened.

* Another Planet Killer/Doomsday Machine is discovered. It’s asleep, but seems to be waking up… and unlike the one Kirk encountered, this one is virtually pristine. There’ll be no stopping it. And since it’s neutronium, there’s no landing on it or beaming into it. So what to do? The recorded memory/personality engrams of Admiral Archers pet beagle are downloaded into it. It now wants to follow the Rotwang around like a happy puppy. This is of course a problem. Until a warp drive and massive impulse engine are bolted to a sizable moon; the warp drive knocks the effective mass of the moon down almost to zilch, which the impulse engine accelerates it at tens of G’s. Enough fuel on board to last for centuries. The Planet Killer Puppy is then told “fetch!” Asteroids control systems keep track of the PKP and maintain a constant distance, and lead the PKP on a path slowly out of the galaxy. PROBLEM SOLVED FOREVER.

* The Captain holds a contest to design, build and fly a one-man craft. It’s a race: not just to build it within a short time, but to fly ten light years out and back again. Teams from as few as three to as many as a dozen work feverishly for two weeks on their craft. But the night before the scheduled launch of the five craft that are finished, Ensign Skippy, who has not been involved, sneaks a drink of Scotty’s 4D whisky. He staggers down to the torpedo bunker and modifies a Class 8 probe and, five minutes before the race time, enters it. Everyone chuckles as he drunkenly gets in and is launched… and then promptly vanishes. The other craft go out and come back in various impressively short times, but Ensign Skippy does not return. Until he shows up for duty the next day with a pounding hangover and no recollection of the day before. A search shows that the probe is back in the torpedo magazine, the modifications burned out; sensor records show that it quietly reappeared in its rack, followed by Ensign Skippy staggering away from it and back to his quarters, two minutes before it launched.

* A new threat emerges in the Gamma Quadrant. A previously unexplored dust cloud turns out to have a single star and Earth-like planet within; the culture that evolved there has never seen another star, so they were unaware of the outside universe. Upon accidental first contact with the Rotwang due to a navigational error, the locals realize that they aren’t alone and decide that all life in the universe would have to go. Their technology, based on white servant-robots, is not particularly advanced; but evidence shows that they will very quickly become a galaxy-wide threat exceeding that of the Borg. So Captain Shaw has Scotty re-open the warp gate on the planet, spilling hellish chaos onto the place. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Shaw says to the senior staff as they watch from a safe distance as the entire nebula folds in upon itself, sucked into an another dimension. No report is made to Starfleet.

* Years earlier, a miniature “proto-universe” was discovered at Deep Space Nine after a ship passed through the wormhole. Given that the expansion of that universe would destroy *this* universe, such things are obviously to be avoided. So the Rotwang crew decide to see what it would take to *create* a proto-universe. Purely hypothetically. Simulated only. Not at all real. Nope. Until… “Hey, hold my beer.”

 

Any other ideas?

 

 Posted by at 10:22 am

“Bland Food”

 blather, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., Meh., politics, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 182023
 

This article from a few years ago popped up on Twitter today:

White people’s bland food isn’t just an internet meme. It’s a centuries-long obsession

The article is pretty much what you’ll think it’s going to be. A lot of yammering about religion, history, privilege, blah, blah, blah. The usual buzz-word salad that’s all too common in any piece that can be used to denigrate white people, white culture, white anything.

But throughout all of it, an obvious point was left unmentioned. Why do a lot of people like “bland” food? Maybe… because they *like* “bland” food. I am one such. I am perfectly capable of making a satisfying meal out of little more than noodles. *Just* noodles. Or plain rice, a mashed potato, an unadorned chunk of chicken. A fine meal can be made from mixing peanut butter with oatmeal. Is it because I like “bland?” No. It’s because the flavor is perfectly satisfying. What people like the author of the linked article don’t seem to grasp is that people’s senses are on a  spectrum. Women, for example, apparently see colors far more clearly than men do. Some people can hear a pin drop, and would be in physical agony to be subjected to the conversational level of the average Friday night at the local bar. Some people can’t smell much of anything and thus drown themselves in perfume; others can pick up the slightest hints of odor from across the room.

Foods that this author, and apparently many others, would find completely lacking in flavor would be a riot of taste sensation to someone else. Subjecting that person to a pile of seasoning  would be to simply overload their senses for no good reason.

I am comfortable in temperatures others might find frigidly cold. I like the lights turned a little dimmer than standard; a nice sunny day is blinding. Some of this is doubtless due to random chance; some of it doubtless due to the northern European portions of my muttly breeding. And perhaps that plays into food: while spices have been present in northern Europe since forever, they were not as plentiful as elsewhere. Many of my ancestors were probably lucky to survive on simple grain, mutton, chicken, that sort of thing. Their foods were likely less “foody” than people from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, Africa, etc. Thus they evolved to deal with that. That was normal for them. One might wonder if that made their sense of taste sharper, more keen compared to some others.

So if you’re like me and a bowl of mac and cheese actually sounds pretty good, don’t let goons like the author of the piece shame you. Take pride in the fact that you don’t *need* to shower your food with extravagances in order to be happy and satisfied.

 Posted by at 11:10 pm
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