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

Disney must hate money

 AARRRGH, art, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, history, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, Worldwreckers, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 152023
 

Photos have emerged from the next Disney live action remake of one of their classic animated films, “Snow White.” You know, the one about the Germanic princess with skin so white it looked like snow, who ended up running around with seven dwarves? Well… about all that, Disney has decided to continue the unprofitable trend of de-whitening European folk tales.

There are claims that these *aren’t* the actual “dwarves.” But given that “Snow White” is to be played by a Hispanic woman… why assume that these *aren’t* an accurate depiction? And remember, Hollywood is hardly above lying to the public’s face. Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch *wasn’t* playing Khan? Or when all the remakes and reboots of classic animated series were supposed to be faithful continuations that the existing fans would recognize, love and appreciate? Yeah… lying liars who lie have a tendency to lie.

And… it turns out that those claims of “fake” are probably themselves fake:

‘Snow White’ Set Pics Stir Anti-Woke Criticism

Asked for comment on the brouhaha, a Disney spokesperson initially told The Daily Beast “the photos are fake and not from our production” and added that the Mouse House wanted a correction from the Mail.

Hours later, however, Disney’s PR shop completely backtracked and said the photos were from the production but were not official “photos”—chalking up the earlier statement to a misunderstanding.

 

Dear readers, consider this: somewhere out in the multiverse there’s a version of the Disney corporation that decided to do a live action remake of “Snow White,” and decided to try their hardest to make it look like the original animated classic. And somewhere else out there is another Disney that decided to do a “Snow White” remake that was faithful to the Grimm tale as written. And somewhere further down the multiverse line is a version of Disney that decide to say “Fark it” and make a truly messed-up remake that swaps out all the “disneyfication” for hard-core “let’s make this thing like Germans a thousand years ago would have made it, with friggen’ terrifying monsters and death and horror straight out of Teutonic legends and myths and folk tales,” likely directed by del Toro with the aid of the ghosts of Lovecraft and Giger.

Any one of those is something I would have been interested in. *This* worlds Disney? Nah.

 

Note: the “dwarves” from Norse/Germanic folk tales weren’t just short humans. They were a different order of being entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)

Anyway, Hollywood is basically on strike now, with writers and actors on the picket line. I imagine this might effect “Snow White,” as well as every other movie and TV show out there. But you know what? Who friggen’ cares. Things have gotten so slow in Hollywood that people have come to expect *years* between seasons of shows… seasons with a tiny number of episodes. long gone are the likes of *good* Star Trek series where you could expect 20+ episodes every year. now… Eight? Ten? And with many shows, the gap between seasons lasting a number of years. When did season 3 of “The Orville” end? When will season 4 start… if it ever does? And let’s face it: there are a metric fark-ton of old movies and shows available for streaming, more than enough to tide most people over for the most extended of strike. And beyond even that… YouTube and the like are loaded to the gills with lone creators who are far more entertaining than quarter-billion-dollar productions. So you go right ahead and shut down production, Hollywood. if it strangles nonsense like “Snow White,” so much the better.

 

How long before I’m able to say “Hey, AI, make me a four-hour faithful adaptation of ‘Snow White’ Using the production team from “The Lord Of The Rings” and starring Marylin Monroe as Snow White’?” Because that’ll be the end of Hollywood.

 Posted by at 10:14 am

An exhausting few days

 AARRRGH, blather, cats, Crazy, Gah., news, photography, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 132023
 

I have no idea if it has been apparent or not based on recent blog/Twitter postings that the last few days have been frazzling for me. But the short form is that Buttons has been quite sick… and terribly miserable. Several days of vet visits finally culminated today in the conclusion that he *probably* is suffering from another bout of pancreatitis, though the initial symptoms were quite different from the earlier bouts. This time it seemed as if he was plugged up somehow, but a X-ray showed that he’s clear. Blood work revealed the infection markers of pancreatitis, so he was treated for that today… and he has shown improvement.

A vocally miserable cat is not something I recommend. Especially one so miserable that he chooses to remain inert and just wail. AAAARRRRGH.

 

This was him yesterday, looking hopeless.

 

This was at the vet today prior to the doc coming in. You can see just how absolutely thrilled he was.

 

X-ray of his innards. It reportedly shows that his intestines are largely empty. To me is seems to indicate that his abdomen is infected with a space-squid of some kind.

 

And this critter is “Ziggy” the French bulldog who was in the vet clinic waiting room as I was checking out. Friendly little guy even if he looks like he aught to be gnawing the foot off of a selfless dark age princess of Urland.

 

Buttons seems to be on the mend. He does not appear to be in agony anymore; instead he simply seems to be wore out. He didn’t eat or drink for several days; he has recent eaten and drank *some,* though not a lot. Progress, anyway.

 

This has cost a *lot.* I need to put a ton of stuff on ebay, both to cover this and my other rather voluminous bills,  but if you’re of a mind to, feel free to hit the tip jar below…

 


Feline Tip Jar


 Posted by at 9:37 pm

The Quiet Star Wars Failure

 AARRRGH, art, blather, books, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., Meh., politics, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 102023
 

Disney has done some amazing things with Star Wars since buying the property. In short, Disney turned Star Wars from a license to print money into a series of disappointments and flops and failures. These are generally well known… how “Solo” was the first Star Wars movie to actually lose money, how the sequel trilogy PO’ed the fans and got progressively less profitable, how “Galactic Starcruiser” shut down after only a year, how the various TV shows have ranged from occasionally quite good to generally awful.

But then there’s “The High Republic.” This was a brand-new income stream for Disney, set 200 or so years before the movies. The Jedi were supposedly at their prime, the galaxy was at peace, everything was awesome, and Disney would make a mountain of money from the books, comic books, movies and TV shows set in that timeframe. Disney spent something like a billion dollars promoting “The High Republic”

Chances are pretty good you’ve either never heard of THR, or you’ve forgotten that it existed.

The video below goes through the sales numbers for the books and, wow, they’re bad. The best seller – the first book – sold over 150,000 copies. The latest book sold less than 10,000. Now, I’d be pretty pleased if one of *my* books sold a mere 9,000 copies. But then, unlike Star Wars, nobody knows who I am. Unlike Disney, a billion dollars wasn’t lavished on publicizing my books.

Even that initial 150K seems pretty sad when you consider that Timothy Zahn’s “Thrawn trilogy,” novels published in the early 1990s which revitalized Star Wars at the time, and which were “de-canonised” when Disney bought Star Wars, have sold five million copies. Specifically, they’ve sold five million copies *since* Disney bought Star Wars. The Thrawn trilogy sold something like *fifteen* million copies before that.

The thumbnail image chosen for the video below is appropriate: it shows what I presume to be one of the main “High Republic” characters complete with a  modern Mental Illness Haircut. That’s who they marketed to, not the existing Star Wars fanbase. So they didn’t get the fanbase interested. One of the main authors actually told the potential customers that if they didn’t like her hyperactively leftist politics, don’t buy her books. “Okey-doke” the fanbase said.

Me? If you agree with or disagree with my politics… buy my books and other publications. If you like aircraft and/or spacecraft, you’ll like what I’ve produced. My politics and your politics will barely enter into it.

 Posted by at 11:22 pm
 Older Entries  Newer Entries