reshaping the world – Page 10

The Lost Continent

awesomeness, blather, reshaping the world, science, science fiction 5 Responses »

Jan 042011

Note for those who may have missed the news: “Atlantis” is bunk. Almost certainly made up by Plato as a device to let him expound on his nonsensical notions for a perfect society. However, there have been at least two true “lost continents.” Sci-fi and fantasy authors, take note. But also take note of the timescales.

Kerguelen microcontinent

A small volcanic continent (about 3 times the size of Japan) formed in the southern Indian Ocean about 130 million years ago, it sank beneath the waves about 20 million years ago.. and is now one to two kilometers deep.

Zealandia: a full-fledged continent under what is now New Zealand. 3.5 million square kilometers in area, it began to sink about 60 million years ago, and was largely sunk by about 23 million years ago, leaving just New Zealand and some scattered mountaintops as islands.

Archimedes Set Roman Ships Afire with Cannons

awesomeness, blather, history, reshaping the world, science, science fiction 30 Responses »

Jul 072010

Neato, if true:

http://www.livescience.com/history/archimedes-set-roman-ships-afire-with-cannons-100627.html

A legend begun in the Medieval Ages tells of how Archimedes used mirrors to concentrate sunlight as a defensive weapon during the siege of Syracuse, then a Greek colony on the island of Sicily, from 214 to 212 B.C. No contemporary Roman or Greek accounts tell of such a mirror device, however.

Both engineering calculations and historical evidence support use of steam cannons as “much more reasonable than the use of burning mirrors,” said Cesare Rossi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Naples “Federico II,” in Naples, Italy, who along with colleagues analyzed evidence of both potential weapons.

The steam cannons could have fired hollow balls made of clay and filled with something similar to an incendiary chemical mixture known as Greek fire in order to set Roman ships ablaze. A heated cannon barrel would have converted barely more than a tenth of a cup of water (30 grams) into enough steam to hurl the projectiles.

As the inventions of Archimedes, Heron of Alexandria and others (especially the Antikythera Mechanism) show, the ancient Greeks were poised on the edge of the Industrial Revolution. Had history gone slightly differently, steam powered ships, land vehicles and factories could have arisen somewhere around 100 CE to 300CE, rather than after 1800 CE. So we would now be nearly two thousand years into a scientific and technological era, rather than a mere few hundred. As Carl Sagan pointed out, we could well be plying the spacelanes between the stars at this point… had history gone a little differently.

The problem is that getting history to go differently might have been virtually impossible. Sure, the technology was nearly there, and the basic principles of science were well understood; on a purely technical level, an Industrial Revolution might seem to ahve been immanent. But culturally, Europe was nowhere near ready. Slavery, for instance, was far too entrenched of an institution. Slave-powered ships were perfectly fine for the world of the Mediterranean; there wasn’t a globe-spanning British Empire in need of a faster mode of transport than sail-powered ships, nor was there an American West needing to be opened. So it might have seemed difficult to imagine what practical value a steam-powered ship would offer. Worse, what would ahppened with the slaves? What would happen to the fortunes of those in the slave trade?

More, this was an era of absolute monarchs and deep mysticism. Both of these concepts are great evils that have done little but retard progress. Overthrowing the mystics – the mystery religions, the Pythagoreans, the Church, and so on – and watering down the power of the monarchs may well have been absolute requirements for an Industrial Revolution to occur. Any sci-fi author contemplating an alternate history where the ancient Greek scientific tradition takes off and leads to a world nearly two millenia more advanced, take note of the cultural issues involved.

Not entirely true, but it gets the idea across:

Obama? I blame you, shiny sci-fi boobies!

blather, history, Obamazombies, politics, reshaping the world 17 Responses »

Mar 292010

Star Trek: Voyager premiered in 1995. There were a number of primary female characters:
Captain Janeway: irritating.
Engineer Belanna Torres: Scary semi-Klingon chick
Kes: Supposedly cute, but since she was only four or so years old… not a sex symbol.
Kes:

After three years, Kes, who was not the draw for the pimply male demographic that the producers had hoped for, was booted off the show and replaced with the catsuited Borg character Seven Of Nine. Seven’s sole purpose was bucka-bucka-wow SEXSYMBOL. Seven:

Seven of Nine was played by actress Jeri Ryan, who prior to this was basically an unknown (one season on a one-season minor sci-fi show). The reason why her last name was Ryan was because she was married to one “Jack Ryan.” However, the two divorced in 1999 for reasons left largely unexplored publicly, although stress from separation due to Jeri’s work in Hollywood, CA on ST:V was claimed to have been a major part (Jack Ryan worked in Chicago). Notable also is that shortly after the divorce Jeri Ryan dated ST: Voyager producer Brannon Braga.

In 2003, Jack Ryan ran for an open US Senate seat from the state of Illinois on the Republican ticket. The two Ryans decided to allow the divorce records to be made public, but not the child custody records. Nevertheless, those records were also released by LA Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider, showing that the reason why Jeri had wanted a divorce from Jack was because he wanted to do some, er, decidedly non-Traditional Family Values stuff with her in public venues. (So did most Star Trek fanboys who saw her in that silver catsuit.) Still, the release of this selacious info was enough to torpedo Jack Ryan’s run for the Senate; his spot on the Republican ticket was taken up at the last minute by noted nutjob and inevitable loser, Alan Keyes. Thus the election was won by another relative unknown, a twenty-year veteran of the Trinity United Church of Christ, an avowed “black liberation theology” institution. Given the complete disaster that was the Republican run for the Senate that year, the Democratic party didn’t really need to try very hard, and the candidate was able to basically walk in on the promise of Hope, Change, charisma and a complete lack of any real knowledge of him by the public. He did essentially the same thing four years later in a run for a somewhat higher office.

Long story short, Jeri Ryan’s work on Voyager contributed to her getting a divorce. The divorce eventually led to Jack Ryan dropping out of a Senate race, which was then easily won by Barack Obama who used it as a springboard to the White House.

There are two good lessons to be drawn from that:
1) If the selection of a space-elf only a few years old to be the sex symbol on a Star Trek series can have massive and completely unpredictable long-term real-world consequences… then any long-term plan that relies on the future being predictable in detail stands a damned good chance of failing spectacularly.

2) Jack. Dude. Yer married to Jeri Fricken’ Ryan. You get to do the horizontal mambo with the hottest chick in Sci Fi EVAR. Be happy with that. Otherwise your libido can ruin not only your political career, but also the national economy for decades to come.

Freakin’ Awesome: Earth with a ring system

awesomeness, reshaping the world, science 4 Responses »

Nov 262009

Now THIS YouTube video was definitely worth the watch.

Something like this m ight be worth doing some day… truck a worthless rock into Earth orbit, grind it into a vast number of smaller rocks, then start seeding throughout the intended lanes of the ring system. Sure, it wouldn’t last long, geologically speaking…the perturbations from the Moon would quickly cause it to rain down out of the sky. Might only last a few hundred thousand years. But that’s long enough to take a few snapshots.

Wikipedia lists a few suggested Roche limits for Earth… for an “average comet” it’s between 17,880 and 34,390 km.

Terraforming Utah: part 1

awesomeness, reshaping the world, Utah 7 Responses »

Nov 222009

When I first moved to Utah in 2004, I assumed that the Great Salt Lake would be a major source recreation for the locals and tourists… boating, swimming, that sort of thing. But as it turns out, I was wrong. The Great Salt Lake is damn near ignored… and for good reason. The water is, as might be expected, very salty… but it’s also loaded with a great many other minerals, metals and toxic nastiness. Nothing lives in it except for some brine shimp and some bacteria… certainly no fish.Willard Bay to the northeast is a fresh water bay, and receives some use… boating and fishing and the like.

What’s more, it’s extremely shallow… boats would run aground. There are places where a person could virtually walk from one side of the lake to the other.

So apart from some salt operations and a few people hunting down brine shrimp, as far as I can tell, the lake is pretty pointless. This, to me, seems like a waste.

What could be done with the lake to make it useful, and what would be required? I have two ideas, which might or might not be mutually exclusive:

1) turn the shallow, toxic lake into a large, deep inland sea stocked with ocean life

2) Turn it into the major energy source for the United States, and perhaps the western hemisphere

So, to start off with, here’s the Great Salt Lake:

It’s an evaporative lake… meaning water flows in, but does not flow out; it just evaporates away. This is why the water quality is so bad… raivers such as the Bear and the Jordan flow in with little bits of salt and other substances dissolved in, leaving those substances behind when the water evaporates away. Total water volume is about 19 cubic kilometers; surface area is about 4400 square kilometers (which averages out to a depth of 4.3 meters). Elevation above sea level at the surface is about 1283 meters.

It will all have to go.

Coming whenever the hell I feel like it: Part 2

Global Warming: a hoax?

blather, I'm from the government, politics, reshaping the world, science 15 Responses »

Nov 202009

Right up front: I believe the data suggests fairly strongly that the globe has warmed since the 1970s. However, the extent of that warming and, more importantly, mankinds contribution to that are topics that I believe can be reasonably debated. There have been, however, several developments that indicate that the “O Noes! Evil American Cars are gonna kill us all!” crowd has been, shall we say, fudging the numbers a tad.

First up, there’s this nugget, courtesy The Telegraph:

… a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.
…
As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

…
But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up
Suppression of evidence
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)
…
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

For more, read this.

Additionally, check out Surfacestations.org. This site documents hundreds of official surface stations… the ground-based temperature sensors that are used to measure climate change in the United States. There are strict guidelines in how to build the sensor “shelters,” and where to locate them… and sadly, a disturbing number of them are located somewhere they *really* shouldn’t be. Like right next to the hot-air exhaust vent of an air conditioner, or next to asphalt parking lots. It would be difficult to locate a sensor somewhere that would give it a false cold reading… but it’s easy to locate it somewhere which will make it read falsely high.

Global warming is a major issue. And while the actual “warming” part of it is of course important, by far the biggest and most important aspect of global warming is the fact that it is being used by a vast number of collectivists in order to ram through massive changes to western countries – America in particular. If the scaremongers are accurate, then, yes, somethign should be done. But if the scaremongers, such as Al Gore (who stands to profit massively from global warming hysteria), are wrong, then it is not only pointless to “do something,” it is counterproductive… and ethically and morally wrong to screw up our economy and quality of life.

Here’s a simple test the next time you ponder a global warming alarmist: if they are demanding that we “do something,” is the “something” they demand we do somethign that would be good and proper regardless of whether there’s warming, or is is something that will serve to increase the power of government, reduce the freedom of the people, and transfer wealth from the productive to the non-productive?

From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of those who are most vocal about the need to fight global warming do not support reasonable solutions, but instead seek solutions that are indistinguishable from the goals of old-school Communists. If global warmign is a real problem, and humans are really responsible, there is one answer above all others that could mitigate the CO2 problem: nuclear reactors. And when it comes to actually controllign the temperature, the ability to do so via regualting “carbon credits” and the like is trivial compared to the power of “geoengineering.” So any global warmign alarmist who shrugs off nukes and geoengineering in favor of socialism… well, that alarmist is either an ignorant boob, or is a socialist simply using global warming as a cover.

And if the data supporting the warming is bogus… then the socialists need to be run out of town on a damned rail. Only then can we face the issue rationally.

UPDATE: A summary of some of the more entertaining and damning emails can be found HERE.

Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709)

Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.

Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)

And many, many more.

UPDATE 2: Searchable database of the emails.

UPDATE 3: Just cuz.

Last Ice Age took just SIX months to arrive

news, nukes, reshaping the world 14 Responses »

Nov 152009

From the Daily Mail:

It took just six months for a warm and sunny Europe to be engulfed in ice, according to new research.

Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade – but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.

In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

Not mentioend in the article is the likely reason *why* the Gulf Stream suddenly slowed down: The ice dam holding back Lake Agassiz broke, and dumped more fresh water than is currently held by all the lakes on Earth directly into the Atlantic ocean via the St. Lawrence seaway. The article *does* crank out the “O Noes! Greenland is melting” scarememe, which is quite a lot less of an impact due to the extremely slow rate at which fresh water is added to the Atlantic as compared to Lake Agassiz emptying out in about a year.

But if you really wanted to freeze out Europe (and who doesn’t?) how would you go about it? Well, you could nuke the bejeebers out of the Greenland ice sheet in the hopes that you’d melt enough fresh water to do it… unlikely. But there might be another possibility: nuke the crap out of the Panama Canal. The Pacific Ocean is about 10 inches higher than the Atlantic at that point; if you could nuke a channel all the way through the canal zone – this would probably require a 100-kiloton class nuke every half mile or so along the whole fifty miles of the canal – the Pacific would try to empty itself into the Atlantic. This would surely change Gulf Stream flow patterns.

1) You might be able to pull this stunt off with a handfull of really big Soviet citybusters. A few H-Bombs in the 10 megaton range taken to Lake Gatun on board a cargo ship, then dumped overboard at the appropriate points (better would be to dump them through locks cut into the bottom of the ships hull, so the operation won’t be seen) and detonated at a precise sequence might do the job. The bottom of Gatun is something less than 40 feet above sea level, so you’d need to excavate the whole length of the lake to at least that depth. The process of doing so would almost certainly create a series of tsunamis which would take out the locks on either side, opening the way for the Pacific to race in and do its thing. So along with the extraordinary panic this act would create, you’d also have the excitement of throwing transcontinental shipping into chaos, as the new channel would not be passable by ship, and of course people trying to walk or drive from North America to South America would find the way not only blasted apart, but radioactive. And then, if all goes to plan, Europe gets thrown into a new Ice Age. Huzzah!

2) ???

3) Profit!

Gore blathers forth again

blather, dumbassery, politics, religion, reshaping the world 1 Response »

Jul 112009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huUJ19l73VI

Perhaps his greatest moment of stupidity comes between 1:30 and 2:00, where he says (paraphrasing) that if we simply reworked all of civilization to be more efficient, we would not need to build new powerplants. While this may be true on a simplistic mathematical level, it fails to take into account that fact that even with greatly increased efficencies, the *need* for power is going to continue for the foreseeable future. The nearly three billion people of China and India are working hard to increase their standard of living; this means, among other things, a greatly increased need for power and transport. I don’t care how efficient your systems are, you simply can’t turn a water buffalo into a car, a TV, a PC or a jetliner.

What the world needs is not “global governance” imposing “efficiency” standards that limit dreams and possibilities and liberty; what the world needs is a few hundred terawatts of new, latest-generation nuclear powerplants, preferably of the breeder reactor variety.

Never forget, never forgive

blather, nukes, reshaping the world, weapons 23 Responses »

May 042009

I could’ve sworn that I’d posted a link to this video before, but damned if I can find it. Anyway, this is to my mind just about the most powerful “9-11 YouTube” videos I’ve ever seen. If you can sit through it – especially the conversation from 2:50 to 3:01 – and not be moved, there’s something wrong with you.

I believe that the greatest failure of the Bush administration was not the bailouts or the prescription drugs travesties… it was the lack of use of nuclear weapons in the Tora Bora region. When bin Laden was confirmed there, we should *not* have done the diplomatic thing and let our Afghani “allies” try to take the region. We should not have sent in the Marines. We should not have sent in B-52’s with Daisy Cutters. We should have sent in the Peacekeepers and the Tridents, and reduced that mountainous region to fricken’ rubble. America’s response should have been massive enough that, 5,000 years from now, after civilization has fallen and risen and fallen and risen again, people on the Asian continent will still sit around campfires and tell whispered tales of how the foolish imps known as the “taliban” once taunted the great sky-god “America,” and how America struck down with the power of the gods, destroying the taliban utterly… and leaving the area filled with the scattered, broken remnants of the talibans dark evil magic, and that’s why anyone who ventures into that realm of blackened glass gets a sickness.

But instead, we went the “tepid” route. And as a result, the Taliban was never fully wiped out, and is resurgent, and moving into Pakistan in force. The reports are that the Pakistani nuclear program is being closely monitored by the US military, perhaps even having US Special Forces on site, ready to carry off the Pakinukes if the Paki government or military falls. So rather than exterminating the ideological garbage that is the Taliban, we now have to worry about *them* getting nukes.

If you think that nuking a thinly populated mountainous region would be a horrible over-reaction to 9-11… imagine what the US response will be if the Taliban gets nukes and takes out an American city. Or imgaine what the Indian reaction will be if Paki nukes are used on, say, New Delhi.

The Anti-Hole

awesomeness, photography, reshaping the world, Utah 1 Response »

Apr 242009

If you take a solid object and scoop part of it out to make a hole, the stuff you’ve scooped out needs to be put somewhere. And so with the Bingham Canyon Mine, the tailings (translation: metals-exhausted worthless crap) need to be put somewhere. And that somewhere is a series of artificial hills.

On the drive in to the mine, you could see a conga line of enormous dump trucks hauling tailings and dumping them over the edge. Sadly, even though it was an interesting sight, you are not supposed to stop anywhere on the road, and there ss nowhere to pull over (stopping or slowing down on the road invites getting flattened by vehicles substantially larger than VW Golfs), and photography-while-driving is sketchy at best. But from outside the mine property, you could still just barely make out some of the older tailings piles…

A closeup gives an indication of scale:

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