I meant to post this many hours ago, but I just spent… well, may hours in a fruitless attempt to find a report that I suddenly decided that I needed (this happens way too often). In any event… as of this writing, SpaceX is less than three hours from the next attempt to launch their Falcon 9 which will hopefully soft-land on a barge.
If you’re awake at 4:20 in the morning (mountain time), you can check of the live streaming of the launch HERE.
Can’t seem to embed it here, so here’s the link:
So if during the current snowpocalypse hitting much of the nation ya hear an Earth-shatteringly loud wolf howl, the sun and moon get swallowed up, giant forms are seen trudging through the blizzard in the distance… turn on CNN. If they’re showing this, whelp, that’s that, I suppose.
A comment and an image over HERE (where they’re discussing how many G’s the Millenium Falcon is undergoing as it maneuvers at the end of the “Force Awakens” trailer):
Patrick Farley Wait, we’re only just now questioning Star Wars’ disregard for Newtonian physics? I thought we had an unspoken agreement, back in 1977, that we were all just gonna sorta look the other way.
(This photo has nothing to do with the topic, but I put it here to remind you young people of what was considered “state of the art” science fiction literally months before Star Wars premiered.)
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That comment was promptly followed up by this nugget of eternal wisdom:
tincansailorman Semi-naked Jenny Agutter in her prime is always state-of-the-art to me.
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Preach it, brother!
Say what you will about Star Wars, it changed the face of sci-fi movies. Before Star Wars, it was just expected that all future or alien sets would looked like cheap cardboard, or impractical, precise, chrome plated and oddly spotlessly clean. Shortly after Star Wars, we got “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” which set new standards in visual realness. You can’t watch “Logan’s Run” now without noticing that not only do the miniature sets look awful, so do the full-size sets, the costumes, the props, the robots, etc.
Star Wars opened in May, 1977. Logans Run opened in June, 1976, slightly less than a year earlier, long enough to have done its business by the time Star Wars came out. But you know what movie *really* got boned by Star Wars? As it turns out, 20th Century Fox had two big sci-fi movies planed for 1977… Star Wars was expected to be the “minor” one. The one Fox expected to be the big blockbuster? “Damnation Alley.” Opened in October, 1977… and closed shortly afterwards, and has been largely forgotten. It has one of the all time greatest sci-fi vehicles in it, but is otherwise devoid of… well, pretty much anything good. But had Star Wars not happened, Damnation Alley probably would have done ok. But it already looked like garbage the day it came out.
Now, if “Damnation Alley” had had Jenny Agutter in it… hmmmm….
It is a common enough gag in cartoons and sitcoms and such to show someone trying to cool the world by throwing open the doors of their freezers or fridges, or cranking up the AC and directing the cool air outside. This is obviously not only futile but counter productive.
Fridges and freezers and AC’s work by compressing a gas (freon or ammonia, commonly); as a gas is compressed, it heats up. If you then run the hot compressed gas through a heat exchanger – a mess of copper tubes, often enough – and transfer that heat to, say, the outside air, when the now-cooled gas is allowed to expand again, it cools down, often by rather a lot. You are not, in fact, really cooling off the whole system; in a perfectly efficient setup, the total thermal energy of a closed environment – a fridge in a sealed chamber, say – would not change no matter how cold you made the inside of the icebox, because the outside would just heat up that much more, exactly balancing the equation. And in reality, nothing is perfectly efficient… so you would actually slowly *add* heat to the total system due to friction in the mechanisms and inefficient electric motors and slight resistance in the wiring, etc.
So obviously firing up a bunch of fridges ain’t gonna cool the planet, because their heat exchanges would simply warm up the atmosphere or lakes that they are connected to.
But… what if you went overboard, and made a fantastically powerful heat pump? Handwave some ridiculous machine, a kilometer ona side, that sucks in atmosphere just as fast and the nuclear reactors powering it will allow. The atmospheric gasses are compressed and warmed up. But not compressed a little, and made kinda warm… I mean compressed *a* *lot,* and made ridiculously hot. Hot enough that the heat transfer mechanism is no longer entirely conduction to the outside air. No, the compressed gases are so hot – call it thousands of degrees – that the gas sheds heat rapidly through *radiation.* Direct these hot gases to the top of the machine, up in the thinner air, and surround the rampagingly bright tubing with mirrors that effectively direct the white light and the IR radiation out into space. The compressed air sheds vast amounts of thermal energy not back into the environment, but off-world. The air is then allowed to expand back to normal pressure; if it has shed enough thermal energy, the machine will probably be spraying cryogenic liquid air out into the world.
I have no doubt that this is a monumentally stupid idea on many levels (not least being that inefficiencies could well overwhelm any cooling effect). But does it seem, at least in principle, like it might possibly be a way to manipulate the overall heat budget of the planet?
Dire new estimates show that people who contract the deadly Ebola virus have a 70.8% chance of dying — and the disease is on course to spread even more rapidly than ever. The latest projections propose a worst-case scenario in which 1.4 million new cases will emerge in the next four months.
That works out to 990,000+ dead folk in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Note that these are only those who die directly from the disease. Not counted are all those who will die because they depended upon people who died of the disease. You know… kids and old folk and the infirm and such. And then there are all those who will die because of the cultural freakout that’s pretty much inevitable from an epidemic like this.
And if you get an epidemic killing hundreds of thousands in just a few months, it’s a safe bet it’ll travel.
Of course, this may all be BS, and ebola will burn itself out. Who knows.
A 1970’s (and boy does it show) film by NASA that *briefly* depicts O’Neill cylinder colonies, but mostly deals with the Stanford Torus:
[youtube EgrdAUFFMrA]
If the bill actually does what it seems to… here we have a new law that’s actually a good idea.
Instead of the “stuff in outer space is the common property of all mankind” bullcrap, this bill would seem to put across the crazy notion that those who go to the bother of actually exploring and exploiting asteroids would actually *own* them.
Fun story about the Ogalalla Aquifer, and how it’s going dry and taking Americas food production capacity with it:
In short, for many decades farmers and others living in what used to be called the Great American Desert have been pumping ancient subsurface water to irrigate crops and water cities and such. And since the aquifer is to a large degree a fixed volume of water with few sources, it’s starting to go dry. The responses have been:
1) Switch to crops and farming techniques that require less water
2) La-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you-la-la-la….
It seems another option should be available, though. My favorite idea… terraforming!
OK, here’s the Ogalalla Aquifer:
I used this particular map for two reasons:
1) it’s one of the few that, on a quick GIS, shows the Ogalalla Aquifer compared to a good chunk of the CONUS
2) it shows it with the planned Keystone pipeline.
Why are these two important? Because here’s my plan. Refill the aquifer.
The norther part of the aquifer is only the width of Iowa from the Mississippi River. In recent years, there have been droughts that have lowered the level of the river to dangerous levels, choking off barge traffic. But then, there have also been times when that river has slopped over its banks something fierce. Well… rather than just letting the place flood, build a series of pipelines stretching from flood-stage Mississippi River western bank locations in Iowa and Missouri all the way west to boreholes in Nebraska and Kansas. Attach massive pumps to them, powered by new nuclear reactors. During floods, the reactors spool up, powering the pumps and using the floodwater for cooling; billions of gallons are drained from the river and passed west to refill the aquifer. During non-flood times, the pumps are shut down and the reactors go to “standard” power levels.
Sure, high pressure pipes ten feet in diameter stretching 400 or so miles would be an engineering feat. But again, note the Keystone pipeline: not as wide, but certainly far longer. The pipes could be either above or below ground, depending on the area; for below ground pipes, much digging would be needed. And here’s where the effort might actually pay for itself: restart something like the Depress-era Works Progress Administration. Take people currently drawing food stamps from around the country, bus them to Nebraska and Kansas, put shovels in their hands and away you go! Work gets done, unemployed get jobs and pay, the environment and agriculture and national security all benefit.
There actually seemed to be a bit of interest in the idea I posted a few days ago for an alternate history book idea I’ve been tinkering with for a while. So I’ll take it off the “nice, but probably never gonna happen” list and bump it up to “Hmm. Maybe…”
This is planned to be an official history, with the (tentative, subject to change) title: “Pax Orionis: A History of the Third World War and Its Aftermath.” Written in the alternate history 2014, it focuses on nuclear pulse propulsion, how it began in the fifties, turned into a reality as a result of a small nuclear war in the sixties and became a dominant force in geopolitics until the Third World War in the 1990’s (currently scheduled for 1994, so the book is a “20th anniversary” thing). This alternate world is quite a different place due to some very small changes that quickly spiral into massive consequences. WWIII is as bad as it gets; somewhere in the history will be population tables from before the war, right after and as of 2014, with discussions of the possibility that within the next X years the planetary population might make it back up to one billion. But on the other side, the war leaves translunar and interplanetary infrastructure largely intact; while Earth is trashed, the universe is now open and the ships are there.
In looking at what I have already put together, I’ve got about 30 pages more or less cribbed from my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book, and a fifteen page outline of the alternate history. The history will be changed considerably from what I originally wrote; the original scribblings were in support of a collaboration with another feller, but now it’s a one-man show and a lot of stuff I’ve written will be dumped or greatly altered.
Being an official history, the usual form of third person fictional narration doesn’t work, and there are some aspects of the story where I’d really like to include that (some of the war events, for example). An idea I’ve been playing with is having the authors of the official history including snippets from autobiographies, diaries, novels and screenplays. This is not how official DoD histories are usually put together these days… but Pax Orionis is a whole different world. It is of course a very, very bad world with a whole lot of dead folk, blasted cities and whole nations that have been simply erased; but history shows that massive devastation is often an opportunity for new things.
Now, this summary of reviews of the recent documentary “America” is interesting and amusing:
In short, only 12% of professional movie critics liked it, while 82% of the regular schmoes who actually went to see it of their own volition liked it. On the one hand, it shows the sort of divide we’ve come to expect in the country. On the other hand, it’s really not that surprising. A movie like this – with an avowed and unabashed “America is a pretty great place” message – is bound to attract the sort of people who will agree with that message, and so long as the movie is competent, will probably like it. Movie critics, on the other hand, *live* in a world of pretend and make-believe, and thus “America is good” is a message they’re just not going to be able to readily process.
My own review: it was ok.Parts of it were good and important, such as calling out scumbags like Alinsky and Zinn and Ayers and Ward Churchill (who admitted on camera that he’d basically like to see the US nuked out of existence), but seemed kinda flat much of the time. An opportunity was lost in that the movie didn’t really match the title: “America: Imagine the World Without Her.” To me, this *screams* of alternate history. And it does start out with a “historical re-enactment” that takes a counter-factual turn. But it doesn’t really follow up on that. It could easily have filled several hours showing a world where America failed in some way… lost the Revolution, fell apart in the War of Southern Aggression, fell to Wilsonian national socialism, the Nazis got the bomb first, etc. Oh, well.
But if you want a primer on where the modern American anti-America movement came from, or if you want to drag a lefty pal to a flick they’ll just hate, then this is the flick for you.
There’s also a book (which I haven’t read):