Sep 302023
 

These rumors sound good. Too good, in fact…

 

Rumor: Christopher Nolan Directing Next James Bond?

Not just that Nolan will direct the next two or three Bond movies, but that they will be based on the original Ian Flemming novels, set in the original time periods, and will be faithful to the source material. This would be directly opposed to the modern studio system of making crap For The Modern Audience, with character race and gender swapped, with the good guys turned into bad guys, beauty made ugly.

Again, just rumors. Thus very likely not gonna happen. But if it does, it’ll be remarkable.

 

 Posted by at 1:40 am
Sep 232023
 

Do you want your very own genuine space suit from “2001: A Space Odyssey?” Sure, we all do. Got at least eighty grand to start bidding on it? Sure, we all don’t. But at least you can look at the pictures and dream.

Astronaut Space Suit (6) Piece Ensemble from 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968)

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:09 pm
Sep 232023
 

Well before the BBC fell into ruin and self-parody, it had a moment of undeniable awesomeness. Nicolas Winton was a British banker who rescued nearly 700 mostly Jewish children from the Nazis just before the outbreak of WWII, getting them to new lives in Britain. Afterwards, he did little to nothing to glorify himself or his deeds; it only really came out in 1988 when his wife found an old notebook with the names and passed them on to a Holocaust researcher. There followed a couple TV programs culminating in an episode of “That’s Life” where, unbeknownst to Winton, the *entire* audience was filled with the children and descendants of children he’d saved.

That’s how you fricken’ do it.

And now there’s to be a movie about Winton starring Anthony Hopkins.

 

 Posted by at 12:36 pm
Sep 232023
 

Still needs to go to the USSC, but it’s another step in the right direction:

US judge strikes down California ban on high-capacity gun magazines

California’s ban on standard capacity magazines was struck down not on some technicality, but because it’s blazingly unconstitutional.

Ruling here:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6082773/149/duncan-v-becerra/

 

Woe to the victim who runs out of ammunition before armed attackers do. The police will mark the ground with chalk, count the number of shell casings, and file the report.

 Posted by at 10:17 am
Sep 182023
 

It turns out that Peter Jackson filmed about 1,300 *hours* of footage for the Lord of the Rings. Seven million feet of negative is sitting in a Warner Brothers vault, not doin’ nuthin’. Granted the majority of this is alternate takes and bloopers, but almost certainty there is enough quality additional scenes there that the already massive Extended Version could be greatly further extended. Guy in the video below suggests that Warner Bros cutting Jackson loose to create six-hour miniseries from each movie for release on HBO/Max would be the way to go for the 25th anniversary of each flick, in much the same way they gave “The Justice League” back to Zack Snyder. I can’t say as that I disagree: a proper Ridiculously Extended Cut, overseen by Jackson, would be a dandy way to get over the nightmare of “the Rings of Power.”

The legalities of such things elude me. I *assume* that Warner retains all the rights to do with their stuff what they see fit, but who knows.

 Posted by at 11:24 pm
Sep 172023
 

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.

 Posted by at 11:47 pm
Aug 242023
 

First, good news from the world of medicine:

UK’s first womb transplant deemed ‘massive success’: ‘Over the moon’

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:

Trans womb transplants ‘10 to 20 years’ away after UK’s first successful operation on cis patient 

Weird enough that some people want to transplant wimminbits into biological dudes. But it gets weirder:

 

Taxpayers should fund $300,000 UTERUS transplants to help transgender women get pregnant, suggests authors in AMA Journal

 

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.

 

 Posted by at 9:29 pm