Yay, chaos

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, youtube  No Responses »
Oct 032023
 

Why everyone’s phone will alarm at 2:20 pm ET on Wednesday

“Everyone” in the US, at any rate, will supposedly receive a text message stating “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” Additionally, some sort of weird alert noise.

OK, fine. Here’s the weird bit:

The test will be broadcast by cell towers for approximately 30 minutes beginning at 2:20 pm ET, FEMA said. During this time, all compatible wireless phones that are switched on, within range of an active cell tower, and whose wireless providers participates in WEA tests should receive the text message.

The test will run for half an hour? I *assume* it means the system will try for half an hour to reach out to all phones for half an hour to send that one message. As opposed to blatting the siren out of your phone for half an hour. That’d be nuts. That’d be stupid. That’d be annoying and frustrating and disruptive. That’d also be the sort of thing that some dimwitted bureaucrats would sign off on.

 Posted by at 5:00 pm

One Life

 art, awesomeness, history, youtube  No Responses »
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

YouTuber worth watching: “Vampire Robot”

 AARRRGH, history, Hmm..., youtube, YouTubers worth watching  No Responses »
Sep 192023
 

This YouTuber has a *lot* of incredibly mundane videos that are surprisingly interesting. They are largely videos shot in public places over the years… stores, malls, etc. on average days and remarkable days.

https://www.youtube.com/@vampirerobot/videos

For instance, shopping at a mall in 1984 is a fundamentally different experience than any mall I’ve seen in over a decade: there are a lot of people there.

And then there are the videos shot on unusual days:

And then there are the videos that presage what we’re going to get to live through again:

 

 

 

 Posted by at 12:23 pm

The LotR 25th Anniversary cut

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., youtube  No Responses »
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

Slooooooooooooow

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., youtube  No Responses »
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

Mining our way to freedom

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., nukes, politics, science, Worldwreckers, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Sep 092023
 

Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world.  There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres of solar panels and fill the seas with whale-confounding wind turbines. But there are issues beyond just what method will produce the volts and amps. For instance… all the batteries will need to be filled with metals dug out of the Earth; electric motors and a billion miles of power lines will need to be processed from all the copper we can scrape up. And the problem seems to be that at current resource extraction (i.e. mining) rates, we’re nowhere near able to deliver those materials.

So it seems we have a few options:

1) Turn Earth into a giant open pit. To hell with the environment… we need to save the environment!

2) Go all-electric… and just tell people to suck it up, they’ll learn to live with less. 15-minute cities will seem like the wildest dream of raving libertarians. Personal vehicles? Gone. Traveling any sort of distance at all? Prohibitively expensive to simply prohibited. Air conditioning? A myth from the Old Ones.

3) Asteroid mining. Everything we might need is available a million times over floating out in space; the effort to retrieve it will open spaceflight to mankind in a way never before dreamed, spreading civilization and terrestrial biology to the furthest regions of the solar system.

Which will it be?

Challenges and Bottlenecks for the  Green Transition

 

 Posted by at 10:03 pm
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