I found a photo of Clarke on the Space Station V set, providing a near-perfect reference for floor-to-ceiling height: it appears that the ceiling is right at 1.25 Clarke Units in height (527 pixels/424 pixels = 1.2429). Now if I knew what exactly a Clarke Unit was, I could dial that right in. So… anybody know? If he was 5’8″, that would give a ceiling height of just over 7 feet. 5’9″ => 7.1875 feet. And so on.
Which provides information, including plans, on how to build things such as 9mm submachine guns out of standard steel tubing. Seems that the British feller (yes, BRITISH) who ran the site up and died here a few years back, but other people are keeping the site up.
Take it for what it’s worth: there are posts written there (such as this) that describe the experiences of Brits who did no more than simply download the instructions from this site. If they are to be believed, apparently the British police see downloading a PDF file from a publicly accessible website as sufficient cause to raid your home. So, FYI.
Also: you can buy the guys book from Amazon (the reviews are positive):
And there’s also this:
And this:
And this:
The point being: guns are not exactly rocket surgery. Couple these sort of home-workshop guns with rapid prototyping, and pretty soon some pretty quality sub-guns will be just a few hours work away.
Disclaimer; all the books say that they are for academic study only. Don’t you dare actually make a gun. That would be naughty.
Now these books aren’t your typical reading material. Common categories include specialized technical and business reports, language dictionaries bearing the “Webster’s” moniker (which is in the public domain), rare disease overviews, and even crossword puzzle books for learning foreign languages, but they all have the same thing in common: they are automatically generated by software.
And then…
So, what’s the next book genre Parker is targeting to have software produce? Romance novels.
Huh.
I’ve long heard people say that in Star Trek-like futures where robots and other technologies have “freed” mankind from drudge-work, people will devote their time to music and art and philosophy and crap like that. Well… it seems that well before robots replace people for most manual labor jobs, they’ll start replacing the writers. And then the painters. And the article linked above points out that a system is being worked on that will replace human newsreaders with CG versions, which means actors won’t be needed for much longer.
So, a world where humans have all our physical needs met, and have nothing to do or contribute. Awesome.
OK, there are a few things here:
A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.
So far, so… well, good, probably. The libraries of the world are *filled* with non-fiction books that would be good for kids to read. Any of a number of histories of the founding of the US, for example. “The Black Book of Communism.” “The Starflight Handbook.” Hell, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.” But what is suggested?
Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California’s Invasive Plant Council.
Ugh.
More than two years ago I expounded on the general topic of schools forcing kids to read dreadful fiction that will turn them off reading forever. Well, just as you can ruin a kids urge to read by forcing “Oliver Twist” or “Hamlet” of “The Great Gatsby,” I suspect tomes on insulation regulations and invasive plants will accomplish much the same goals.
And this is apparently going to be spread pretty much nationwide. Feh.
When I read the Telegraph article, at first I thought it was satire. Let’s hope that it’s actually just bad reporting.
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This may be of interest to some:
… which has decent-resolution page-by-page photos of a number of old books from various libraries around the world. Books like:
Copernicus, Nicolaus (author) – De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Libri VI – 1543 – Nuremberg – The Warnock Library
Galilei, Galileo (author) – Sidereus Nuncius – 1610 – Venice – Stanford Library
Kepler, Johannes (Author) – Astronomia Nova – 1609 – – The Warnock Library
Kepler, Johannes (Author) – Harmonices mvndi . . . – 1619 – Lincii Austria – Stanford Library
Newton, Isaac (author) – Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica – 1687 – London – Stanford Library
Sacro Bosco, Joannes de (author) – Sphaera mundi – 1490 – – Stanford Library
Darwin, Charles (author) and Wallace, Alfred (author) – On the Tendency of Species fo form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection – 1858 – London – The Warnock Library
Franklin, Benjamin (author) – Experiments and Observations on Electricity – 1751 – London – The Warnock Library
Maxwell, James Clerk (author) – A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field – 1864 – Oxford – The Warnock Library
Newton, Isaac (author) – Opticks – 1704 – London – The Warnock Library
And a bunch of others. What it doesn’t *seem* to have is any way to download the images… it’s all done via Flash, and if there’s a way to save the images as something useful like jpegs or PDFs (apart from the drudgery of doing a vast number of “print screens” and stitching the results together… bleah), I haven’t figured it out.
Still… first edition Galileos, Newtons, Keplers! Now, if I could find some first editions of Archimedes and Heron…
OK, here’s one of the projects I’ve been working on of late… scanning and repairing the old “Collier’s space series” articles from the early 1950’s for reprinting in the AIAA-Houston section newsletter. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time these have been republished in clear, high-rez and full color format since the original release.
For those unaware, in the early 1950’s Collier’s magazine (similar to “The Saturday Evening Post”) ran a series of articles written by the likes of Willy Ley and Werner von Braun, illustrated by the likes of Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman, describing what the future of manned space exploration may look like. Their vision was, to put it mildly, grandiose, and far exceeded what the actual space program became and did… but the impact on the public of these articles helped lead to the space program becoming popular with the public… and the government. The designs that were produced, such as the Ferry Rocket and “Wheel” space stations, are comfortably described as “iconic.”
The July/August 2012 issue of AIAA-Houston Horizons reprints the complete first Collier’s article from March 22, 1952. The original magazine layout included numerous ads and extraneous bits that were edited out of this reprint, and in several cases replaced with “Mini-APR” articles, several of which tie directly into the Collier’s series. This first article includes about 30 pages of the original Collier’s stuff. Future issues of Horizons will carry the complete set of Collier’s article,s including the Moon exploration and Mars exploration articles.
As always, Horizons is a free-to-download PDF. New for this issue, it is available in both high and low resolution.
Feel free to spread the word about this. The more it is downloaded from the AIAA site, the more interest is shown in it, the more might be done with this in the future.
The Acks o the Apostles, Chaptir 14, verse 8
**Noo, at Lystra, there was a cripple mannie vrang amo e feet fae e day he wis born, nivver haein waalkit. He wis hearknin tae Paul as he spak, an Paul, leukin him straicht in e ee an seein he hid e faith tae be made aa better, says till him wi a lood vice: “Stan straicht up on yer feet!” He jumpit up an set oot waalkin. An fan e crood saa fit Paul hid deen, they roart oot o them in their ain tongue, “E gods hiv come dooon till hiz in e form o a mannie.”
Now who can argue with that? (Spellcheck about melted down on this’n, though)
Vaguely relevant:
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Many a year ago I read the 1949 novel “The Earth Abides” by George Stewart. In it, a plague sweeps across the planet, very nearly making humanity extinct… the total population of the San Francisco region, for instance, is reduced to on the order of a dozen or so. These few survivors are faced with entertaining decisions such as “do we outright murder this new guy who came stumbling into camp… he seems decent enough, but it looks like he has syphilis, and maybe we’d be better off if we simply brained him and shoved him into a hole.”
After ten or twenty years, the survivors and their children are curious about survivors elsewhere. Given that they don’t have near enough of a genetic base to build a viable population, it’s a valid concern. So the decision is made to restore a jeep to running condition and send a few of the young uns out into the world to see what they can find. Unsurprisingly, getting a jeep into running condition decades after it last ran is not a straightforward proposition. one of the big issues is that the tires have all dried out, turned brittle, broke and rotted. Eventually they do find some that were stored well, and off they go.
That part did get me thinking. If all you had were tires that were decades old and you *had* to get them running… would it be chemically possible to restore the rubber? Would some form of heat treating (boiling them in water, boiling them in oil, boiling them in some solvent or hydrocarbon, putting them in an oven) restore dried-out old rubber? Or does the arrow of time on rubber only run one way?
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PS: if you haven’t read “Earth Abides,” you really should. It’s technically science fiction, what with a remarkably vicious plague that the main character – who is basically Just Some Guy, not an in-the-know scientist or some such – guesses might’ve been a bioweapon. But nothing about it really seemed sci-fi. It seemed frighteningly realistic, and there are some really poignant scenes (I’m especially thinking of two times the main character crosses the Golden Gate Bridge, decades apart… passing the same car stopped mid span, drivers door open, both times). The main character tries to make sure that the next generation will grow up civilized, and puts great hope and faith in one son who is especially promising. And… it ain’t Hollywood.
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Oooh! Somebody buy THAT one!!
A short while ago a Well Known Science Fiction Author contacted me about the possibility of getting a diagram created to illustrate a novel he’s working on. Done! I’m uncertain of the propriety of giving out details, so I’ll leave it with once it’s public most of y’all will go “well, sure, that one makes sense.” I understand the book is about a year-ish from publication.
I actually got paid for my work. Woo!
Anybody else???