I woulda bought the hell out of a *lot* of these kits… had they been made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX5B1TUUOA0
Apr 292023
Apr 282023
I listened to part of an NPR piece earlier today on the subject of art forgery and the economics of it. Part of the discussion revolved around a case where a museum had a special display of “art” produced, supposedly, by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 80’s. If you’ve never heard of Basquiat, there are two things to keep in mind:
1) His paintings have sold for over one Hundred MILLION dollars.
2) His paintings look like this:
Yeah. That’s really what passes for “fine art” these days.
As it turns out, this museum exhibition was populated by *forged* Basquiat paintings, which caused headaches all around.
Anyway, the thing that made me laugh out loud was one of the admissions by one of the forgers: the paintings took less than half an hour to create. According to THIS ARTICLE, some of them as little as five minutes. If you can forge “art” that passes *any* sort of muster in a matter of minutes, I gotta question whether said “art” is worthy of any real mention.
In the NPR piece, the expert they talked to yammered on about how “important” Basquiat was, along with Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. There’s yer problem: you think *that* is art worthy of remembrance. But where is your reverence for Chesley Bonestell? Norman Rockwell? Robert McCall? You know, artists with actual skill and talent, producers of art that inspired and uplifted… and demonstrated craftsmanship and ᚠᚢcᚲᛁᚾᚷ effort? Artists you couldn’t create “previously unseen” art from in the time it takes to listen to a mediocre podcast?
This is just a part of the uglification of the world, the exaltation of the mediocre, the banal, the bland.
Apr 242023
110 years in prison for selling flat pieces of metal.
Apr 202023
Well, it got off the pad. That’s good. But at least six of the engines didn’t seem to be burning, and the whole stack started tumbling just before stage sep… and then the stages didn’t sep.
But it got not just off the pad, but away from the pad, and made it a good way toward first stage burnout before things went sideways. So… a qualified woohoo.
EDIT: Just saw a different launch angle: It clawed its way off the pad at something of an angle. The thrust vector seems to have been off from the beginning; SpaceX is probably lucky they didn’t lose the pad.
Seems relevant:
Nailed it.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/FC5wo1eppH
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) April 20, 2023
Six of the 33 engines weren’t running:
Apr 202023
Potatoes are better than human blood for making space concrete bricks, scientists say
Potato starch was used to create bricks from simulated Martian soil. 55 kilos of dehydrated taters resulted in about 200 bricks. Many thousands would be needed to make something the size of a house, so that’s a lot of po-tay-toes. Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a Martian brick production facility.
But that wasn’t the weird part of the report: blood and urine were also studied as binding agents for the bricks. Bleah.
Apr 182023
1 person killed, multiple injured in NYC parking garage collapse
Things in this country have gone from “weird” to “concerning” to “downright embarrassing.”
Good thing the mayor of New York has his priorities in the right place:
Apr 182023
I haven’t flown in years. The last few experiences were *terrible.* So how’s it going these days? Maybe it’s better…
I am not part of the community that believes children/babies shouldn’t fly HOWEVER, I do believe certain communities do not properly manage their children in public and I understand why that might drive someone to lose their mind. pic.twitter.com/qAGYviNlye
— I ❤️ Jews, Please dont close my accounts. (@LaCienegaBlvdss) April 18, 2023
We are all either this guy or this woman. pic.twitter.com/TNTmlQbeak
— Observations from Life 🎙 (@ObsFromLife) April 18, 2023
Yeah… I think I’m good staying on the ground. Stuck in a tube with a screaming child? No thanks. Stuck in a tube with a screaming adult? No thanks.
Apr 152023
Something failed on the launch tower and fell the full length of it, sending out a shower of sparks. Seems like the man-carrying elevator suffered a problem and the counterweight plummeted. This is doubtless not great news for the planned Monday launch.
So, yeah. Another “infrastructure oopsie.” Hmmm.
Here is another angle showing what appears to be some kind of electrical short resulting in an object falling into the base of the tower.
🎥@LabPadre pic.twitter.com/VWqri1yS0N
— Zack Golden (@CSI_Starbase) April 15, 2023
🚀Sparks Fell From the Orbital Launch Tower🚀
At 1:47AM 2023-04-15 sparks rained down from the orbital launch tower (OLT) at the #SpaceX #Starbase rocket launch complex.
The sparks may have been some kind of late night welding or grinding, maybe some kind of mishap.
🎥LabPadre pic.twitter.com/WMC9NCNnn2
— Starbase Watcher 🚀 (@watchstarbase) April 15, 2023
Apr 142023
Netflix will be releasing a “documentary” about Queen Cleopatra VII. This “documentary” is apparently based on the fictional notion that she was a sub-Saharan African. This is a long-debunked and remarkably silly idea, but welcome to 2023, I guess. Here’s a good takedown:
When you race swap enough fictional characters, you start in on race swapping the historical characters. then you re-write history entirely. then you *erase* and *invent* history. And then society is whatever those in power want it to be.
Apr 082023
So there I am minding my own business when a text message comes in from my dad. Nothing unusual there. But the message is long, rambling, kinda stream-of-consciousness, seemingly part of a conversation I wasn’t a part of. I have received messages meant for other people before, but the format of the message, and the length of it, were quite unlike my dad’s normal type of messages. So I send him a “WTF” response. A few minutes later, clarification: the phone *listened* to my dad as he held a conversation with someone else, transcribed both sides of the conversation into a single kinda gibberishy paragraph, and then decided to send that transcript to me.
At no point in the process was my dad clued in to this; the phone did it itself.
So… who else gets these transcripts? The NSA? FBI? IRS? The Russians? And as seems most likely, the Chinese?
Something to keep in mind: if your phone, or Alexa, Siri, HAL, or any other modern device *can* hear you, it *does* hear you. And sometimes it does stuff with what it hears.
Now pardon me while I wrap my cell phone in a few layers of tinfoil.