Aug 082025
 

So a very distant relation in Sweden is working on fleshing out his family history and managed to get in touch with my mother regarding my mothers fathers fathers father, who left Sweden in 1852 and came to Illinois. Included in what we have so far is a translation of a letter the guy sent back home to Sweden describing the ocean voyage and the trip from Boston to Chicago in “steam wagons.” Kinda interesting to read, but there was one sentence that jumped out at me as kind of a WTF moment. I don’t know if there were anomalies in the translation from Swedish to English, but given how well the rest of the letter seems written, I’m thinking not. I think my Great great great grandfather got some bad info while in Boston regarding a local landmark:

“We went to see the tree under which Samuel Columbus rested the first night after discovering America.”

Ummm.

GGGGrandfather makes note of tricksters trying to scam immigrants, so it would surprise me none at all if some random tree was declared an important historical landmark. Doubtless someone tried to sell souvenir branches or something.

He lived to the ripe old age of 99, having fought in the Civil War on the Union side.

 

 Posted by at 9:37 pm
Jul 172025
 

A Tweet about the Pixar movie “Coco,” which I have not seen, got me thinking (and I think re-iterating an idea I blathered about on this blog years ago but can’t be bothered to look up again).

https://x.com/cirsova/status/1945885686768230903

An interesting theology: you continue to exist in some form so long as someone remembers you, then once nobody alive remembers you, *poof* you’re gone.This is apparently the plot of “Coco,” where some kid visits Mexican Afterlife, which is a party for those whose living relatives still venerate them. While this does not seem to jibe with my understanding of Christianity, set that aside for the moment and just ponder the basic idea, that your existence in the afterlife is contingent upon people remembering you. (A lot of theologies around the world include some ancestor-veneration, seemingly implying that Great Granny’s afterlife is depending on you dropping off a banana on her shrine now and then.)

For most people throughout history, that meant that within probably 40 years of your death, you’re off to oblivion. Some people last in some form of memory for centuries, of course… Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great will last a good long while. But some people are remembered, then utterly forgotten… then remembered again. Consider  Gilgamesh or any number of Pharaohs or minor functionaries mentioned on clay tablets or tomb walls or hidden texts. They were forgotten and lost for millennia, with not a single soul living on Earth knowing their name. But then their name is found and read again by archeologists. Some  become world famous, known to millions: King Tut, for example. Others, like Ea-nāṣir, are known ta  relative few. Are these dead souls left in some sort of limbo or stasis during the years they’re forgotten, then come back, or do they just pop back into existence?

And of course, how much does the condition of the afterlife depend on the condition of your memory? Is the afterlife a party only if people who actually knew you still remember you? Does it fade into hollowness and boredom as your memory fades? Are you left sitting motionless in an empty space if your memory consists solely of your name written on some unread wall?  Imagine the grim fate awaiting us all as we wait for proton decay to erase the last memory crystals that contain our tax records, a googol years or more from now.

 

 Posted by at 11:52 pm
Feb 222025
 

Now scanning: “Norspiel,” rules book for a wargame created at Northrop Aircraft in 1957. Not the usual sort of thing I go after, but it seems interesting. I wasn’t able to find anything online about it other than the ebay listing, so it may be new to the wargaming world. I’m not a wargamer (not since about 1987), so I’m no expert, but it seems a lot simpler than, say, Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer 40K.

This will be added to the next APR Patreon/subscriber catalog to be voted on for a monthly reward. If this sort of thing is of interest, please check out: 

aerospaceprojectsreview.com/monthly.htm

 Posted by at 6:12 pm
Feb 222025
 

Everyone is nostalgic for the days of their youth and think that “those years were the best.” But I really believe a good case can be made that the 80’s and well into the 90’s were in many ways the pinnacle of our culture. Pop culture was almost undeniably at it’s zenith. We still had optimism; our culture hadn’t been tainted with the post-9/11 malaise and the recognition that a demographic tsunami and cultural collapse were inevitable. Hollywood still made entertainment that entertained and wasn’t loaded to the gills with deviant insanity. Everything *wasn’t* a struggle session forced on us by people who hated us and our civilization. And pop culture was really in a sweet spot. TV, movies and music had learned how to make just exactly awesome stuff that people loved. Things were *fun.* And I suspect that entertainment tech was perfect, in a way. If you wanted “Star Wars,” you could get “Star Wars” on a VHS tape. It wasn’t especially easy and it certainly was nowhere near as good as on a movie screen, but it was okay. And that “available, good but not great” accessibility scratched the itch but made you want to go to the movies & get the Good Stuff. To chat about it you talked face to face with friends, as social media didn’t really exist. Now it’s too easy and we’re too separated. We didn’t know how good we had it.

 

Today if you want to watch something, chances are you just pull it up and stream it. Any episode, the whole series, available in 4K resolution on an 85-inch high-def screen the moment you want it. And that’s great and all… but there really is something special about things being a bit more challenging than that. When a show took 22 weeks to tell a seasons worth of stories, rather than dumping 8 hours on you all at once and not to be seen again for another year or two, it spread out the joy over time. You could absorb it and process it. And, in the case of shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, X Files and the like, argue and debate it with your friends, one episode a week.

When things are too easy, they become cheap.

 Posted by at 9:07 am
Jan 272025
 

I haven’t finished the first Pluto, but I decided to go ahead with an improved version anyway. Pluto ver 2 now has a full weapons bay interior, shadow shield and air conditioning equipment. I am also going to completely revise the reactor and add booster rockets.

 

The first one will still be completed, to serve as a proof of concept and as a painting test to get that 24K gold look. Then I’ll probably see about selling it on ebay or something.

 

 Posted by at 1:45 pm
Jan 182025
 

So it has been a little bit of a while. Been busy, and lately I’ve been ill (influenza B). But the illness is finally fading and the busyness may be tapering a bit. So here’s a recent product of slow progress: the 3D printed bits of a 1/18 Project Pluto  nuclear ramjet missile. Much of it is fiber-printed, with smaller parts resin printed. Why does it exist? Because I want one. But also because I hope other people may want one (or more). As shown here it’s fairly basic; nose cone and midsection are printed  as single pieces, tail section left & right halves. A basic TORY nuclear reactor is included; it’s visible through the nozzle but not so much through the serpentine inlet. But if displayed as a cutaway, it should be pretty effective. If I go ahead with a production version, the midsection will be split left and right, with visible equipment including weapons bays. Who might be interested in this as a kit? Printed and ready for sanding (LOTS of sanding) and assembly, I’m guessing something like $200 plus shipping. A fully completed display piece would be rather more. Going to experiment some with getting a good golden surface. If interested in joining a list, send an email to:

Not shown are the 1/144 “Big Onion” SPS launching SSTO and the 1/1 M388 “Davy Crockett” warhead. Both of those are done and being painted.

 

 Posted by at 3:44 pm
Aug 262024
 

A scientific paper published more than 20 years ago was recently rediscovered by the internet:

Sugawara et al. 2003, “Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam”

https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062

A lot of this goes over my little post-Covid head, but the summary seems to be that, theoretically, an advanced high energy collider, similar to but larger and more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider could slam muons into each other and create a laser–like beam of neutrinos. OK, cool. But where I get fuzzy is the discussion of the “mean free path” of the neutrinos. By tinkering with the exact energy of the neutrinos, you can set the MFP to the exact distance from the collider to the target. The beam of neutrinos pass virtually unhindered through the Earth, then, at a fairly specific spot, they create a shower of hadrons. That’s where I’m lost: do the neutrinos suddenly decide “ok, let’s interact with the atoms in dirt right here,” or what, exactly? I’m puzzled.

But in any event, that shower of hadrons *is* perfectly capable of interacting with normal matter, such as the fissile material in a nuclear bomb. In a matter of seconds or minutes, the uranium or plutonium will heat up enough to cause the surrounding high explosives to catch fire or detonate, while messing with the nuclear properties of the warhead itself. They estimate that the bomb will “fizzle” with about 3% the yield it was designed for.

The anti-weapon weapon is hilariously impractical: even with advanced superconducting electromagnets the collider will be on the scale of kilometer in size, costing hundreds of billions. Each shot will require the power output of a nation, and will only target a single nuclear weapon, whose position must be known to just a few feet. And it kinda seems like this vast ring-like structure must be aimed physically. Good luck with *that.*

It seems like “physically possible, engineeringly impractical, financially impossible” project. Something nobody could pull off on Earth. On the other hand, the sci-fi possibilities are clear. Aliens, say, show up. Their scouts check out Earth, realize we’re loaded with troublesome nukes, so their von Neuman bots start carving up the moon. They dig a trench around the moons equator and fill that trench with a vast accelerator… with the reaction chamber pointed right at Earth. A relatively small jiggering of the chamber can aim the resulting neutrino beam to any desired spot on Earth; slight adjustments to the colliders power sets the precise range. Nukes in solos start melting down. Nukes on planes kept in constant motion, however, would likely be safe. Nukes on subs? If they can precisely track submerged boomers, they can probably target them.

 

 Posted by at 11:29 pm
Jun 172024
 

Videos have come out showing President Biden doing bad things (specifically, acting like what he is: an elderly man who is well into cognitive and physical decline), and his PR machine is spooling up the defense that the videos are “cheap fakes” and “deep fakes.” The videos are clearly *not* fakes, neither “cheap” nor “deep,” but have in most cases been shot by reputable media sources and broadcast on national news. However, we’re now at the point where people are coming to know and understand deep fakes, and as I’ve been saying for a long time, bad actors will start claiming that valid videos of them behaving poorly are actually deep fakes.

 

The era of video as useful evidence is coming to an end. They’ll be good for a while longer, but not much longer. In maybe five years, the courts will be in complete chaos as every defendant on trial who was seen by cell phones or security cameras will be able to rightly claim that deep faking is now so easy that it would be simplicity itself for the prosecution to slap it together over lunch.

 Posted by at 7:12 pm
Jun 052024
 

There is a constant war between sane people and those who want to neuter the English language in order to make it safer and more politically correct. One aspect of that the desire to remove from common parlance phrases that originate with firearms. For example:

 

https://grandparentsforgunsafety.org/gun-violence-facts/words-matter/

 

We speak casually about dodging a bullet… shooting the breeze… taking aim and smoking guns. The language of gun violence is pervasive in our culture.But it doesn’t need to be that way. We can be conscious of the phrases and metaphors from our vocabulary and begin to change the conversation about gun violence one word at a time.

 

Or, and here’s a thought, use these and similar phrases *more.* Normalize firearms in everyday speech.

This is not a complete list; I’m sure there are more. Feel free to comment.

 

ammunition
armed with the facts
aim for

at the end of a gun

bang to rights

best shot

big guns

big shot
bite the bullet

blaze away

broadside

brought a knife to a gunfight
bullet-points
bullet-proof

bullet train
bull’s eye

cannon fodder
caught in the crossfire
cheap shot

circular firing squad

dead eye
dodged a bullet
don’t shoot the messenger
even shot
faster than a speeding bullet

finger on the trigger
fire away

fire back

fire for effect
firing blanks

firing line

firing squad
flash in the pan

full bore

go ballistic
great guns

gun down
gun it
gun shy
gunning for someone
half-cocked

hang fire

have a shot at

heavy artillery
high caliber
hired gun
held a gun to my head
hot shot

hotter than a $3 pistol

in my sights
in the crosshairs

in the line of fire

itchy trigger finger
jumped the gun
Just shoot me!
keep your ammo dry
like shooting fish in a barrel
lock, stock and barrel
lock and load

long shot

loose cannon
magic bullet
misfired
missed the mark

more bang for your buck
moving target

number one with a bullet
outgunned
on target

open fire

parting shot
point blank
point & shoot
pot shot

powderkeg
pull the trigger

quick on the draw
quick on the trigger
rapid fire
ready, aim, fire

riding shotgun
rifle through

scattershot

set your sights on
she/he is a pistol

shoot blanks

shoot down in flames
shoot first, ask questions later
shoot for
shoot for the moon
shoot from the hip
shoot me an email
shoot off your mouth

shoot on sight
shoot out
shoot the breeze

shot across the bow
shot down
shot in the dark
shot myself in the foot

shot to hell

shotgun apartment

shotgun seat

shotgun wedding

shots fired
silver bullet

slow on the draw

small bore
smoking gun
son of a gun
stick to my guns

straight down the barrel
straight shooter

sun’s out, guns out

surefire
sweating bullets
take aim
take a shot
target market
top gun
trigger a response
trigger alert
trigger happy

trigger law

trigger warning

triggered
trip your trigger

turkey shoot
under fire
under the gun

welcome to the gunshow

whole nine yards
whole shooting match

with both barrels
with guns blazing

worth a shot

you could fire a cannon down the street and not hit anyone

young guns

 Posted by at 4:08 pm