No need for the blue monkeys?

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Jul 282023
 

The driving motivation behind everything in the movie “Avatar” was humanity’s need of the mineral “Unobtanium.” It was special since it was a room temperature superconductor, allowing for a lot of advanced technologies. In the movie, humanity would travel light years and wipe out primitive alien civilizations to get it. But recent news suggests that we might not need to… but only if the study turns out to be true. And scientists are dubious.

 

A spectacular superconductor claim is making news. Here’s why experts are doubtful

Korean scientists claim to have created a room temperature superconductor (up to 127 decrees C). The video *seems* to back that up, but who knows. This will need to be tested and replicated. And the chunk they’ve displayed seems kinda cruddy… but the history of prior low-temperature superconductors seems to be that the first bits out the gate are cruddy, with quality following along as production techniques are refined.

*IF* this pans out, there are two fantastic takeaways here. The first is “hey, awesome, room temperature superconductor.” Maglev trains and such become a lot easier. CAT scanners won’t need liquid helium supplies to keep their magnetic bearings working.

But the second thing to note should be noted and noted *hard:* the material is primarily lead, doped with copper oxygen and phosphorus. You know what I *don’t* see there? I don’t see “rare-earth elements that we have to go hat in hand to the Chinese to obtain.” We don’t need to throw money into third-world hellholes to have them scrape vast pits into the ground. Domestic mining and production would seem entirely feasible.

That’s all great. I hope it bears out. But history is full of fabulous press releases that turned out to be fraudulent or simply wrong. That’s certainly possible here. We’ll just need to wait and see.

 

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the material. See how far you get before you go “I dunno what the frak they’re talking about:”

The chemical composition of LK-99 is approximately Pb9Cu(PO4)6O such that—compared to pure lead-apatite (Pb10(PO4)6O)[4]: 5 —approximately one quarter of Pb(II) ions in position 2 of the apatite structure are replaced by Cu(II) ions.[1]: 9  This partial replacement of Pb2+ ions (measuring 133 picometre) with Cu2+ ions (measuring 87 picometre) is said to cause a 0.48% reduction in volume, creating internal stress inside the material.[1]: 8 

The internal stress is claimed to cause a heterojunction quantum well between the Pb(1) and oxygen within the phosphate ([PO4]3−) generating a superconducting quantum well (SQW).[1]: 10  Lee et al. claim to show LK-99 exhibits a response to a magnetic field (Meissner effect) when chemical vapor deposition is used to apply LK-99 to a non-magnetic copper sample.[1]: 4  Pure lead-apatite is an insulator, but Lee et al. claim copper-doped lead-apatite forming LK-99 is a superconductor, or at higher temperatures, a metal.[4]: 5 

 

Here’s a video discussing the “discovery” and the causes of skepticism:

 

 Posted by at 2:40 am

Need a 4K release of this

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., religion, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 272023
 

“The 13th Warrior” was, shockingly to me, one of history’s great box office bombs… budget was about $100 million in 1999, but it only made about $33 million domestically, less than that foreign. Counting marketing, it lost well over a hundred million dollars. I’ve never understood why this was so; it was a substantially badass movie, based on a Michael Chrichton novel (“Eaters of the Dead”) not long after the success of “Jurassic Park,” starring Antonio Banderas. It had Vikings fighting Neanderthals. What was not to like? Well, apparently the movie going public wasn’t interested. My ass was in the theater on opening weekend.

It had a DVD release, but never a valid Blu Ray. I’d be all over a 4K release.

 Posted by at 1:34 pm

New PBYs?

 aircraft, history, Hmm..., news  No Responses »
Jul 262023
 

Color me not just skeptical, but damn near dismissive:

Reviving The PBY Catalina For Modern Warfare Is This Company’s Goal

I fully support the manufacture of newly designed, modernized PBY “Catalina” flying boats. Damned things were awesome 80 years ago; had I buckets of money, I’d fund the program myself. But *this* program does not inspire a great deal of (i.e “any”) confidence. All they show are a few *very* low re and simplistic CG renders of a modernized PBY… lacking the  braces that kept the parasol wing from snapping off during maneuvers. I know materials have advanced a lot since the 1930’s, but come *on,* that design just don’t look right without those braces.

Recall that just over a year ago an Australian company said they were going to remanufacture the Grumman Albatross flying boat. The last “news” update to their website was December of 2022.

 Posted by at 1:28 pm

Woke morons

 dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, science, wisdom  No Responses »
Jul 262023
 

Study results: unsurprising.

Higher Cognitive Ability, Less Concern for Political Correctness – Study Finds

As you can see, there was a moderate positive correlation between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech, and a moderate negative correlation between cognitive ability and concern for political correctness. (The asterisks tell us these results are statistically significant.)

North Americans with higher cognitive ability are more supportive of free speech and less concerned about political correctness. They’re less woke.

It’s a single study and not a terribly comprehensive one. But with a sample size of a single Kamala Harris or AOC or Swalwell, it’s easy to conclude that wokism leads to a massive case of brain rot.

 Posted by at 12:21 pm

Return of the Automat

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Jul 262023
 

An “Automat” was a style of restaurant that was basically a great big vending machine. A wall, or part of one, was covered in little cubbyholes with locked doors; behind each door was a piece of food that the customer could see and pay for. Feed in your coins, the door would pop open and you’d get your sandwich or apple or slice of pie or whatever. Door closes, and the guy working on the *other* side of the wall puts a new one in the cubbyhole. Used to be real popular, but they faded away a couple generations ago.

They seem to be making a comeback, and it’s really not surprising. The video below is an interview with the owner of an Automat franchise; economics is driving this, as three employees can service 250 customers a day, where a regular restaurant would require six. And of course as the minimum wage continues to be driven higher and automation continues to be driven cheaper, soon enough the production of those individual food items will be automated and the cubbyholes will be filled by a robotic arm.

There is another aspect that makes the automat format attractive: this separates the staff almost entirely from the customers… which makes them harder to rob. Additionally, other than the individual cubbyhole doors and things like windows and furniture, violent morons have little to reach that they could destroy. BLM or Antifa rioters come by to smash up the joint? No cash registers or computers or stoves or anything else to reach, so long as the  staff doors are secure. The food-doors would be small and mass produced in vast numbers; they would likely be both cheap and durable… and stocked in large numbers in a few boxes in the back. A Mostly Peaceful Protest sweeps by, you’re closed for a day while the staff swaps out doors, and then you’re back in business. There are those customers who are provoked to violence not because of politics, but because they are crazy or stupid; they order the wrong thing, or their order is screwed up, and they lose their minds and started screaming and flailing. With an automat, they see what they’re going to get before they pay. So long as the mechanisms work, there *should* be reduced incentive for violence. Of course, some people are just going to go buggo anyway, but here humans are largely removed from the other side if the equation.

So long as we’re bringing back things from the Depression era, can we swap out Brutalist architecture for Art Deco?

 

 Posted by at 11:58 am

“Bland Food”

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Jul 182023
 

This article from a few years ago popped up on Twitter today:

White people’s bland food isn’t just an internet meme. It’s a centuries-long obsession

The article is pretty much what you’ll think it’s going to be. A lot of yammering about religion, history, privilege, blah, blah, blah. The usual buzz-word salad that’s all too common in any piece that can be used to denigrate white people, white culture, white anything.

But throughout all of it, an obvious point was left unmentioned. Why do a lot of people like “bland” food? Maybe… because they *like* “bland” food. I am one such. I am perfectly capable of making a satisfying meal out of little more than noodles. *Just* noodles. Or plain rice, a mashed potato, an unadorned chunk of chicken. A fine meal can be made from mixing peanut butter with oatmeal. Is it because I like “bland?” No. It’s because the flavor is perfectly satisfying. What people like the author of the linked article don’t seem to grasp is that people’s senses are on a  spectrum. Women, for example, apparently see colors far more clearly than men do. Some people can hear a pin drop, and would be in physical agony to be subjected to the conversational level of the average Friday night at the local bar. Some people can’t smell much of anything and thus drown themselves in perfume; others can pick up the slightest hints of odor from across the room.

Foods that this author, and apparently many others, would find completely lacking in flavor would be a riot of taste sensation to someone else. Subjecting that person to a pile of seasoning  would be to simply overload their senses for no good reason.

I am comfortable in temperatures others might find frigidly cold. I like the lights turned a little dimmer than standard; a nice sunny day is blinding. Some of this is doubtless due to random chance; some of it doubtless due to the northern European portions of my muttly breeding. And perhaps that plays into food: while spices have been present in northern Europe since forever, they were not as plentiful as elsewhere. Many of my ancestors were probably lucky to survive on simple grain, mutton, chicken, that sort of thing. Their foods were likely less “foody” than people from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, Africa, etc. Thus they evolved to deal with that. That was normal for them. One might wonder if that made their sense of taste sharper, more keen compared to some others.

So if you’re like me and a bowl of mac and cheese actually sounds pretty good, don’t let goons like the author of the piece shame you. Take pride in the fact that you don’t *need* to shower your food with extravagances in order to be happy and satisfied.

 Posted by at 11:10 pm

Disney must hate money

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Jul 152023
 

Photos have emerged from the next Disney live action remake of one of their classic animated films, “Snow White.” You know, the one about the Germanic princess with skin so white it looked like snow, who ended up running around with seven dwarves? Well… about all that, Disney has decided to continue the unprofitable trend of de-whitening European folk tales.

There are claims that these *aren’t* the actual “dwarves.” But given that “Snow White” is to be played by a Hispanic woman… why assume that these *aren’t* an accurate depiction? And remember, Hollywood is hardly above lying to the public’s face. Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch *wasn’t* playing Khan? Or when all the remakes and reboots of classic animated series were supposed to be faithful continuations that the existing fans would recognize, love and appreciate? Yeah… lying liars who lie have a tendency to lie.

And… it turns out that those claims of “fake” are probably themselves fake:

‘Snow White’ Set Pics Stir Anti-Woke Criticism

Asked for comment on the brouhaha, a Disney spokesperson initially told The Daily Beast “the photos are fake and not from our production” and added that the Mouse House wanted a correction from the Mail.

Hours later, however, Disney’s PR shop completely backtracked and said the photos were from the production but were not official “photos”—chalking up the earlier statement to a misunderstanding.

 

Dear readers, consider this: somewhere out in the multiverse there’s a version of the Disney corporation that decided to do a live action remake of “Snow White,” and decided to try their hardest to make it look like the original animated classic. And somewhere else out there is another Disney that decided to do a “Snow White” remake that was faithful to the Grimm tale as written. And somewhere further down the multiverse line is a version of Disney that decide to say “Fark it” and make a truly messed-up remake that swaps out all the “disneyfication” for hard-core “let’s make this thing like Germans a thousand years ago would have made it, with friggen’ terrifying monsters and death and horror straight out of Teutonic legends and myths and folk tales,” likely directed by del Toro with the aid of the ghosts of Lovecraft and Giger.

Any one of those is something I would have been interested in. *This* worlds Disney? Nah.

 

Note: the “dwarves” from Norse/Germanic folk tales weren’t just short humans. They were a different order of being entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)

Anyway, Hollywood is basically on strike now, with writers and actors on the picket line. I imagine this might effect “Snow White,” as well as every other movie and TV show out there. But you know what? Who friggen’ cares. Things have gotten so slow in Hollywood that people have come to expect *years* between seasons of shows… seasons with a tiny number of episodes. long gone are the likes of *good* Star Trek series where you could expect 20+ episodes every year. now… Eight? Ten? And with many shows, the gap between seasons lasting a number of years. When did season 3 of “The Orville” end? When will season 4 start… if it ever does? And let’s face it: there are a metric fark-ton of old movies and shows available for streaming, more than enough to tide most people over for the most extended of strike. And beyond even that… YouTube and the like are loaded to the gills with lone creators who are far more entertaining than quarter-billion-dollar productions. So you go right ahead and shut down production, Hollywood. if it strangles nonsense like “Snow White,” so much the better.

 

How long before I’m able to say “Hey, AI, make me a four-hour faithful adaptation of ‘Snow White’ Using the production team from “The Lord Of The Rings” and starring Marylin Monroe as Snow White’?” Because that’ll be the end of Hollywood.

 Posted by at 10:14 am

Pushback

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Jul 132023
 

The pendulum *may* be beginning to swing the other way on some issues. For a number of years the bulk of the populace has been cowed into obedience over LGBTQ/Pride stuff with threats ranging from being called names to losing their jobs… but more and more people are ceasing to care. Some of this is doubtless due to the over-use of Cancel Culture tactics. And a lot of it is doubtless due to people being fed up with the utter insanity that many weirdos are trying to normalize. “Drag Queen Story Hour” may go down in history as the moment when people, parents of small children in particular, said “enough.”

The video below describes a *lot* of recent events, both of the weirdos trying to threaten people for not going along with the ideology, and with normal folk pushing back.

 Posted by at 12:18 pm
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