Star Trek: Lower Decks

 Meh., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 132020
 

So CBS All Access released the first trailer for the new Star Trek animated show premiering in August…

I remain unconvinced that spending money on CBS All Access makes any kind of sense. Sure, *finally* CBS made a Star Trek show that looks like the designers have actually seen an episode or two of Star Trek before… the ships and shuttles and tech all look like they’d fit into the TNG timeframe. But CBS does not yet seem to have figured out how to *write* Star Trek. This is a trailer, so it should contain some of the best stuff… and since the show is supposed to be a comedy, the trailer should be funny. But yet…

Pass.

 

Sigh. Used to be a time when “This new Star Trek Movie or show looks not good” would fill me with righteous indignation that the franchise was being degraded and squandered. Now it just fills me with a gray nothingness.

Cancel all the Trek. Collect all the rights back into one place, let Trek sit fallow for three to five years… then give it to Seth Macfarlane. It’s the only way to be sure.

 Posted by at 12:13 pm

Suddenly I still don’t want to fly commercial again

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 132020
 

Before 9/11, I *liked* flying cross-country. But after that it quickly became not only annoying, but physically painful as I was forever getting shoved into seats with nowhere near enough legroom. A flight a couple years back, after a gap of several years, convinced me that I was correct in my disdain for modern flying.

Then the Commie Cough comes along, and now you have to assume that you are going to catch whatever boogems are being spewed by all the other people trapped in that metal tube with you.

And *now* you have to worry about religious Antifa/BLM-worshipping nutjobs:

Unruly Passenger Forces Alaska Airlines A320 Back To Seattle

“I will kill everybody on this plane unless you accept Jesus was a black man.”

Special.

The feller, who at least wore his facemask, appears to be a white guy. There’s no zealot quite as zealous as the recent convert; I assume that this guy is therefore a convert to the religion of BLM. Flying out of Seattle, he may well have been one of those recent CHAZ/CHOP losers.

There is a video there of the incident that is well worth watching.

The other passengers react as well as you could expect… there doesn’t seem to be any panicking, but they do put a stop to the incident and everybody seems to remain reasonably calm and rational. The loon is put down by a pair of passengers *notably* bigger than he is. I hope the airline at least bought them some beers.

That said, “calm” and “rational” are sure to be personality traits that our cultural betters will soon tell us are inappropriate:

Co-founder of BLM Vancouver says that ‘reliability’ and ‘loyalty’ are white supremacist concepts

Vancouver is a stones-throw from Seattle. This is the same Vancouver that is criminally investigating the appearance of tire tracks on a cross-walk as a “hate crime”. Must be something in the water out there.

 

I expect that I will never again leave the surface of the Earth. For a former aerospace engineer who grew up wanting to be an astronaut and who earned a private pilots license… this realization seems a bit disconcerting.

 Posted by at 11:11 am

*What* fragility?

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 132020
 

In the face of incessant yapping about “white fragility… behold:

The Unintentional Racism Found in Traffic Signals

Where the heroic, strong and brave – and not the least bit fragile – author of the piece whines about the fact that traffic signals have a “little white man,” and how much he hates asking a little white man for permission to cross a street.

The author does make a useful point: used to be a time when crosswalk signals weren’t simplistic icons of walking humanoids, but the actual words “WALK” and “DON’T WALK.” As some point that changed because were can’t rely on people being able to read… certainly not being able to read *English.*

 Posted by at 1:04 am

“An odious act of treachery”

 AARRRGH, art, Gah., history, Hmm..., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 122020
 

No, this is not about how the news media is distorting and underplaying important facts to sell a dishonest narrative, but about modern architecture and how it’s… well… awful.

 

As an engineer, for me function is far more important than form. Building a supersonic aircraft to look “cool” is insane because the margins of performance and profit are narrow enough as-is. But *buildings?* Civil engineering has big fat margins. Here you have the capacity to make things actually seem livable and comfortable. So modern architecture which *looks* like soulless boxes of cheap concrete and metal and glass are, at best, wasted opportunities.

 Posted by at 5:11 pm

Bardcore

 art, history, Hmm..., humor, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 112020
 

I learned a new word today. “Bardcore” are modern pop songs redone in a medieval style. The results are… interesting.

 

This one is lesser, but still interesting:

 

 

 

 Posted by at 11:25 pm

Conflicting data

 AARRRGH, blather, Hmm..., news, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 112020
 

The big news – apart from whatever Trump is tweeting about, Bidens handlers are telling the press to ignore, and the rise of the fascist Marxists – is the Commie Cough and how the United States is doing such a monumentally, criminally bad job of handling the pandemic that the ChiComs dumped on us. To buttress that narrative, the data generally pointed out is new cases per day, which does indeed look bad (per http://www.91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/):

And the *total* number of cases normalized by population:

In both cases, the US looks *really* bad. We are right near the top of the chart in terms of the percent of our population that has caught the Pinko Pox and continues to come down with it. We looks like the freakin’ third world. But then… there’s another metric that seems kinda important that doesn’t seem to get mentioned so much… the mortality rate. BEHOLD:

The US has a current mortality rate of about 4%, with a max near 6%. That’s bad…. but it’s also the lowest one on the chart. Canada is 8%. Sweden more than 7%. Italy is above 14%, France above 15% and Britain and Belgium are pushing 16%.

The data seems to indicate that more Americans are catching WuFlu, but fewer are dying. I suspect the truth is more along the lines of differences in testing and reporting. But if it’s therefore not accurate to say that the US is doing better than everybody in the mortality sweepstakes, then it’s equally invalid to ramble on about how bad we such in preventing the pandemic in the first place.

 Posted by at 12:34 am

Campaign 2020: Come out swinging

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 102020
 

A Trump ad. Regardless of whether or not Biden wants to defund the police, the fact is that his cohorts *do.* Ask his prospective VP nominees if *they* do, because if Biden wins in November, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the VP will actually take the reigns come January.

Below is an interesting interview with Biden that touches on judicial system reform, where he wants to take money from the police and give it to criminals in the form of Pell grants and every other conceivable bennie.

 

 Posted by at 8:31 pm

Selenomelanin

 Hmm..., news, science  No Responses »
Jul 092020
 

New biomaterial could shield against harmful radiation

Short form: a synthetic version of melanin – the pigment that darkens human skin – containing selenium has been found to protect organisms from dangerous levels of ionizing radiation (X-rays here). The researchers suggest that astronauts could apply it like sunscreen while in deep space.

OK… but… wouldn’t a sunscreen made of some simple paste mixed with selenium work just as well, rather than going the extra steps in cobbling together the specific melanin pigment? I suppose if astronauts could be modified somehow so that if they were fed a diet higher in selenium, or took selenium supplements, and the selenium bonded to the melanin in their skin, that might work, but that doesn’t seem to be what they’re working towards. Hell, couldn’t the selenium be formed into fabric and worn as clothes? I remain baffled about the mechanism by which a small amount of selenium bonded to a form of melanin protects the body from radiation. You’re madding perhaps grams-per-square-meter of selenium to your skin, where X-Ray technicians wear lead aprons that are thousands of times more massive to provide protection.

But, ok, sure. let’s go with it and assume that it works. One detail not in evidence is what does selenomelanin *look* like? I would assume that it doesn’t look like standard melanin. Rather than astronauts looking darker after getting their selenomelanin coatings or boosters… would they look gray? Green? Silver? Magnesium oxide white?

 Posted by at 9:32 pm

What hath Autotune wrought?

 art, awesomeness, Crazy, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 092020
 

Aaaannnnd here we are:

The comments at YouTube are spectacular. Many are worthy of stealing (after adjusting spelling and grammar).

“One day you’ll be before a god less merciful than the rest of us”

“It’s like a unicorn vomited up it’s intestines and they spelled out “Kill Yourself” in cursive.”

“When Funkytown is just the name of the BDSM dungeon”

“This has the same energy as someone whispering “moist” in you left ear.”

“CHAOTIC NEUTRAL: THE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE”

 

 Posted by at 6:44 pm

The Aerospace Projects Review Discord server

 aircraft, APR, blather, Book X, books, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 092020
 

Several recommendations have come in over the years to set up an APR Discord server… which has now been done. I’m still in the process of configuring it and figuring it all out, but once it’s up and running it will serve as sort of a backup to the APR blog. It is something that seems to be available solely via invitation, so there will be some other little features it’ll have… such as, probably, even more restricted discussion forums specifically about Book 1 and Book 2 (“Book X” and “Book XX,” whatever) where I will describe them and post preview images such as representative diagrams, lists of vehicles to be illustrated, possibly early stabs at cover art, etc.

Subscribers to the APR Patreon and the Monthly Historical Documentation Program will all get invites when the time comes. I’m thinking of inviting the higher-level patrons/subscribers into the Book1 & 2 subforums. At the moment it’s pretty bare… there are channels for “Aircraft projects,” “spacecraft projects,” “aerospace news,” “aircraft – built” (as opposed to “projects), “general” (which is just for discussion of the APR Discord server itself) and “US Aerospace Projects,” which will go into further detail about the USxP issues I’ve released and plan to release.

If anyone has experience with such things, feel free to leave recommendations and suggestions in the comments.

 

 Posted by at 3:09 pm
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