Not a big rap fan, but whatcha gonna do. Sometimes it’s amusing.
Feb 052020
Feb 052020
There is a long history of screw-drive vehicles in Russia. This is due to Russia/Siberia having *vast* regions of swamp/marshland, virtually impassable by conventional wheeled or tracked vehicles. Screw-drive vehicles can simply chew their way right through the much and vegetation. But they are also terrible on roads or rocks. I imagine its possible to build a vehicle that could combine the systems, to drive on roads when possible, to ride on screws when necessary, but like any combination vehicle it’d be an expensive, over-sized, under-performing kludge.
As memory serves, NASA and/or a contractor or two looked at screw drive for lunar vehicles early on, when it was thought that the lunar surface might be a few meters of extremely fluffy dust. Wheels, as it turns out, work just fine. And Russia weren’t the only ones to look at screw-drives for swamps:
Feb 042020
Heh. Or… huh.
Feb 032020
Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn’t Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity
The University of California rejects outright job applicants – for positions such as teachers – who do not demonstrate not only the right ideology, but the right *vehemence* of ideology. That ideology is *not* “the facts, first and always.”
a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were
This is not just for the sciences of course, but every field of study. Every field of study is tainted now. UC would seem to be a bad place to invest in.
Feb 032020
Virtually *every* business is the wrong business compared to this:
Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they’re racist
A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious.
A business model that convinces people of specific racial and ideological groups to not only feel bad about themselves – and likely to convince them to stop reproducing – while at the same time giving you an unreasonable sum of money? A license to print money while utterly upending the local culture? If they are not already, the CIA *really* needs to look into this. Heck, the alt-right needs to look into this. Learn how to fake this race-baiting nonsense, then scam truckloads of cash from gullible self-hating buffoons. Not only do you enrich yourself, by dispiriting your targets you can engineer them into becoming less worthy political adversaries… as well as willing participants in some good old fashioned self-winnowing eugenics.
It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?”
“Why, I gave money that could have funded space exploration or even a food pantry to a couple of race hustlers. Does that count?”
Feb 032020
Chinese authorities threaten to kill pet cats and dogs over coronavirus fears
Leave it to a communist bureaucracy to decide that the way to deal with a human virus is to exterminate the rest of the mammalian population.
Feb 012020
How a vegan diet could affect your intelligence
Unsurprisingly, studies have shown a link between eating meat and improved intellect. One such study gave additional soup to Kenyan schoolchildren, who, being poor, began the study as effective vegans. Some kids got soup with meat; others didn’t. Leading to…
the children who were given the soup containing meat each day seemed to have a significant edge. By the end of the study, they outperformed all the other children on a test for non-verbal reasoning. Along with the children who received soup with added oil, they also did the best on a test of arithmetic ability.
From the sounds of it, the kids who got meat were better at reasoning and math. The vegan kids… well, they sound like the basis of modern woketivists who despise engineering rigor.
Further, there is a direct link between vitamin B12 and IQ… and B12 is not made by plants or fungi. In the natural world, it’s only available through eating meat. iron deficiency also reduces IQ, and the best form of iron comes, you guessed it, not from a vegan diet but from a carnivorous one. Taurine, creatine and choline are also vital for proper brain function and are also largely absent from vegan diets.
From one point of view, the obvious course of action here is for vegans to take supplements. And for those vegans who are vegans because they have allergies to animal products or other valid medical reasons why they cannot eat a proper diet, then this seems perfectly proper. But for vegans who are vegans for “ethical” reasons, those who think that humans morally *shouldn’t* eat animals, then taking supplements is just as wrong. Because supplements, unavailable in the wild, are a tacit admission that their ethics do not align with objective reality. Similarly, “ethical” vegans should avoid vegan foods that attempt to replicate the taste and texture of meat… the latest veggieburgers and the like. Because if you’re not supposed to eat meat, you shouldn’t enjoy the simulacra of eating meat.
Adults should be able to eat whatever the frak they want. A vegan diet? Pure potato diet? Nothing but Twinkies? Knock yourself out. But from infancy through adolescence, and likely for some time beyond, a proper omnivorous diet would seem to be biomedically and ethically recommended, and a case can probably be made that such a diet should be legally mandated. The world has a sufficiency of stupid people, we hardly need to be manufacturing more.
Feb 012020
In a rare moment, the GOP is actually taking advantage of the incredible bigotry and hubris of their opponents:
Jan 312020
The USAF’s reference design for an operational space based laser missile defense platform, circa 1990. Details such as mass and dimensions remain elusive, although the fact that it was to be launched by a “Titan V” might be instructive.
Jan 312020
CBS All Access has decided to put the first episode of Picard onto YouTube. So, view and judge for yourself. Offer may not be valid in countries other than the US of A. Also seems to disable viewing anywhere but YouTube, so click the link…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PPm5l3o2zw
UPDATE: I’ve watched it. It… was ok, I guess. It’s a weird mishmash of Canon Trek and Fake Trek… there is “Romulus destroyed by supernova” from the JJTrek flicks, and the lameass STD ships. But there were also a bucket of visual references to canonical ships such as the Ent-D, Ent-E, Stargazer, Cousteau; there was a still image showing Picard alongside Canonical Worf, who is distinctly *not* a JJTrek mutant Klingon nor an STD Klingork. The production values, apart from the use of STD digital assets, are top-notch. But at least so far it didn’t really seem very much like Star Trek, just generic modern sci-fi.
As to why CBS posted this for free… shrug. Seems likely that viewership numbers may not have been what CBS would’ve wanted, so they’re trying whatever they can to get people to watch. Example:
Google Trends Show Star Trek: Picard Interest Plummeting After Premiere Episode
Sadly it appears that the best hope for the future of Star Trek may have faded.