My house seems to have been invaded by these rather sizable exoskeltal nightmare-inducing terrors. Found three of them in my bathroom in a one-day period, including one that jumped out of the friggen’ sink drain. MMmmmllleeeeaaaaccchhh.
So are these one-inch hair-bearing eight legged freaks harmless little skeeter-eaters, or are they more akin to Hobo/Brown Recluse horrors?
A couple days ago I wondered – somewhat sarcastically – if the coverage of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings would be covered differently in the press. And a few days have passed and it is clear that there is a *massive* discontinuity. In El Paso, the shooters politics are front and center; anyone who shares *any* of his political beliefs is by extension a monster. And in Dayton, the shooters politics are covered sparingly, if at all, and I’m sure as hell not seeing a lot of attempts to claim that anyone sharing his politics is culpable.
One might argue that since the El Paso shooter killed 22 and the Dayton shooter killed 9, the Dayton shooter was a “lesser” villain. But the El Paso shooter was *done* at 22; he’d left the scene. The Dayton shooter was shot dead by the cops inside of thirty seconds. he was still busy killing, and had much killing left to do. The last I heard (this could now be inaccurate), he’d fired more than 40 rounds; thus, roughly one death per four shots. But he had 250 rounds of ammo left. Left to himself, his initial kill ratio means that he could have killed anther 250/4 people… more than sixty further deaths. Simple math attributes around seventy total dead to the Dayton shooter, more than three times the El Paso total. Of course such things cannot be considered truly valid, but it does indicate that the Dayton killer was no less evil than the El Paso killer. So why is that incident, and the politics of the man behind it, seemignly of no interest to the press?
Obviously – at least to people whose brains have not been consumed by and twisted up with hateful ideologies – the fact that the Dayton killer was a leftist does not excuse the El Paso killer. They’re both monsters. But it is pretty clear that the fact that the Dayton killer was a leftist is being downplayed to downright ignored by much of the media. If Bernie or Warren were to show up in Dayton, would there b the outrage that Trump is getting for going to El Paso? trump is catching hell for referring to the invasion of central Americans as an “invasion,” with claims that his choice of words is responsible for hate crimes. Is AOC going to be held to the same standard for going on about “concentration camps?” Is the collective guilt by association being heaped upon the right going to be heaped upon the left?
The one where Thunderf00t tears apart the “Energy Vault.”
If, like me, you were unaware of the “Energy Vault” prior to this, here’s the short form: it’s a “battery” for the storage of excess power from weather-based power systems like wind and solar. It takes excess power generated when it’s sunny/windy, and uses that power to lift heavy “bricks” of concrete up to 100 meters from the ground to a stack; when power is needed, it reverses the process, turning the gravitational potential energy of the massive bricks into electricity in much the same way that regenerative braking systems in electric cars can charge up batteries when going downhill. it’s not bad physics. Everything here is perfectly possible. It’s just not a good design:
The biggest problem here is that this is a problem that has already been solved. Want to use gravitational potential energy to store excess electricity? Great! PUMP WATER UPHILL.
You don’t need to locate your “battery” right next to the wind farm. It just needs to be hooked into the grid. So… driving across the US, the two biggest regions I’ve directly seen for wind generation are in Iowa and Wyoming. Now, Iowa is flat. So you would need to build a series of water towers, with enclosed subsurface water tanks below them; nothing here is new. There are a *vast* number of municipal water towers in the US; these are essentially catalog items at this point. Granted getting them a hundred meters tall might be a bit tricky, but if you build them in joined clusters, they’ll be good and strong, resistant to storms. So you could have something like a forest of supports, holding aloft a cluster of tanks covering several acres.
But in Wyoming, the wind farms are located within just a few miles of *mountains.* In this case, you could simply build a few vast cisterns thousands of feet above similarly sized cisterns at the base of the mountains, with high pressure pipes, pumps and turbines. Easy. Works all-weather for decades on end.
The “Energy Vault” appears to me to be someone trying to show how clever they are, rather than how practical they are.
But it’s not a series, rather some sort of video game for mobile devices. If Amazon or Netflix or even the SciFi channel were to make a proper multi-season series out of it with the same quality and seriousness as “The Expanse,” I would be all over it. But as a game for telephones? Meh.
Still: watch it. It’s freakin gorgeous. And how often does anyone use a voiceover from President Reagan to extol the virtues of space exploration in a science fiction setting? I belive it’s from his post-Challenger address to the nation.
This has great potential. Potential to be fantastic… and potential to be forgettable dreck like “Nightflyers” or unwatchable garbage like “Another Life.”
At least by being on Amazon it should be freed to be as gruesome as it needs to be.
Disney continues its trend towards annoying the fans. While in recent years this process has been largely through politicizing and just plain bad writing, here “Thor” director Taika Waititi goes the extra step towards directly insulting long-term fans of the Marvel character. As a result Diktor von Doomcock goes off a little bit, using some NSFC language to express his displeasure at how not only is Thor going to be a woman in the next movie (which is nonsensical; “Thor” is the guy’s name, not his job title. Similarly, “Jesus” is always the same dude, while “Christ” is actually a job description), but in how Waititi takes pleasure in *explicitly* declaring that he’s going to trash the “mythos.”
I look forward to Waititi’s movie where he portrays Muhammad as a Korean transwoman.
Working as Disneyland “talent” seems like a little slice of Hell on Earth, especially in summer. But you have *got* to admire how well the actress here pulls off “Evil Queen” improv.
Disney has access to considerable talent and skill. The woman here is spot-on, both in attitude and appearance, and certainly seems to enjoy her job. But Disney also has substantial engineering talent, and I really hope that that has been tapped to create a costume that near-magically provides active cooling. Perhaps that jewel on her sternum contains a miniaturized nuclear reactor that powers a refrigeration system that pumps coolant throughout the costume, much as space suits do, and rejects heat through heat exchangers built into the cape. Because… sure, that would make more sense than a major megacorp simply roping minimum-wage-slaves into sweating bullets.
Still and all: gotta love what she can do with her eyes.
Just finished the initial cut of diagrams for US Transport Projects #9, except for the interior layout of one jetliner…
Previously…
Cover art was provided by Rob Parthoens, www.baroba.be
US Transport Projects #8 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #8 includes:
USTP #8 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4.25:
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A bit of weather blew through tonight, complete with light show.
More photos follow…
I just… I don’t… gah.
A look into what happened during one part of the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America in Atlanta this weekend. pic.twitter.com/bWekVQxPWV
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 4, 2019