Jul 082019
 

And here endeth the lesson. Read the final installment after the break.

Lemme know what y’all think in the comments. I slapped all these separate posts together at one time and scheduled them in advance… so for all I know I’ve been run over by a Mack truck and yer never gonna get to see anything else from the War With The Deep Ones. But assuming I’ve miraculously survived the last two weeks and retain enough cognitive function and physical capability to do anything about anything… does this seem like something you’d buy a  paperback copy of? As a reminder, the first “War” story is Honolulu, the second is Champion of the Seas. Feel free to check them out.

Of course if I *am* dead, then I don’t care what people want. What with being dead and all.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 11:33 pm
Jul 082019
 

Poll: Young adults grow uneasier with LGBTQ

Just 45% of adults ages 18 to 34 said in 2018 that they were comfortable interacting with LGBTQ people, according to the recent Accelerating Acceptance survey conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD. That’s down from 53% in 2017, and 63% in 2016.

Lots of people just want to live their lives in peace. Most people are pretty libertarian on most issues; if someone is straight or gay or asexual… for the most part, who cares? So you’d *think* that “acceptance” would be on the increase, what with marriage laws changing and whatnot. So… what could possibly cause this apparent drop? Or, perhaps more accurately, what could possibly be the cause in this apparent rise is uncomfortableness?

Hmm…

See, most people if they’re being honest are more or less fine with regular folk who are gay. But “drag queens” are the furries of gay people. and make most regular people recoil… especially when it’s in conjunction with children, even more so when the children themselves are being sexualized. There’s a level of weird there that sets people on edge.

It’s not even necessarily that these, err, guys are (presumably) gay. Imagine if instead of “drag queen story hour” it was “gimp suit story hour” or “Elsa She-Wolf of the SS Dominatrix story hour” or “coprophiliac story hour.” These could of course all be completely straight people. But parents would go nope-nope-nope-nope and run the other way and not too many people would blame them… but if they dislike the idea of grown men not just dressing weird, but dressing weird in a sexually weird way, interacting with their kids, they are called names and made to feel like they’re bad parents.

People don’t like that, and they rebel. And people who aren’t involved in the whackadoolde weirdness, but who are used as the political shield for the weirdness, take the heat as a result.

 Posted by at 9:37 pm
Jul 082019
 

Gentlemen, behold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7gtoLmHd5w

Hmm. This one isn’t auto-embedding. Maybe because it’s an “Age restricted video.” But if you like witnessing a fairly blatant example of the downfall of civilization… here ya go.

I’m honestly *shocked* that it took as long as it did for Disneyland security to get on the scene. The Disney parks are generally considered to be prit near police states of surveillance and control; this was just sad.

Additionally: the worst of the fighting was broken up when other park patrons decided they’d had enough of this ridiculous display and stepped int to stop it themselves. On the one hand… good for them for doing so. on the other hand… I fully understand the bulk of the other patrons who saw what was going on and decided “I want no part of this.” There was, up until the end, no clear good guy/bad guy; just a bunch of uncivilized horrible people. In such a situation, it makes all kinds of sense to just stay the frell out of it. Now if there was a clear victim right up front, you’d hope that your Average Guy would step in and do something proper. But even in that case… it would be hard to blame anyone who decided to stay out of it. You are unlikely to be there by yourself; chances are you’ve got your significant other and probably a kid or two in tow. your chief duty is to see to *their* security. And even if you had no such worries, trying to stop a physical confrontation not only puts you at risk of getting shanked, but of getting arrested and sued. there’s a reason why the police freakin’ *hate* domestic violence calls.

 

 

 Posted by at 4:48 pm
Jul 082019
 

One of the defining traits of nerd-dom is the “fan theory.” No pop-culture franchise is so thoroughly and completely detailed that *every* question is answered. And in reality, most franchises are such a plot-hole and contradiction riddled mess that they’re often more question than answer. So it is a fun and challenging intellectual exercise to take disparate, unrelated scraps of evidence and link them, inserting original new content to bridge the gaps and make it all make some sort of sense. This is of course not restricted to science fictional nerds… religious nerds have been doing this forever. Religious texts are notoriously scatter-brained. Rabbis have been arguing over the whichness of the Torahanical why for millenia; more recently, fan theories about the “Rapture” and “Tribulation” promoted by Darby back in the 1800’s have become accepted canon among a lot of fans of the Bible.

But enough of that silly religious stuff, let’s get to something more important: Disney’s animated character Goofy.

Some people are apparently big fans of the anthropomorphized dog-like character Goofy. Goofy appeared in a number of animated shorts in the 50’s and had his own TV series and a couple movies in the 90’s. This was adequate to build up a respectable database on the biography of the character… and it was apparently more than enough for the fans to recognize some disturbing trends and details. Such as: in the 50’s, he had a wife and son, Max. In the 1990’s, he still had his son… but his wife was nowhere to be found. Not mentioned once.  Why? Who knows. Disney has a well-known love of killing off parents and leaving the main characters orphans or at least separating children from parents and sending them out to face the world alone. So Max, it seems, beat the odds and lucked out by at least still having his dad around. But what *did* happen to the mom?

By leaving the question unanswered, that opens the door to fan theories. By leaving the topic unexplored, that paves the way to those fan theories being pretty clever… and pretty dark. behold:

Gawrsh! Goofy’s entire family may be dead

There’s some delightfully dark stuff in there.

I have no idea if the theory that Max is actually the milkman’s kid and that the mom is dead is generally accepted by the Goofy fandom. One suspect that Disney, if they wanted to, could crank out a direct-to-DVD movie that answers all these questions in a typically saccharine fashion (are their any ginger characters in the Goofy legendarium that Disney could erase and replace?). But sometime, that doesn’t work. Sometimes the fan theories are so clever and so popular that when the actual owner of the intellectual property reveals “the answer,” the ftans say “Nope. Wrong.” Look at Star Trek. Ask about a war between the Federation and the Klingons in the years before Kirk taking command of the enterprise, and the license holders will point to STD… but the fans will point to Axanar.

 Posted by at 12:08 pm
Jul 072019
 

Turned on the tube for some background noise only to find some UFO show. They were cranking out the same nonsense about how the United States was able to advance technology thanks to reverse engineering the flying saucer that crashed in Roswell in 1947. Their leadoff claim was that stealth technology came out of nowhere in the 1980’s. Of course, in the real world stealth technology was developed over decades; even as classified as it is, the evolution of the designs and technologies can be seen (for example the 1961 Boeing “Quiet Bird” stealth concept).

But there’s one thing that seems like it should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. OK, so let’s say an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Right now as I write this in the early 21st century, we have *nothing* like the technology needed to build and operate FTL scout ships of our own. Such a device would be far in advance of what we have in 2019, never mind 1947. Still, the technology we *do* have in 2019 would seem fantastically advanced in 1947. Tech such as a smart phone – the microchips within it would be astonishingly advanced in 1947. So… let’s say you dropped a supply of 2019 advanced tech in 1947 and told the boys at Wright-Pat “have at it.” Would they have the first clue *how* to reverse engineer a smart phone? Is there anything in one of those things that they would have the ability to understand in order to use them to invent transisters or lasers or whatever the frak these UFO nuts think we reverse engineered?

I doubt it. The technology did not exist in 1947 to allow the best minds on the planet to even analyze modern technology, never mind reverse engineer it. And we’re supposed to believe that these same mooks somehow figured out how to analyze a computer that would have been at home onboard the Starship Enterprise?

We will soon see commercial devices that use graphene sheets in their construction… batteries, capacitors, display screens using single-molecule-thick sheets of this special form of carbon. 1947 would have been damned lucky to even *detect* the microscopically thin layer of carbon, and even if they did, they would not understand what form it took, and would certainly be unable to duplicate it.

A lot of modern technology is so fabulouly microscopic that the simple act of trying to measure it will destroy it. Why should alien technology centuries in advance of *now* be any different? Hell, for all I know the 2060 equivalent of the smart phone – assuming there’s still a handheld variant, and they’re not all just nanowires that are grown directly into your cerebral cortex – will be a rectangular slab of quartz 1 centimeter by 4 by 9. It will appear to be a simple perfect rectangular solid. Every form of analysis we have today will show that it it composed of nothing but pure SiO4, and yet it can do amazing things and seems to have an inexhaustible power supply. We in 2019 simply would not have the technology to understand that what makes it work is the differential gravity wave displacement process that uses slightly greasy solar atoms guided by a detrion-based dark matter tachyon beam to preferentially quoodwrangle the individual silicon atoms into specific spacetime sub-domains while simultaneous quantum entangling all of the oxygen atoms to a single synthetic offsite master atom. How would we expect people who think that mechanical watches are the bees knees to figure that crap out? How the frak would they take that sort of technology and derive *transistors* from it?

Gah.

 Posted by at 11:24 pm
Jul 072019
 

I posted a slightly earlier version of this back in 2013. While these may be originally spacecraft-specific, they apply not only to other areas of aerospace engineering, but to all areas of life. The canonical list is kept HERE.

When I think of philosophies to live by, I come up with something a lot like these.


1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller’s Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There’s no justification for designing something one bit “better” than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison’s Law) “Better” is the enemy of “good”.

15. (Shea’s Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you’ve screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee’s Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It’s called a “Work Breakdown Structure” because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden’s Law) Following a testing failure, it’s always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo’s Law) Don’t do nuthin’ dumb.

27. (Varsi’s Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger’s Law) There ain’t no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept.

31. (Mo’s Law of Evolutionary Development) You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin’s Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don’t show up.

33. (Patton’s Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt’s Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

35. (de Saint-Exupery’s Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

37. (Henshaw’s Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

39. Any exploration program which “just happens” to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.

39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1)  No new launch vehicles.
2)  No new launch vehicles.
3)  Whatever you do, don’t develop any new launch vehicles.

40. (McBryan’s Law) You can’t make it better until you make it work.

41. There’s never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there’s always enough time to do it over.

42. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right…)

 Posted by at 9:35 pm
Jul 072019
 

And I’m a little surprised at the lack of interest in some of them:

Aerospace Vehicle Design Vol II Spacecraft Design by K. D. Wood, 1964

This one is real hard to come by, usually sells for well over $100. Only one bid, $19.99. This one ends in a  few hours.


Three early “Space” books for kids: Fletcher Pratt, Jack Coggins, Lester Del Rey

Sure, they’re a little rough, but they’re old kids books, awesome in their massively over-optimistic way, and terribly low price. This one ends in a  few hours.

 


Proceedings of the Shuttle-Based Cometary Science Workshop, 1976 NASA

This one ends in a  few hours.

 


And this one:

XIIIth International Astronautical Congress Varna 1962, II (pp 483-1026)

This book of conference proceedings has papers on the Aerojet Sea Dragon, a general Electic “Direct” Apollo design and a nuclear-powered TV satellite. It’s already made the rounds on ebay once, no bidders. Huh.

 

And there’s other stuff.

https://www.ebay.com/usr/dynascott

 Posted by at 4:29 pm