Dragonfly: Drone to Titan

 aircraft, awesomeness, news, nukes, science, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 272019
 

NASA has announced that the next planetary mission will be a flying drone probe for Titan. This should prove interesting, thought it would b best if instead of sending one helicopter, they put the things into mass production and sent a *lot* of them to Titan. Given how much cheaper Falcon 9 Heavy is than the likes of Delta IV, to say nothing of the *possibility* of BFR/starship. Imagine sending a *fleet* of these things to Titan in one shot…

Also good news: it’s nuclear powered. So instead of slapping down into the methane mud and promptly running out of battery life, it could potentially function for *years.* Even if it’s just sitting on a hilltop motionless, if it has a decent camera angle on the surroundings it could provide years of interesting observations.

 Posted by at 3:31 pm

So much for E Pluribus Unum

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, Meh., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 272019
 

First bilingual presidential debate as three candidates and a moderator speak in Spanish

Here ends the great American experiment. Let’s start divvying the place up.

As soon as it is established that Presidential candidates are openly courting the votes of people who refuse to speak the language of the United States, that’s a good sign that we have failed as a nation. The US is, like Britain, just a geographical region, with nothing binding the inhabitants together anymore. Every man, woman, family, tribe, ethnicity, identity group for themselves.

 Posted by at 2:31 am

Raider

 aircraft, awesomeness  No Responses »
Jun 262019
 

If you want to hop in a chopper and get somewhere lickety-split and you don’t care how LOUD you are, Sikorsky has you covered:

And it can throw on the brakes:

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 3:47 pm

The Current War

 blather, history, Hmm..., science, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 262019
 

This looks promising:

 

It is a common sneer that “those guys” are mired in a culture that is a millenium out of date. But it is worth remembering that it is entirely possible, if you are an adult, that you may well have known someone who remembers an America or a Britain or a France that, at night, was Fricken Dark. And while it is another common sneer that the “Gilded Age” of robber barons and unfettered capitalism was just Terribly Awful And Not At All Progressive… that culture of greed, massive egos and rampaging, unflinching and often cruel progress lit up the world. In a remarkably short time, due to the grasping desire of a few men for knowledge, power and money, the West went from streets filled with horse crap, water filled with cholera and the night filled with the dim squint of a few gas lamps to cities where the streets were clear, the water clean (-ish) and the night  brightly lit and the superstitions of the dark largely swept away. The comparison between, say, 1870 and 1910 makes the advances of 1980 to 2020 look like garbage. Yay, now we have social media. Whoopadeedoo.

The closest to the “Current War” we have today *might* be something like the vague competition between SpaceX and Blue origin. I hope that that race to colonize the universe is as fruitful as the fight among Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.

And on that subject…

 Posted by at 3:27 pm

War With The Deep Ones: Interstitial Tales 1 (redux)

 books, Hmm..., My Fiction, science fiction, War With The Deep Ones  No Responses »
Jun 252019
 

A year and a half ago I made a single post describing the “interstitial tales” that I wrote for “War With The Deep Ones.” WWTDO is a book filled with short-ish stories about the first day of an invasion of H.P. Lovecrafts “Deep Ones,” waging a war to wipe out humanity. These stories, set all over the globe, were to be separated by little-bitty sub-stories set in the more than a century from the time of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” to the start of WWTDO. These little tales string together to give a basic history of one organizations efforts to understand and prepare for the threat.

As I said, I made one post, and promptly didn’t make another. Because follow-through is for suckers, I guess. But what the heck, I’ll try again. I’ll post one a day till I’m through them. They will be in simple blog-text after the break, not EPUB or PDF or any such. As always, comments, critiques and large sums of cash welcomed.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 11:08 pm

Men/Women/Boys/Girls Can…

 Forward!, Hmm..., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 252019
 

Google has, of course, an “autocomplete” function. You type a portion of a phrase to search for and it produces a series of possible responses. Google’s ideas are… a little bit interesting. Behold:

How much of this is just because that’s what people look up, and how much of it is because of Google’d official positions on political matters filtering down to search suggestions, I dunno. But how many people actually look up “Women can do anything” or “boys can be bugs” or “men can have periods?”

 Posted by at 11:10 am

All cultures are equally beautiful and awesome

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 252019
 

And if you say otherwise, you’re a terrible human being.

Five killed in Mozambique ‘for being bald’

A new superstitious belief has emerged in some areas of Mozambique – that bald men have gold in their head.

However, the head has to be taken to a witchdoctor who will use magical powers to extract the gold – and make them rich.

If your immediate response is that the belief that bald men have magically extractable gold in their heads is stupid idiocy, it’s because you need to decolonize your mind. Witchcraft is no less valid than Newtonian physics.

Repeat after me: Other Ways Of Knowing.

 Posted by at 2:20 am
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