This school is inclusive, so we’re kicking you out

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Jun 212019

The specifics on this interchange are hazy at best… it seems that a student disagreed with a teacher in Britainland (Scotland?) about just how many genders there are. And since the student went against the current received wisdom… out he goes. He was invited to keep his opinion in his own home and not share it in school.

Three cheers for small concealable video cameras. The student (High school? College?) seems reasonable enough, but it would of course be better to have had the whole exchange. Soon enough camera miniaturization, power systems and storage capability will allow regular schmoes to have 24/7 body cams running. Students with wacky teachers would be well advised to record their classes. Of course, teachers would be similarly well advised to record their days, what with colleges and universities these days being filled with overgrown toddlers.

Reminder: Selling a bunch of stuff on ebay

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Jun 202019

Most stuff sold. I will, hopefully, regularly sell more stuff.

I’ve been meaning to sell a bunch of stuff for a good long while now, and I’m finally getting around to doing it.

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

This first batch is all sci-fi stuff, mostly Eaglemoss Star Trek ships (very nice little officially licensed models that come with glossy magazines that describe the vehicle and how it was designed). Also in this batch is the very last of the preliminary drafts of the Space Station V “booklet of general plans.” Everything has a pretty low starting price, so chances are good you can get them for cheap. Shipping gets a lot better the more of them you get…

“2001: A Space Odyssey” Space Station V Booklet of General Plans: blueprints

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #128 OV-165 ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #49 ECS Fortunate ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #109 Borg Queen’s ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #35 Klingon Bird Of Prey ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #70 Voth City Ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #62 Voth Research Vessel ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #3 Klingon Bird Of Prey ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #129 Tholian Starship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #106 Kazon Raider ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #53 Klingon Augments ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #138 USS Lantree NCC-1837 ship and magazine, new

What are the options?

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Jun 192019

On one hand, social media has turned out to be something of a disaster: it has allowed the dissemination of BS and bad things… Holocaust denial, Apollo hoaxers, antivaxxers, democratic socialists, Nazis, commies, antisemitism, Jihadis, third wave feminists. On the other hand, *some* effort has been made to reign that stuff in. On the gripping hand, those efforts have often been ham-fisted and politically bass-ackwards. And on whatever the frak you call the fourth hand, those effort to reign in the horribleness have resulted in a secondary cascade of really horribl things. Gentlemen, behold:

Bodies in Seats

Where we read about the truly awful lives of people who moderate the worst things Facebook vomits forth. Every time someone posts a video of, say, animal cruelty (and there are descriptions of several of such, so, watch out), some poor slob has to review it.

“They kept reposting it again and again and again,” he said, pounding the table as he spoke. “It made me so angry. I had to listen to its screams all day.”

Yeesh.

Marcus went home on his lunch break, held his dog in his arms, and cried.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeesh.

Content moderation, especially reviewing videos of the worst of humanity in action, is the sort of thing that can mess a person up.These places hire regular schmoes and put on a pretense of being a modern clean office, but from the reporting the employees and the work environment quickly turn into the Lord Of The Flies. This is obviously bad for them (and their friends, and their families, and society), but it also damages their ability to effectively do their jobs.

So, on the one hand it’s an argument for working real hard to develop AI content moderation. But that can only be done effectively with a lot of human interaction, and will almost certainly involve lot of false negatives and false positives. On the other hand… perhaps it’s an argument to say “social media was a mistake.”

This will either uplift you or piledrive you into sadness

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Jun 182019

Both are valid options. Doing both simultaneously is also a valid option.

Odin pity the culture that sees no value in non-humans, or in our relations with them.

AGM-183A ARRW test flight

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Jun 172019

The USAF is already flying bits of the AGM-183A ARRW.

Air Force conducts successful hypersonic weapon flight test

This was a “sensor only” captive carry, which presumably means something along the lines of a wholly non-functional mass/aerodynamics simulator. It doesn’t really look like the sort of thing that could get to Mach 20 with a meaningful payload.

The U.S. Air Force successfully conducted the first flight test of its AGM-183A Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW, on a B-52 Stratofortress aircraft on June 12 at Edwards Air Force Base, Californiahttps://t.co/N8wluNSayE pic.twitter.com/bdNrDRDpTr

— Edwards AFB (@EdwardsAFB) June 17, 2019

Impossible Trek

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Jun 172019

I’ve recently been watching (well, having it on as background noise) Star Trek: Voyager. Twenty years ago I kinda disliked the show due to a lot of the early-season writing, but as time has gone on – and as I’ve caught more and more of modern WokeTrek – the better Voyager seems. A few days ago I caught an episode that, it seemed to me, would be virtually impossible to write and air today without utterly flipping the script since it is utterly “problematic” and not at all woke. Looking back through season 4, it seems there are several episodes that have messages and outright plotlines that would cause untold online outrage among the purple-haired mental illness haircuts. There are also several other pints about the show that simply would not be allowed today:

1) Strong Female Characters: Captain Janeway, B’elanna Torres and Seven of Nine are all quality SFCs… *without* being screeching man-hating harpies. They are competent, reasonably well written (most of the time, anyway), don’t yammer on about oppression or patriarchy or whatever is outraging them today (well, except for B’elanna, but then, she’s a Klingon), and they’re all straight. The horror.

2) Seven of Nine. She was introduced for the shallowest of all possible reasons: the producers wanted to replace the character of Kes – a nothingburger of a dullsville female character – with someone who would bring adolescent male eyeballs to the show. So they brought in an unreasonable attractive actress to wear an unrealistically tight and form-fitting catsuit, complete with AHEM Borg Implants right up front, to serve as eye candy. And boy howdy did they succeed, something that would not be allowed today except – possibly – as a one-time thing in order to show just how awful men are for being interested in such things. But then… Jeri Ryan and the writers took this obvious bit of fan service and made her a damn compelling individual with an interesting personality, some substantial troubles and a lot of pathos.

3) Assimilation. No, not Borg assimilation, but aliens assimilating into the Voyager crew. Voyager, of course, does not let just anyone who wants to come aboard, come aboard and stay; the Captain picks and chooses who she allows to become a permanent resident. And those who do, assimilate. They become part of the dominant culture. They retain their own identities, of course, but they do not demand that everyone else adjust to accommodate them. And they do not demand to be catered to; but instead they all want to contribute, to earn their keep.

And then there are plot details and whole plotlines:

Season 3, Episode 24, “Displaced:” innocent aliens find themselves transported aboard Voyager, at the same time that crewmembers disappear. The migrants replace the natives, in the end completely taking over and turning the Voyager into their own property. What had seemed an innocent occurrence turns out to be a slow, subtle invasion.

Season 4, Episode 3, “Day of Honor:” The USS Voyager aids some refuges… and the moment Voyagers guard is down, the refugees come in far larger numbers demanding more resources, threatening theft and violence if they don’t get what they want. In the end, Voyager repels said refugees with force and provides a bit of aid, but only enough to get them to help themselves, away from Voyager.

Season 4, Episode 10, “Random Thoughts:” A society where wrongthink is literally a crime.

Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect:” Seven of Nine makes inaccurate accusations of assault against a man. As punishment is meted out without going to the bother of holding trials, the mans life and livelihood are ruined, and in the end he commits suicide. Seven of Nine goes on about her way with no punishment.

Season 4, Episode 23, “Living Witness:” Seven hundred years after the USS Voyager has gone by, an alien civilization has re-written their history to cast themselves as the innocent and in fact wholly virtuous victims of a technologically superior culture. They revel in their supposed oppression. Money quote: “It’s always about race!” Antifa/BLM riots and attacks a museum and causes substantial property damage when word gets out that someone is saying things that go against the narrative of oppression.

These are just a few off the top of my head. Imagine the people behind STD trying to do these things *now.*

This means something. This is important.

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Jun 172019

A while back I made some preliminary “General Plans” for Space Station V from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Some 19 sets were sent out; the feedback I received was positive, so it’s likely that I will revise these and do another release. Obviously sets of such “Booklets of General Plans” would be of greatest interest for the spacecraft of 2001… the Orion and the Discovery seem likely to be of greater interest than the Space Station. But what I am (very, very casually) working on is Clavius Base. Why? Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps because it’s something others haven’t really tackled in the past. Perhaps because of the dearth of info, it’s more of a challenge. And perhaps because, as potentially dull as a moonbase is compared to a spaceship, Clavius Base represents a *vast* engineering undertaking far exceeding any mere spacecraft in terms of cost, effort and achievement.

Clavius Base is shown only twice in the movie… once through the windows of the Aries Ib, and once from the viewpoint of a trio of astronauts standing on a ridge, cliff or hill, the base stretched out below and behind them. A few photos of the model are available, such as in Adam Johnsons “2001: the Lost Science,” which I heartily recommend. It is this model photo that served as the basis of my preliminary reconstruction. The photo is taken from a shallow angle; fortunately it is built with a series of concentric circular structures meaning that with some photoshoppery, perspective adjustments can be made to produce a fairly decent plan view of the base. With that plan view created, I imported it into a CAD program and traced out the broad strokes of the geometry. And once I had that, I imported a screenshot from the movie from the “ridge” view and adjusted the angle and perspective of the CAD diagram until it matched, to reasonable approximation, the view of the base seen behind the astronauts. That gave me the position in terms of angle, distance and elevation for the astronauts viewpoint, as well as producing a line on the ground where the Aries 1B landing pad must be. The result is that the base seems to be *real* close to a tall surface feature… hill, cliff, whatever. As this is Hollywood, I am willing to fudge things somewhat; as this is 2001, I’m willing to fudge things only as far as needed. So perhaps I’m comfortable with moving the hillside another fifty percent further away than shown here. At a stretch, twice as far. But that’s really pushing it.

The bigger issue is scale. If I knew how high up on that hillside the astronauts are, I’d know exactly how big the base is. But numbers seem to be utterly lacking. So… while the Aries Ib landing facility can be scaled reasonably precisely, since it is seen in-scale with the Aries Ib, the base itself will have to be guesstimated. Mainly by assuming the smallest structures visible are sized to serve as meaningfully useful buildings. Careful examination of the available model photos might give hints of scale based on the heights of multi-story structures.

Yes, yes, I know…

Whelp, that’s about it for 70’s nostalgia…

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Jun 172019

If you’re an old fart like me you may well remember “The Banana Splits” as one of those inconceivably bizarre, LSD-driven bits of Sid & Marty Krofft madness that actually originated in the late 60’s but ran over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over throughout the 1970’s. It, like almost everything else from the 1970’s, was best left there. But SyFy has decided that it would be a good idea to bring it back. And the way they’ve decided to do it is… ummmm….

Ummmmmm….

A Mach 20 Arrow

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Jun 162019

In response to both Russia and China claiming to have develop hypersonic weapons, the USAF has awarded contracts to Lockheed for two new hypersonic missile systems: the AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW: “arrow”) and the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW: “hacksaw”). Little info is publicly available about them just yet (though it’s a safe bet that the Chinese have a complete set of plans; I’d be unsurprised if they had real-time access to the workstations being used to design them), but the ARRW is a boost-glide system that uses a rocket motor to launch a hypersonic glider to around Mach 20. This is not a particularly new idea; ground launched ideas like this go back more than fifty years, with air-launched versions seriously considered at least as far back as the 1980’s. The image below, taken from the SDASM Flickr page, shows a (presumably 1980s) General Dynamics design for an air to surface missile using a twin-engined rocket booster (presumably solid fuel) with a hypersonic glider.

The Lockheed ARRW is likely similar in concept if not detail. The basic idea of a rocket-booted glider is the most practical approach to long-range hypersonic strike weapons, though it’s not as flashy or trendy as airbreathing system such as scramjets. but while rocket systems would weigh more than an air breather, quite possibly by a lot, they would be much more reliable, cheaper to develop and capable of *far* greater speed. The ARRW, after all, is supposed to reach Mach 20. A scramjet would be damned lucky to exceed Mach 10, and testing has shown that a scramjet would but damned lucky to maintain that speed for long.

The heavier gross weight of a rocket system compared to an airbreather means that an aircraft could carry fewer weapons. The obvious solution is to build more carrier aircraft. While there will be no more B-1B’s or B-2’s, the B-21 *may* be built, though unlikely in any real numbers. A more practical solution might be to build specialized carrier aircraft, perhaps based on modified jetliners, perhaps even made unmanned, designed to fly in massed armadas with one or two manned control planes.