Not *MY* intelligence, bucko

 AARRRGH, blather, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 302019
 

Twitter is eroding your intelligence. Now there’s data to prove it.

Using Twitter reduced performance on the test by about 25 to 40 percent of a standard deviation from the average result, as the paper explains.

Color me stunned that trying to get educated via Twitter leads to dumbnification compared to traditional teaching methods.

Notably, the decline was sharpest among higher-achieving students, including women, those born in Italy and those who had scored higher on a baseline test.

It seems that Twitter doens’t just make everyone dumber, it is more effective at reducing the intelligence of smart people. A groundless speculation on my part is that it erodes away at the frosting-like extra smartness on top of the cake that is the basic human animal. If you don’t have that much to begin with, Twitter doesn’t have that much to work with.

This finding, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning.

Hey. HEY! This here blog is Teh Smartness. But by all means, avoid “social media,” especially Twitter. And for Odin’s sake, avoid at all cost any celebrity or especially “journalist” who seems to get their data from Twitter. And someone *please* take that damn thing away from Trump.

I’ve never been tempted to sign up for Twitter. Now I know that I are the smart.

 

 Posted by at 5:30 pm

Hmmmmmm….

 art, awesomeness, history, science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
May 302019
 

This actually looks pretty good, at least technically. It’s being done practically with animatronics & puppets, just lihe the original, though there’s some CGI on display for some of the “lightning” and suchforth. Let’s hope the writing doesn’t stink. But clearly the people making “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” are willing to put in a *lot* of hard work, so chances seem pretty good that the writers will as well.

The 80’s, man. What a time.

 Posted by at 4:09 pm

I… *guess* this is good?

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., humor, news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 302019
 

I don’t exactly pay a whole lot of attention to Australian politics. But I gather that there was a national election there recently where the non-communists won and as a result, the local Ozzie SJWs melted down. So on the one hand, I guess it’s good to see that America isn’t uniquely cursed by the existence of these overly-dramatic crazy people who scream that every example of democracy that doesn’t go exactly their way is proof that their nation is run by Nazis. It’s always comforting to find that you are not alone. But on the other hand, this also means that this particularly horrible brand of SJW is perhaps prevalent world-wide, and that the damage they do to discourse, to culture and to *lives* is perhaps universal, indicating that the entire world may be in a spot of bother.

Language is a tad NSFW. so if you work in an office filled with leftist fascists… well, I’m not going to suggest that you hack into the PA system and play this at substantial volume, but if you do so, try to film the result.

 Posted by at 11:48 am

Sikorsky S-65

 aircraft, art, history, projects  No Responses »
May 292019
 

Throughout the 1960’s Sikorsky tried to sell a civilian passenger transport helicopter to airlines. The helicopter in question was the “S-65,” not to be confused with the CH-53 Sea Stallion which also bore the S-65 designation. The civilian S-65 design effort dragged on into the early 1970s and involved a very wide range of designs. One of the earliest configurations (1962) was a more or less civilianized version of the military S-65/CH-53.

The design quickly changed, diverging far from the CH-53 basis and beginning to incorporate unconventional elements. By the end of 1962 the CH-53 elements were almost gone (the cockpit and engine/rotor system are visually somewhat similar, but clearly different), and the tail incorporated an unusual dual-torque rotor configuration, one rotor on the end of two butterfly tails.

By 1965 the tail had reverted to a more normal layout; the fuselage was now circular in cross section and visually rotund.

By 1968 the S-65 had transformed from a pure helicopter into a compound helicopter, adding two turboprops under two stub wings. These would greatly increase forward speed and cruise fuel efficiency, at of course added weight and cost. The tail reverted to the earlier butterfly configuration, but with a single torque rotor.

By 1969 the 1968 design was modestly refined and proposed to the USAF as a search and recovery aircraft, which a compound helicopter should theoretically be good at. This was more or less the end of the line for design development. Throughout the project, a number of varitions on each configuration were proposed, including a version using more or less the last design but with telescoping main rotor blades that would shrink in diameter during high speed flight, reducing drag.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 7:09 pm

Oh, God, SHUUUUUUUT UUUUUUP

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., news, religion, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 292019
 

So I was working on the computer yesterday, doing some 3D computer modelling of a vehicle for the next issue of US Launch Vehicle Projects. I was tapping away at the computer, getting more and more into it (yes, sometimes I can become terribly engrossed in my work), and I absently turned on the TV for some background noise. I paid zero attention to the TV for some extended period. Coulda been an infomercial, coulda been a televangelist, coulda been a sitcom; didn’t pay it any mind. As it turns out it was CNN. At some point I glanced up from my work and became transfixed by what I was suddenly hearing. It was truly astonishing.

What it was was a press conference by Amanda Eller, a hiker who disappeared for 17 days in the forests of Hawaii. Normally I’d pay little attention. And normally I’d pay a Regular Schmoe a whole lot of slack when it comes to saying ridiculous things. But what I heard, at least for the few minutes I was stuck listening before I could tear myself away and stab furiously at the “turn it off, turn it off!” button on the remote, was mind-shredding self-involved newage spiritualist nonsense.

I won’t be surprised if this turns out to be another Balloon Boy.

In the video below, I first started noticing it on the TV at about the 30-minute mark.

Fortunately the Magickal Crystal Dumb Rays lost their hold on me after just a few minutes… but I see from the video that it went on for another *hour.*

 Posted by at 12:56 pm

“Chernobyl” is horrible

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, history, Hmm..., I'm from the government, nukes, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 282019
 

And I mean that in the best possible sense.

HBO is four episodes into a five-episode miniseries entitled “Chernobyl” based on, you guessed it, the nuclear accident. I’ve seen the first three episodes and it is, in my opinion, something of a horror masterpiece. Acting, writing, visuals, even the score conspire to make for an engaging story of what happens when socialist bureaucrats are put in charge of badly designed nuclear reactors and then have to try to clean up the inevitable mess. Incompetence leading to CYA on an industrial scale… but followed by selfless heroism by people high and low. “I’ll do it myself.”

In many ways this comes across as one of the better Lovecraftian horror stories I’ve seen on screen. There is a monster that threatens millions, something that is impersonal and vast and invisible and largely incomprehensible. It kills in horrifying ways (that the makeup people went to town on) that you can barely hope to defend against, and once you’ve met it there’s nothing anyone can do for you except watch as you basically fall apart. There is a sense of doom that hangs over especially the first two episodes that is just monumentally well done. In this it is aided by the score, barely music, composed by the impressively named Hildur Guðnadóttir. The score is composed of sounds from a Lithuanian nuclear powerplant and is just plain creepifyin’, subtle and mechanical, like the sound of machines in slow agony.

I suspect ol’ HPL would have loved to have seen this, and would have nodded along to a lot of it. One line in particular, “You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before,” seems like something that would be at home in a tale of Cthulhu. There are individual scenes that are just plain disturbing… a plant worker looking directly into the exposed open, burning core, like looking into the mouth of Hell. Bureaucrats yelling at people that they did not see what they know they saw. “It’s not three Roentgen. It’s fifteen thousand.” A Geiger counter starting off going nuts… and only going faster until it’s an almost solid tone. A nuclear physicist trying to explain to Soviet apparatchiks why finding graphite *outside* of the reactor building is a Very Bad Thing. Cerenkov radiation visible *outside* of a containment vessel.

I would say that this exceeds, at least so far, “The Terror” in terms of effective horror. Which is interesting because Jared Harris is an important character in both stories.

Recommended.

 Posted by at 8:12 pm

This is some high quality comedy right here

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, humor, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 282019
 

Few things in life are more fall-down hilarious than watching someone knowingly commit a crime right on camera and get promptly nabbed for it and realize that they’ve just screwed their own selves over.

Clearly there was a massive failure in the educational system somewhere. This person was:

1) Unaware that taking someone else’s stuff was theft and a crime

2) Unaware that other people have the right to have differing opinons

3) Unaware that other people have the right to express those opinions in public

4) Unaware that when she sees an opinion she disagrees with, she can simply walk away.

Maybe a few days in jail will help edumacate her in the law.

 Posted by at 11:48 am

At least he’s polling at zero percent

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, humor, I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 282019
 

Eric Swalwell, the Democrat Presidential nomination hopeful who thinks it would be a good idea to nuke his fellow citizens if they disagree with him on their right to keep their rights, explains in this brief clip just why he should never be President:

Here he is confronted with a Clown-World-level-stupid question: “Why should another White Guy be President?” And instead of answering it like a sane person, with something along the lines of “wow, what an incredibly racist *and* sexist question,” or with “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all day,” he instead accepts that the proposition “White Guys shouldn’t be President” has merit and grovels to be accepted.

So on the one hand, anyone who’s not a hard-core “progressive” identitarian is likely to be turned off by Douche Nukem’s weak-willed self-hating bigotry. On the other hand, he points out that whenever the issue comes up of a topic that does not specifically deal with his tiny little sector of intersectionality, he’ll “hand the mic” to someone else… which means the obvious question becomes “so why do we need you?”

 

And let’s face it: THIS is the face of the type of person he’s desperately pandering to at warp speed:

Good luck with that. That’s not the face of a woman swooning over how woke you are, Mr. Swalwell; that’s the face of someone who despises you for being a white male. She looks like she’s about two seconds from going after you with a shard of broken glass.

 Posted by at 11:15 am
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