Lights in The Sky

 art, awesomeness, news, photography, Utah  No Responses »
Apr 032019
 

Late last night the power went out during a mild rain shower. Turns out a power pole caught fire and trashed the transformer and such, cutting things off for most of the night. Fortunately the temperature was not an issue and most everybody was asleep, but having a house full of uninterruptible power supplies suddenly all beeping incessantly was  a pain in the keister. But the situation did lead to some interesting sights, straight out of Project Blue Book: a few miles off, a few police vehicles with flashing lights along with a utility truck pointing spotlights up at the pole while the workers fixed it. The lights were reflected not only by the mist in the air, but also the low-hanging clouds.

 Posted by at 12:04 pm

Joker

 Crazy, Hmm..., youtube  No Responses »
Apr 032019
 

When they mess with the origin story of Spock, I become annoyed. But comic book characters are necessarily different: there are dozens of different takes on, say, Batman, and even they though conflict and cannot be reconciled it is in the nature of comic book characters to be constantly re-invented and re-imagined. Sometimes they go too far, of course. Making Batman a poverty-stricken Puerto Rican woman in rural Alabama would not make sense. The “Suicide Squad” Joker really didn’t work for me, while the Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger versions did.

Joaquin  Phoenix is the next Joker, and this one seems further removed than most. It appears that it will be set in the 1970s, and it appears that Batman will either be nowhere to be found or very, very minor. The Joker here is quite unlike any previously seen. And I gotta say… I’m intrigued. Prior Joker origins have usually had him start off as some sort of crime boss who ends up dumped in a vat of toxic chemicals. This one replaces “toxic chemicals” with “the people of New York in the 1970’s,” which, from what I remember of the 1970’s, is just about right.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 11:05 am

Anti-MAGA whacko: Apparently this *wasn’t* an April Fools gag

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 022019
 

I dislike April Fools day. I dislike hoaxes and practical jokes in general. Of the several reasons for this, one is that it might make you think that a falsehood is true… and that it might make you think a real event was a hoax. Case in point, this incident that hit a crazy persons Facebook on April 1. The story is straight out of a Trump supporters fever dream: an elderly man is wearing a MAGA hat and is set upon by a leftist whackaloon. A bemohawked woman-like creature spots him in a Starbucks and not only screams at him, she photographs him, posts his photos on Facebook and tells her followers to dox him and his children in order to harass and drive him out of her town. This story is *exactly* the sort of thing that sounds like someone would make up in order to make lefties look bad… sort of a reverse Smollet.

But it turns out that it seems to actually have been true.

Crazed Bernie Supporter With Mohawk Attacks Elderly Man Wearing MAGA Hat – Chases Him Out of Starbucks Screaming ‘Get the F*ck Out’

And…

Liberal Verbally Assaults Old Man in a MAGA Hat, Publicly Declares Herself a Hero

The second piece has some fun updates about the self-appointed anti-MAGA “hero,” such as “the internet has doxxed *her,*” and “her employer has fired her like a cheap Saturday Night Special.” She was an accountant for a music store, and they were probably barraged with nastygrams. Most companies have a “do not embarrass us” clause, and this would certainly seem to qualify.

I shudder to imagine just how nutty these replicants will get if Trump wins re-election. This sort of thing will probably help drive technological development… we already have body cams and GoPros and the like, but it seems to me that what the world is calling out for is a simple, affordable multi-camera system that you can wear that will not only record a full 360 degrees around you in high def, but stream that video to a server for storage and public posting, AND will be unobtrusive… preferably invisible to the people around you. Perhaps even a swarm of tiny, inaudible mini-drones that flock around you and capture every conceivable angle. Because if there aren’t already, I’m sure there will soon be a *lot* of people heading out wearing MAGA hats and surrounded by cameras *hoping* to create a disturbance.

 

And apropos of nothing, the self-portrait of the woman running the second-linked blog:

While here is the leftie:

When I was a kid, “conservative woman” could have been a euphemism for “fun-hating assassin of joy.” Now… why is it that conservative women always seem like they’d be a *lot* more fun to hang out with? While a whole lot of left-screaming women seem like spending time with them would be like getting a root canal while sitting buck nekkid on a belt sander.

 Posted by at 8:03 pm

The end of social media?

 Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 012019
 

Australia and New Zealand want to pass laws making it a crime punishable by years in prison for platforms like Facebook to not promptly pull down violent content that they don’t like. Assuming this goes through and they actually try to enforce it, what would the result be?

A: Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. would be forced to institute self-censoring so harsh that it would basically make them useless systems. Every Tweet would need to pass through some AI censor which would doubtless make a mess of the system or would be tricked by trolls who figure out how to beat the system… thus getting the head honchos of those companies in legal hot water.

Or…

B: The world of social media – nay, the entire internet -would somehow need to be Balkanized, with nations like Australia and new Zealand cut off from the civilized world in order to protect their fragile citizens from naughty words and dirty pictures and bad ideas. This is something that China is trying and Russia wants to do; the only way to really pull it off would be to actually cut off the cables and somehow prevent satellites from transmitting. I imagine this is possible, but what does it say about your country if they attempt this?

 

 

 Posted by at 5:15 pm

Half a billion

 blather, Hmm..., news, politics  No Responses »
Apr 012019
 

Because Honduras, Guatamala and El Salvador are responsible for the bulk of the recent mass influx of economic migrants trying to and often successfully crossing the southern US border, the State Department under Trumps orders is planning on cutting about half a billion dollars in aid to those countries. On one hand, it would seem better to focus on the road those people take to get to the US: Mexico. Make it painful for the Mexican government to let armies of colonizers cross their territory, then the road will close and the invasion will slow.

But then on the other hand, half a billion dollars per year isn’t exactly chump change. Compared to the whole US Federal budget it’s a drop in the bucket that will be simply lost in the shuffle, but I’m sure some good use could be made of that money. Obviously, the most important thing the US could do with that money would be to promptly earmark it for the express and specific purpose of establishing an interplanetary colonization and industrialization program; using SpaceX systems, the US could probably have a sizable little colony on Mars inside of a decade and corner the market on asteroid mining within two.

Sadly, the US government isn’t that forward thinking. But what *could* we do with that money for relevant purposes? I just looked up the cost of flights… Dallas-Forth Worth to San Salvador runs $164 for a one-way economy seat. At that rate, the United States could use that half a billion dollars to deport three MILLION people a year.

We are forever being told that vast numbers of economic migrants are a boon to the economy. Imagine what three million people a year being deposited into El Salvador could accomplish. It would be cruel, nay, racist and elitist to deny El Salvador and its neighbors that boon.

 Posted by at 4:29 pm

Bang, zoom, Falcon 9 to the Moon

 Hmm..., news, politics, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Apr 012019
 

NASA chief says a Falcon Heavy rocket could fly humans to the Moon

The launch vehicle would require a number of modifications, including the use of the ULA Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage and a larger payload fairing.

The article seems lean on some details. The launch vehicle thus modified with the ICPS and an Orion capsule would seem perhaps capable of sending men *around* the moon, but actually landing on the moon would seem to require a lot more capability. The obvious approach would be to go back to the original idea NASA had in the earliest Apollo days of launching multiple Saturn I’s, with separate vehicles and tankers, for a rendezvous in Earth orbit and an assembly and tanking. But beyond all that  there remains one over-riding problem: where the frak is the lunar lander?

 Posted by at 3:43 pm

The Day The Dinosaurs Died

 awesomeness, history, news, paleo, science  No Responses »
Mar 312019
 

A much longer and more detailed and generally just plain interesting story about the discovery in Hell Creek:

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-­section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another.

SHAZAM!

Finding not only the tektites but the *craters* they made in the mud? That. Is. AWESOME.

Can you imagine what one of those little fossilized mud craters would go for at auction? Every museum in the world and a *lot* of private collectors will want a piece of this place.

 Posted by at 7:32 pm
 Older Entries  Newer Entries