Right up front: Tiger Woods gets in a car wreck? I don’t care. Tiger Woods had an affair? I don’t care. Tiger Woods? I don’t care. A Chinese TV show goes to the trouble of making a fully computer generated re-enactment of the incident? Now that kinda funny.
OK, bear with me. This will seem like a pretty meaningless and trivial post (as opposed to the world-shatteringly important ones, like the cat photos), but I think there might be something of some cultural importance here.
Two science fiction shows from recent years that I found entertaining were “Stargate SG-1” and “Primeval.” They had a few points of similarity:
1) Both are set in the present day
2) There are wormhole-like things that allow for instant travel from this world to another
3) There are teams whose job it is to investigate these “portals” and what lies beyond
4) The government is fully aware of the portals and what lies beyond, but is covering it up from the public
5) There are, nevertheless, journalists trying to uncover the truth
6) There are competing groups trying to control the portals
7) there are dangers on the other side of the portals… and sometimes they come through into our world
OK. Now, the differences:
1) Stargate is American TV, set largely in America; Primeval is Brit TV set largely in Britain
2) The “Stargate” is a machine built millenia ago by aliens, and it opens a portal to other stargates on other worlds across the galaxy; the portals in Primeval are gateways to the distant past (or future) of Earth, and appear to be naturally occuring holes in spacetime
3) Stargate thus deals with aliens; Primeval deals with dinosaurs and such.
Now, here’s where this becomes interesting to me. In both shows, the people involved are *forever* getting in trouble with the aliens/critters on the other side of the portals. In general, they’re always getting their asses handed to ’em by those on the other side. But… while the Stargate team is getting whupped by aliens thousands of years more technologically advanced than modern humans, the Primeval team is getting spanked by critters with no more smarts than your average retarded rat. Now, why might this be? Well, let’s take a look at the teams involved:
Primeval:
Stargate:
Primeval:
Stargate:
Primeval:
Stargate:
Primeval:
Stargate:
I notice one subtle difference in how the teams are equipped. Did you catch it? That’s right… the Stargate team wears camouflage.
And packs heat. Lots of heat.
If you notice in the last of the Primeval cast shots, there is one guy tucked way in the back holding a shotgun. This character was an addition in the third season, when it was becoming obvious even to the BBC that “gee, maybe some form of defense might make some sort of sense, as these velociraptor chaps aren’t behaving properly.” But even then the guy was something of a puss… and of course none of the rest of ’em were armed (except for the occasional tranquilizer rifle which tended to not work terribly well on the bigger and angrier critters).
Granted, this Just Television. Getting too worked up about this makes as much sense as a Kirk vs Picard argument (when we all know the winner: Nuke ‘Em Sheridan). Still, I think a message of some small importance can be gleaned from this.
Anybody with more than a double-digit IQ should be able to figure out that if there is a Magic Portal To A Dangerous Beyond, you had damned well better prepare for all kinds of eventualities… and often enough those eventualities seem to be aliens and other critters that want to eat you. As a consequence, if you must send people through, or have a reasonable suspicion that those Dangerous Nasties are going to come through on their own…your people had damned well better be armed. This is just basic sense. And yet, the British take on the idea seems to be that arms are dirty, nasty things, almost more distasteful than being chewed up and swallowed by some prehistoric blighter. While in Stargate, they’d often enough go through packing not just guns… but nuclear fricken’ bombs. And when we encountered aliens, the first things we did was reverse engineer their weapons and power systems.
Interestingly, one thing that repeatedly startled me for the first few years of Stargate SG-1 was how often the team would wander into some alien village with machine pistols, rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, zap guns, grenades, knives and what have you all hanging out in the breeze, right out in front of Odin and everybody… and the villagers/aliens – from paleolithic tech on up to Star Trek-level tech – *never* freaked out about it. For the longest time this seemed like an oversight to me. But then I realized that it was a rare case of Hollywood *not* being stupid. In a world where all kinds of people and aliens and critters are coming and going… of course you go about armed. Duh.
In the end, Willing Suspension Of Disbelief lets me sit back and enjoy TV shows about stargates and cracks in the fabric of spacetime; stories about aliens snakes living in people’s heads, and super-evolved bats. But I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to let Primevals’ wholly bizarre world of intentionally defenseless humans slip by without complaint.
A few ladybugs from Illinois a few months back.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find Muslim fanatics are behind the intentional bombing of civilians.
North Caucasus group in Russia train bomb web claim
Doku Umarov, a Chechen, is considered the leader of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus. He says he is fighting to expel Russian forces, and to turn the region into an Islamic emirate.
You know, a decade ago I was on the side of the Chechens, who wanted to drive the Russians off of their land. But for some reason, a little more than eight years ago my views on the matter started to change…
Tusns out that nearly fourteen decades ago, the New York Times had itself a flamewar in its letters to the editor pages that would read almost exactly like a modern online flamewar. Anonymous usernames, off-topic rants, insults and finally the moderators jumping in and shutting it down.
Awesome.
The Way We Ate: The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872
For once, I highly recommend reading a piece in the New York Times.
Participants in the discussion didn’t just object to scrapple, of course. They also objected to each other. In what may be the earliest recorded example of a “flame,” H.G. punned on A GOOD LIVER’s pen-name, suggesting that he be “boiled and chopped up” for his ignorance.
Finally unveiled is a photo of the flying wing UAV that has been operating in Afghanistan:
Interesting things to note:
1) A single semicircular exhaust nozzle
2) The main landing gear doors seem to be much longer than they need to be
3) There are faired-in teardrop shaped pods above the left wing root, and presumably also the right
4) There is another pod under the nose
As for 2) and 3), one *possible* explanation is that the landing gear extends out a lot longer than is shown here, for reasons unknown. If that’s the case, then it looks as if landing gear long enough to require the whole length of the landing gear door would also not fit within the wing… and the overwing fairings actually cover the wheels. That seems unlikely to me, though. A perhaps more reasonable solution is that the fairings cover sensors or weapons of some kind… and the landing gear door is so long because it’s also the weapons or sensor bay door. The pod under the nose likely houses sensors or a laser designator for bombing missions.
In the early 1960’s, the General Dynamics art department produced this piece to illustrate their F-111B naval strike fighter:
A few years later, Convair’s art department produced this to illustrate their Model 44 VFX design concept… the VFX being the design competition that led to the F-14… the plane that followed the failed F-111B.
Huh.
Now available: a PDF copy of a 1958 Lockheed brochure on the CL-379 VTOL demonstrator. This 24-page document lays out the operating principle of this twin-turboprop, fixed-wing design and gives numerous very nice illustrations including three-view, inboard profile, artwork and so on. BONUS: the PDF also includes an extra page of technical details and drawings of the CL-379, giving information not included in the brochure.
Air Doc 14: CL-379 can be downloaded for $5.50.
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