August 2010 – Page 7 – The Unwanted Blog

The next few decades should see this sort of thing become epicly entertaining:

Medical treatment carries possible side effect of limiting homosexuality

Short form: a few dozen female babies are born every year with a hormonal problem that makes their nads look like those of a male. This can be tested for in the womb, and can be treated with a hormone treatment. Side effects seem to be that the female baby will be sorta extra-feminine behaviorwise (not entirely sure what that means, but if my reading of sitcoms has taught me anything, I guess that means a predilection for purses, shopping, shoes, the color pink and screaming like a banshee over Justin Bieber)… and, entertainingly, reducing the chances that the female baby will become a lesbian.

This has of course outraged Certain Groups.

For years the arguement has raged over whether homosexuality is a learned behavior or “born that way.” I think by this point it’s pretty well established that for probably a sizable majority, it has biological roots, not just mental choices and upbringing. This is both good and bad news for advocates of homosexuality… if it’s biology-based, then the “moral stigma” should go away. But if it’s biology based… it can be medically “treated.”

And before Other Certain Groups start celebrating because “yay, a few pills and we can make all the gays go away,” keep in mind that if you can treat a baby in the womb to make it not-gay, you can almost certainly treat a baby in the womb to make it gay.

I think I’ll sit this one out.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19309-neptune-dead-zones-hold-more-rocks-than-asteroid-belt.html

Short form: astronomers find evidence that there are more 100-km asteroids in Neptunes “Trojan” positions (L4 and L5) than in the regular asteroid belt, with 150 such asteroids in the trailing Trojan group. Given the relatively easy access to Neptunes system of moons and it’s faint rings, these asteroids could well wind up with one *hell* of a population someday

This is both sci-fi cool, and a little creepifyin’.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727733.900-skull-electrodes-give-memory-a-boost.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes. The method can temporarily increase or decrease activity in a specific brain region and has already been shown to boost verbal and motor skills in volunteers.

Will the college students of the future, cramming for tomorrows exam, live by the motto “Tase me, bro?”

EDIT: This was originally titled “Titan IIIK/Apollo.” The “K” designation was an error on my part. Brain fart or typo.

From the same source as THESE, here’s an Apollo Command and Service Module atop a Titan IIIM. Similar to, but not the same as, THIS Apollo/Titan mashup. This would seem to have been an obvious sort of design, but perhaps the “Apollo = NASA” and “Titan = USAF” thing might have precluded much serious examination of this idea. Marry it with THIS idea, though, and you might have been onto something…

This 1972 North American Rockwell concept was specifically for a rescue Apollo. The Titan IIIM/Apollo combination would be kept near the launch pad on a state of constant readiness, to be launched as needed.

In 1974, the US Navy was looking forward to smaller “Sea Control Ship” aircraft carriers packing VTOL fighters like the ill-fated Rockwell XFV-12. Smaller carriers would be cheaper than giant supercarriers, so there could be more of them, spread to the numerous hotspots of the world… or at there very least there would be some of them, as the military budget was way down. The VTOL capability of the fighters would mean the smaller decks would not be a major hinderance to flight operations.

Planners were sufficiently optimistic about the chances for VTOL fighters that companies began sketching out ideas for minimum-size carriers. Normally nobody would ever think of landing a jet fighter on something the size of a Coast Guard cutter, yet helicopters do so with some regularity; so in principle is should be possible to operate VTOL fighters from ships this size. So companies and military organizations produced artwork (it’s unclear how detailed and rigorous the actual designs were) of small ships capable of carrying one or two fighters.

One Boeing notion called for the use of a fast hydrofoil boat to carry a single fighter. In this case the fighter was a VATOL (Vertical Attitude Takeoff and Landing) design… not exactly a tailsitter, but instead operating in the same fashion as the Ryan X-13. A landing platform would be raised to the vertical (like a billboard), and the fighter, standing on its tailjets, would mosey on up to it and latch on. Aware of the difficulties encountered by similar VATOL craft in the past, specifically the trouble the pilot has in seeing where he’s going when his cockpit is pointing straight at the sky, Boeing fitted their fighter design with a cockpit that could tilt “down” 90 degrees, allowing the pilot to remain comfortably upright while the plane bent underneath him.

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A US Navy concept sketch used the XFV-12, with two of these planes operating from an Advanced Marine Vehicle. This would be used to support a larger conventional carrier group, by providing a ring of interceptors and similar missions.

Of course, the whole idea fell flat. The XFV-12 proved wholly incapable of lurching itself into the sky, and the one VTOL fighter to enter US service, the AV-8 Harrier, proved to be somewhat troublesome (it’s jet exhaust would happily bore holes through the decks of most ships, for instance). By the 1980’s, the budget for the military began to go back upwards, and Cheap Small Aircraft Carriers fell out of favor.

The last of ’em is a C-130 with an entirely new wing, large enough to fit four sizable lift fans. The fans would be driven by high-pressure gas tapped off of the six turbojet engines mounted atop the wings.

Tried meteor photography last night with so-so results. Probably need a wider angle lens for this sort of thing.

Rather than pointing the camera at a dull part of the sky and hoping that a meteor would flash through, I pointed it at the Milky Way and hoped that a meteor would flash through. A few did.

I only caught part of this one with the 55mm lens, but it’s interesting since the trail is bright *green.* Boron contaminants, perhaps? Or something about the camera or sensor?

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Another partial trail, green-ish.

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Caught a whole one with the 18 mm lens.

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Something I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before (in fact, I know I have) is that the change in technology over time leads to things from different eras seeming somehow… not right. While this makes a TV commercial from a couple decades ago seem odd because there are no website addresses listed, a commercial from today would seem even odder to people of twenty years ago… due to the inclusion of website addresses.

A long thread on Fark discusses this in detail:

This is always fun: write a sentence that wouldn’t have made sense a decade ago

Two writers nail it in the first two submissions:

Facebook friend me, Allison.

and

Hmmm. Let’s make it 2 decades ago.

“She keeps twittering me, so I friended her. I hope she’s got Bluetooth.”

/think of what you’d do if someone said that to you in 1994 or so.

So much of today’s commonplace discussion would be simply incomprehensible gibberish not that long ago. While to a certain degree this has always been the case (23 skidoo!), now it’s due not only to changing slang, but to the rapid introduction of entirely new things, entirely new activities and entirely new concepts.

One thing that hasn’t changed is being shocked and apalled that dates and events that seem not that far in the past really are that far in the past:

I started to do this. Then I realized that a decade ago was 2000, and now I want to french kiss a light socket.

I’m of two minds when it comes to democracy. On the one hand, it’s the best political system yet devised. On the other hand, it needs to be beaten to death with a large mallet, wrapped in a tarp, loaded down with rocks and dumped off a bridge into a deep river.

One the one hand, democracy is understood to mean that a people can choose their own destiny.

But on the other hand, in practice what it seems to mean is that a people can choose someone else’s destiny. The usual analogy here is “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”

In a good democratic system, people could vote on directions their government could take… but not on what the government can take from the people. This has proven virtually impossible to achieve. In *real* democratic systems, people vote on what they want for themselves, and grant their government the power – and the right – to take the required resources from other people. This is, to put it bluntly, evil.

And stepping up to demonstrate and advocate this evil dark side of democracy is Peter Wilby, a writer for the British rag The Guardian, and apparently straight out of Central Casting for the role of “evil British-accented effete Galactic Imperial officer.”

In a recent editorial, he bloviated ignorantly:

It is surely admirable – isn’t it? – that 40 US billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have signed the “giving pledge” to donate half their fortunes to charity. … But let’s be clear. Money paid to charity is exempt from tax; the US treasury already loses at least $40bn (£25bn) a year from tax breaks for donations. So billionaires, not the democratically elected and (at least theoretically) accountable representatives of the people, get to decide on the good causes.

In other words… give away all your money to the government, let the bureaucrats decide what to do with it.

And he’s not alone. In another, fortunately shorter writeup, idiot fascist Barbara Gunnell wrote:

If the Gateses, von Furstenbergs and Bloombergs want top ranking in the pantheon of benefactors they have to give away something really important. How about giving the poor the chance to decide the fate of the wealthy? How about delegates from the poorest 100 countries deciding how much of the world’s wealth they want to allocate to software developers, dress designers, film producers etc and how much to eradicating poverty?

How about… no.

Those who legally earn a fortune (and since laws vary from place to place, by “legal” I mean “they lived up to the terms of the contract they willingly signed”) have every right to do with it as they please. Those who argue against that argue against the idea that slavery is wrong. They also tend to argue from a position of staggering ignorance. Commisar Wilby wrote:

Far better that they open their wallets to deserving causes than that they spend yet more money on yachts, carbon-emitting private jets or garish mansions.

Really? How about the people who *build* yachts, jets and mansions? If nobody buys those products – and only the rich can – then they lose business and consequently their jobs. This doesn;t mean just the Evil Rich (Almost Certainly White Male) Businessmen who own the yacht companies, but also the riveters, the electrical engineers, the pipe fitters, they guy who sprays gelcoat on the boat hull molds. And then it spreads out to the companies who supply the tools and parts and lumber and lightbulbs.

Additionally, those who create industries, create a multitude of jobs that did not exist before. For the most part they did not earn their billions by breaking into the houses of po’ foke and stealing their cookies; they earned their billions by creating products or services that large numbers of people decided they want. Yeah, people bitch about the bugs in Microsoft… and go right out and buy the latest version of it. Because on the whole, people know that these products make their lives better in some way. I know that *I* would sure as hell rather work with my creaky old Microsoft Word ’97 word processor program than bang all this crap out on a Smith Corona. Fascists like Wilby seem to think that economics is a zero sum game… one person becoming a billionaire means that everyone else goes down an economic notch. This worldview is of course nonsense. But it seems to be a popular worldview, and it informs its believers views about democracy.

Those people who would use democracy (and the almost fetishistic adoration of democracy that most people in the west seem to at least pretend to have) as a way to rob others are a detriment to society. These people argue that the labor of certain folk is the property of “the common good,” which means, in effect, that at any time someone could find themselves retroactively enslaved. People like Wilby should be exposed for what they are, and ridiculed in the public square… and finally ignored. But so long as he and his ilk continue to bleat his jealous bleat and impact public opinion and voting patterns… he should be noted, his views raised publicy, and his opinions mocked and shown to be the product of an unsteady mind.

And if, in the end, a large enough mob of people can be raised to storm his home with torches and pitchforks in the middle of the night, tar and feather him and run him out of town on a rail… why, that’d be democracy in action, would it not?

Update: the data on the trashed hard drive is apparently all recoverable. I just got a list of everything on the drive they can recover… a list 5,966 pages long (yow). 878 gig. Cost: just under a grand. Ouch. First thing to do when I get the new drive: copy all that crap over onto *another* one, and *really* start cranking out the DVDs

Let this be a lesson to y’all. Especially y’all who are serious about archiving data.

Because I was too cheap (i.e. “broke”) to spend $130 for a new backup drive, I got to spend $260 for *two* drives, along with a grand for the data. Am I still broke? Hell, no! Now I’m in debt! I’m living like the US Government! Wooo!!!