… and promptly passes out.
While Raedthinn’s status as “Weird Position Sleeper Champ” is unquestioned, Buttons is taking him on in the realm of “Champion Overall Sleeper.” Raedthinn is a relatively light sleeper compared to Buttons, who refuses to be bothered while sleeping.
To compare with:
A design reported on by Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project staff at Oak RidgeNational Laboratory in mid 1952. The report dealt with the reactor program, not the airframe, so there’s limited data… including who designed the thing. Could be an in-house Oak Ridge design, it might be a Fairchild NEPA design. There is even limited technical data on the design. No dimensions are given, but they can probabaly be estimated based on a few snippets:
Gross weight: ~350,000 pounds
Wing loading: 70 lb/sq.foot
Reactor-to-crew separation: 120 feet
Crew compartment: 4.5X5.5X12 feet
Thrust at takeoff was to be 155,000 pounds, using six turbojets clustered around a single 350 megawatt beryllium oxide moderated circulating fuel reactor.
Note that the geometry of the aircraft is *really* simple… lots of straight lines, sharp corners and simple circular structures. This was pretty common among early “NEPA”-era nuclear aircraft designs. But by 1956 or so, contractors were producing nuclear powered aircraft concepts of far greater sophistication, which would have been difficult to tell from conventionally-powered (albeit advanced and exotic) aircraft design concepts.
*IF* this pans out… neato!
A brave new world of fossil fuels on demand
In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”
This would be one of those inventions that should merit the sponsor some serious goodies… *if* it works out. This would be worth it even if the only benefit it brought was the ability of the US to tell the leaders of the Middle East and Venezuela that they will receive no more money from us, and that single-celled *scum* is worth more to use than they are.
It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.
By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels.
I have about 4 acres that’s currently not doing much. So theoretically, this could be making 100,000 gallons of ethanol per year, or (apparently) 3200 barrels of crude. At the $30/barrel price, that’d be $96,000 worth of crude per year. I can’t imagine that any crops short of marijuana or coca or opium poppies would be able to rake in that much money per acre. Adn it would have a few advantages over wind turbines… quieter (almost certainly), while probably low to the ground (thus not messing up the view), and without the strobing effect of the shadows of the blades that apparently can really bug some people.
Cracked.com has a good writeup on nine movie villains who weren’t exactly the simple badguys they’re generally understood to be. I think they nailed it with Ed Rooney, Senator Robert Kelly, Carl Anheuser, and General Hummel, and at least make interesting cases for the Wicked Witch of the West, the Matrix-bots and Sauron.
As is often noted, almost nobody ever actually sees themselves as the bad guy. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Jim Jones, Woodrow Wilson, Osama and many others are clearly seen as villains… but they nevertheless attracted large numbers of followers who were fully aware of the ideology and actions that we seen as villainous… and were perfectly happy with it.
But there is a different form of villain I’d love to see more of. Let’s take the James Bond flick “Moonraker.” (I know the movie sucks on pretty much every level, but it was a favorite of mine from childhood and I still find it entertaining as hell, so bite me.) In it, Hugo Drax plays an industrialist (Boo! Hiss! Dirty capitalist!!!) who builds his own space program including a fleet of space shuttles and magically builds a city in space without anybody catching on, and plans to wipe out all humans on Earth and start again. OK, that’s pretty villainous. But imagine a somewhat different take on the story. Eliminate the Surprisingly Toxic Gas aspect, but keep the missing Space Shuttles. Hell, ramp it up. Space technologists from around the planet have disappeared in large numbers; astronomers and such have been having a really bad run of luck with heart attacks, bad brakes and occasional lead poisoning. Vast sums of money seem to have been pilferred by shell corporations and mysterious individuals that may be related to Drax Industries. Hell, even SPECTRE has come out of the woodwork, doing all manner of nasty thievings and kidnappings and such, and again it vaguely points to Drax Industries. James Bond does his investigation thing and does his “get caught by the bad guy and get him to monologue his evil scheme thing,” but instead of a monologue, the bad guy goes straight to tossing him into the Unnecessarily Complex Execution Machine. Bond, being Bond, escapes, hitches a ride on a Shuttle, and rides up to the space city, where he sees a rather larger space city, with a *lot* of secret space shuttles. Gets himself caught again. This time, the Bad Guy decides to do the monologue. And just why has Hugo Drax murdered, extorted, stolen in order to build his space city? Look at the monitor: that’s a ten-mile-wide nickel-iron asteroid on a collision course with Earth, with a velocity of 70 kilometers per second. The governments of Earth wouldn’t look at the evidence of onrushing DOOM, so the astronomers who discovered it went to private industry in the form of Hugo Drax… who used his company, along with whatever other resources he could scrape up, to build a giant Space Ark (which will either stay in Earth orbit for eventual re-colonization of Earth, or is due to boost to Mars for terraforming… whatever).
Here James Bond, Hero, would be presented with a bad guy who has done bad things… because that was the only way to save mankind. If Bond does anything to interfere, he knows that he will reduce the shipments of supplies, seeds, critters, people, etc. that the space colonists will need to survive. The only way to save the world is to let the villain win and get his way.
Now, wouldn’t *that* be a much more compelling villain?
Here’s your dose of “Gah!!!” for today…
I, and everyone else who is enlisted in my company, was ORDERED by my Battalion Commander to take the GAT’s Spiritual Fitness Test not very long ago. Let me make this CLEAR, we were all ORDERD to take it. … Two of my battle buddies who I KNOW are thinking of ending it all were a million times worse off after failing this SFT and being called a “spiritual failure” and then ordered to go see the chaplains.
Ah, mandatory religion and the military. What could *possibly* go wrong?
I just read the short story “Philosopher’s Stone” by Christopher Anvil, in the January, 1963, issue of Analog science fiction magazine. In it is described an interesting idea on how to spur technological progress and expand economies.
The story, in short: the main character is an interstellar data courier. While faster than light travel is in use, there is still a whole lot of relativistic time dilation, the result being that a few week ship travel time equates to a year or three back on Earth. So as the courier goes about his career, he sees technological progress and cultural changes occurring very rapidly. He is an American, but eventually bumps into one of his Soviet counterparts (remember, published in ’63), and they compare notes.
When they started out, they (or more strictly, their employers) tended to book tavel on American or Soviet star liners… but now they are being booked on British Imperial star liners. And the culture onboard the ships is very, very old-school British, with “nobility” walking around with swagger sticks that denote their “station,” and people bowing and scraping accordingly. The American and the Soviet are confused by this, so they do the obvious thing… get themselves a boxload of booze, get ‘faced, and check the onboard computer library to find out what the hell is going on. And what’s going on is that the British Empire, once a tiny little speck, economically, is now the dominant power on Earth and growing exponentially.
The question is, “how in the hell did *this* happen?”
Being science fiction, the usual answer would likely be that the Brits made first contact with aliens or some such. Instead, what Anvil came up with is perhaps an ingenious solution, and purely sociological.
1) Nobility and social rank are pushed as worthy of attainment.
2) Rank in nobility is not passed on directly to the male heir, but is instead dropped two ranks. “The son of a duke becomes an earl.”
3) And the way to bump your rank *up* is to “bring a useful invention to prominence.” This is not to say to *invent* something… but to be the guy who brought Invention X to the world stage and made it go. Think: “Baron Billy Mays here for Oxy Clean!”
This system means that social climbing is done by advancing the state of the art. Families that don’t do well at that fall out of the nobility; families that do well at that keep their station, or advance upwards. But one need not be an inventor… only have the wisdom to see the value in an invention, and have the wherewithal to bring the technology not only to market, but to make it a world-beater.
In the story, the start of Britain’s rise to dominance came with the invention of “ocean mining” (which is not described, other than to point out that Britain can now effectively mine 70% of the Earth that the other nations can’t). With “nobles” crawling all over each other to find The Next Big Thing in order to climb up the aristocratic totem pole, Britain is now far and away the world leader in innovation. The story ends with the American and the Soviet discussing how to incorporate the same basic idea into their own home societies. The Soviet’s idea is that each Party member must sponsor one good innovation every five years, or get booted from the Party; the American’s idea is to have “teams” like major league baseball teams, with the team members made up of innovation-sponsors, with pennants and awards and such awarded based on “points,” which themselves are based on numbers of useful innovations sponsored by the team members.
Personally, I can see the British solution, as presented, proving to be very effective and the Soviet version fairly effective, but I’m kinda “meh” about the American idea. While my personal view of “nobles” is that their best social purpose is that of “gunnery target” and “guillotine fodder,” I can see how a society that takes some of the sleazier motives of humanity (social climbing) and marries that to true social progress (technological advancement) could quickly rise technologically, economically and politically.
In the US today, our current best approximation of this is the profit motive. And while the profit motive is certainly an effective one, we also have a truckload of anti-motives, such as “progressive” taxation, massive bureaucracies, regulations out the ying-yang… and cultural indifference to innovators. If we adopted something somewhat akin to the system proposed in “Philosopher’s Stone,” I could see the US clawing its way out of the recession ina heartbeat. Here are a few ideas… certainly some suck, but I’d be interested in others.
1) Once a year, a hundred (or whatever number) innovations are selected. Those who sponsored those innovations (and the sponsor could of course be the actual inventor) are granted five years free from *all* taxation.
2) Sponsors are given land grants… say, hundreds or thousands of acres of choice property that the sponsor chooses (if the land is currently privately owned, the government can buy that land… but none of that eminant domain bullcrap). Free from property taxes or any other obligation for the rest of the sponsor’s life. The land can be sold or willed to inheiritors, but the property taxes and such kick back in after the sponsor kicks off.
3) Sponsors get ten votes in federal elections. Vote ten times for one guy; vote for ten guys. Whatever.
4) Sponsors get a five-year supply of all the bodyguards, doctors, lawyers and world travel they can stomach.
5) The selected sponsors are given the sort of fame and media adoration that is currently reserved for such as the Kardashians, the Jersey Shore mutants, Paris Hilton, movie stars, rock stars, etc. Sponsors can of course opt out… but the desire for fame is a common one, and could easily be one hell of a motivator.
My idea is to make the five years (and that time period is up for debate) following the sponsor’s selection by the Awards comittee into one long party… if the sponsor so chooses to do it that way. If the sponsor is smart, he will instead be making plans for his *next* great innovation, to keep the party going and the tax collector at bay, and to build up his land. If the party-period ends and the sponsor doesn’t have something else lined up… well, he will be inspired to get back on the job. But even if not… the prospect of making a bucket of money from a popular invention, along with scoring a primo bit of real estate and a couple of really entertaining years would be incentive enough for a whole lot of people.
Buttons and Fingers fight a lot. And I mean a lot. A dozen or more times a day, every day. But the thing is, their fights strike me far more like play than combat. They seem to have a hell of a fun time rolling around and chasing each other… no hissing, growling or screaming, and if one loses interest, just walking away signals the end (running away, however, signals “chase me!”).
Raedthinn, of course, has no use for such frivolity. It would interfere with his lounging. And amazingly, Buttons leaves him alone.
The movie “Minority Report” from a few years back had a number of nifty sci-fi technologies on display. Some are likely to remain pure fantasy for a good long while – mind-reading computers and, sadly, jetpacks are probably at the top of the “it’s the year 2000… where’s my flying car?” list – while some are either really close… or already here.
While the world of “Minority Report,” unlike “Blade Runner” (both of which were based on Phillip K. Dick stories) was shown as a bright, sunshiny and on the whole clean place, it was nevertheless a bit of a nightmare world due to ever-present surveillanc, and overpowering omnipresent commercial advertising. These are of course trends that would surprise approximately nobody if they get to the point shown in “Minority Report.” One of the advertising technologies shown was animated cereal boxes. Cartoons would play on the flat surfaces of the boxes, and would, apparently, be triggered on and off by movement of the box:
[youtube ccCJfwnFU_Q]
As a bit of added realism, the “off switch” is shown to not work all that well, and it just comes across as yet another annoying technological pain in the ass .
Well, guess what… the boxes are damn near here:
[youtube M0R5LPhLz_U]
They are not “animated” quite yet, but that can’t be far away. The boxes light up in various patterns… and what’s worse, they apparently communicate with each other.
Wonderful. Something else for the schizophrenics to freak out about… their Trix cereal conspiring against them with the Honey Nut Cheerios. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Furbies were talkign to each other and telling nutjobs that Sarah Palin wanted them to gun down Republican-appointed federal judges, now breakfast cereal will be spreading sekrit messages from Tea Party Central Command.
Raedthinn demonstrating the proper theory and application of relaxation.
