I got your email. Apparently you didn’t get *mine.* Given that you’ve had trouble receiving emails from others, it would seem that your email system is expanding it’s circle of incompetence.
Mar 062012
Mar 062012
The history of the internet is replete with stories of people who were photographed or video’ed in an unusual pose and who then gained notoriety as people mocked them. Mugshots are especially good for this sort of thing. Tosh.0 wrapped an entire successful TV show around the concept. And for many of these people, the response is rage or despair… which, the Internet being what it is and populated by who it is, only makes the situation worse.
Every now and then, though, someone becomes an internet meme and decides to be awesome about it. Take, for example Neil deGrasse Tyson, recently mentioned hereabouts in the past few days. He got himself a Rage Face. The full histoy of that can be read HERE, but the short form is in the summer of 2011, a video of him talking about Sir Isaac Newton was posted to YouTube, where he can be seen gesturing in awe and astonishment over the fact that newton invented calculus at the ripe old age of 25.
[youtube danYFxGnFxQ]
Within relatively short order, a shot from that video (at about the 1:32 mark) got turned into a “rage face” cartoon:
Now, some people might take offense to that, and either get all pissy about it or try to avoid it. And then there’s Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Now that displays a level of class that you don’t see all that often with public figures. The ability to not only impart wisdom and a position AND take a joke and have fun with it is what’s needed to really make a good leader. I can see NdGT becoming an important figure in the attempt to regain an American space program, and this sort of thing will only help.
I once worked with someone who was portrayed as an Important Leader In The Effort To Get Your Ass To Mars. That feller was *not* a badass. Nor much of a leader. NdGT seems to be the polar opposite… a smart guy who is good with the public and comes across as an actual human. Now, if only there was some sort of Society for Mars that he could be voted president of… Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2012!
Mar 062012
Fox puts Terra Nova out of its misery
Hardly surprising. It was a very expensive show. But worse… it was based on a great concept… a colony 80 million years in the past, a show by Spielberg about dinosaurs and future technology, and yet… dinosaurs rarely appeared, the future tech was bland, and the show turned out to be more about whiny teenagers than anything else.
Feh.
Mar 062012
Technology marches on.
Getting close to twenty years ago (yikes) Babylon 5 pioneered the use of “virtual sets.” A number of the locations on the show – the bridge of an alien starship, various rooms on the station, the interior of the station itself – physically existed only as a floor and some green screens. B-5’s budget was fairly low, and the technology was new and immature; today the rendering is pretty obvious, but at the time it was pretty astonishing. But it’s crap compared to what’s being done on television today.
[vimeo 34678075]
The rise of places like Vancouver as alternatives for shooting in the over-taxed and union-dominated Hollywood caused irritation a decade or more ago. The rise of this sort of virtual technology may make Hollywood almost entirely irrelevant.
Another step is needed, though… the reliable, low-cost and utterly believable ability to replace actors with computer generated characters. Not aliens, not cartoony figures… but humans that you simply cannot tell do not actually exist. Once this happens, the Screen Actors Guild is likely to go ape. No longer will actors be able to demand dozens of millions of dollars to strut their stuff; they can be replaced with anonymous body doubles (Andy Serkis will never go hungry again) and software. No longer will people give a damn what some actor has to say on matters of politics or policy… because without getting their faces out in the public, an actor just another tool.
Mar 052012
This was Freakin’ High-larious.
Photoshop Theme: Photoshop an Internet meme in the style of WWII airplane nose art
Some of my favorites:
Mar 052012
For Fantastic Plastic, a 1/48 scale “Hydra Parasit” from Captain America.
Mar 042012
Leaked nude photos believed to be of Mad Men star Christina Hendricks hit the internet
As approximately two billion males – and probably a billion females – rush to Google Image Search.
I suspect that I could bump up blog readership numbers if I posted actual topless photos of Christina Hendricks, but that, sadly, would be slightly outside the “mission statement” of this blog.
Four photos have hit Teh Interwebs. Three are clearly Ms. Hendricks, but don’t show her goodies; the fourth shows *someones* jubblies, but not her face, so it’s impossible to say who it is. Whoever it is, though, is a couple standard deviations on one side of the bell curve, if ya know what I mean.
And now, back to nuclear explosions and rockets and stuff…
Mar 042012
I recently caught part of “I, Robot.” For those who haven’t seen it, the relevant thing to know is that it is set a few decades down the line where society is filled with humanoid robots that are not sentient (with an exception), but are physically capable of doing anything a human can, and are shown doing just about all the “blue collar” jobs: FedEx delivery, bartender, housework, cooking, dog-walking, construction, etc.
Unlike a lot of sci-fi robots (what with feelings and souls and such), this sort of thing I can see happening. Of course, the robots shown here probably miss out on accurate prices… I just can’t see a humanoid robot that can do pretty much anything going for much less than the price of a good car. So your average schmoe very likely won’t be able to afford new robots for a good long while.
But here’s the thing: not only would average schmoes be unable to afford such robots… they’d be *replace* by such robots. One of the sillier aspect of Star Trek: The Next Generation was the notion that “technology had freed humanity,” that now that material needs were met, people were free to explore their potential. Well, no, sorry. Look at lottery winners: how many of them wind up drunk and broke?
But robo-slaves that can do *most* of the jobs humans can do are coming. Hell, this won’t even necessarily be limited to blue collar stuff… surgeons could be easily replaced (robots are doing some pretty advanced operations even now). So… what to do here?
Assume a future America with a population of 350 million people… 200 million of whom are economically redundant. Assuming that a robo-slave costs fifty grand, few people will be able to buy one… but employers will *easily* be able to do so. This will lead to very bad things, I think. A permanently unemployable *large* fraction of the population would lead to violence and revolution and death and destruction.
So how to deal with it?
1) Ban such robots: won’t work. Not only will certain areas of the economy *scream* for such robots… other nations will employ them to economic advantage.
2) Provide full employment-level free income to people who are replaced by robo-slaves. This is also bad. Costs a lot, while subsidizing people to do *nothing.* Perhaps link such payments to sterility treatments?
3) Make robo-slaves available for free, one per working-age adult. Everyone has a robotic doppleganger that you can send out to do work. If the robots are all made to the same basic specification, then anyones robot can do any basic job, which means that all such jobs are economically identical: construction worker or dog walker, they all cost the same, and thus draw the same rate of pay. Alternatively, if the robots are identical, simply rotate them from job to job… one day they’re working as a burger joint for five bucks an how, the next they’re building houses for twenty dollars an hour, the next they’re tort lawyers for fifty cents an hour.
4) Similar: everyone gets a robo-slave. The programming to do everything from janitorial work to brain surgery can be downloaded and installed for free. But… a robots *license* to perform such tasks is based on the owner having proven to have those skills him/herself. Thus if you get your free bot and you promptly decide to devote your life to being a drunk or a chav or a partier or other such “excess population,” your robot is allowed only to do minimum wage jobs. if you want to rake in the big money through your robot, then you need to train up in how to be a brain surgeon, a Navy SEAL, a fighter pilot, a nuclear reactor tech or an SPS construction worker. Something *easy* for robots to do but difficult for humans.
On one hand, a limitation of one robot per human would seem to make sense. But passing laws banning someone from owning a whole army of bots would seem as legally dubious as laws that limit gun purchases or allow you to only have a single book in your library or one car in your garage.
So corporations would either be allowed, or not allowed, to buy their own bots. If they could, they’d staff every single possible job with their own in-house, specially fitted-out bots, and would have little to no need for outside bots. And thus you’d have boatloads of unemployed people with unemployed robots. Feh. But the Constitutional justification for disallowing someone to purchase as many robots as they want seems lacking.
Anybody got any ideas?
Mar 042012
Smithsonian Is 3-D Scanning and Printing Part of Museum Collection
As the article suggests, a complete scan of the NASM would be *awesome.* I’d be curious to see what sort of scanner they’d use to scan a 707 or Concord intact and whole…
Mar 032012
Arguably his most recognizable creation was the design for Darth Vader…
Whether you know the name or not, you know the art, and the designs that came from that art. McQuarrie was an integral and vital part of the creation of Star Wars, and helped to shape the world we have today.