It has been a while since Guillermo Del Toro has given the world a movie (2013’s “Pacific Rim”). In October that changes with the release of “Crimson Peak,” a trailer for which has just been made available. Looks like a lavish Victorian-era haunted mansion. With Loki!
Seems likely to be an effective horror flick.
According to IMDB, next up on Del Toro’s plate is Pacific Rim 2… and Hellboy 3. One of these days, “At The Mountains of Madness,” one of these days…
Back in the day, George Lucas commissioned a short film to be shown before “Empire Strikes Back.” The film, “Black Angel,” was included in European showings of ESB… and then promptly lost for more than 30 years. it has been found and restored and posted to YouTube. It’s *not* a Star Wars film, but instead a medieval film of substantial atmospherics. It reminds me of nothing quite so much as John Boormans “Excalibur;” the intro here claims that Boorman showed the film to his crew while making “Excalibur.”
It’s only going to be available on YouTube until the end of May (which is weird since you can simply download the video from YouTube and keep it forever); June 2 there is supposed to be some “big news.” My guess would be that perhaps the film is being rebooted to a full-length flick. This would certainly be good news for the director, Roger Christian; after directing this and serving as art director on ESB, he attained infamy and career suicide by directing “Battlefield Earth.”
It’s worth watching for the scenery if nothing else.
I’m interested in getting the models of the USS Bush and the ISS from the video game “Iron Sky: Invasion.” Can anyone help out? Purpose: as aids in creating diagrams for the NPP book (which I have gotten back to working on… since finishing the Deep Impact “Messiah” model, I have created two more “pop culture Orion” models. Obviously, much simpler models than the Messiah…).
Rhodiola rosea is a succulent plant that the local herbivores don’t want to eat. Weather apparently has a minimal effect on it. Lack of rain doesn’t bother it. Arctic cold doesn’t bother it. It was a “Soviet military secret.” It looks like it could become an economically important crop, displacing harder to grow things like taters. The plant is known for being an important energy source.
Next up: the things will sprout whips and legs. *Don’t* keep watching the skies!
So apparently there was a controversy at Oberlin College due to feminist Christina Hoff Sommers giving a lecture there. The problem wasn’t that she was a feminist; it was that she was the wrong kind of feminist. As a result, the causeheads went bonkers, ramping up the PC nonsense straight to 11. “Trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” and physical threats… all the usual campus hijinks we’ve come to know and love from these adorable little scamps.
Interestingly, one of the best replies to the fanatical snowflakes at Oberlin came from the Oberlin choir. I’m not what you’d call a fan of choir music… but this is pretty awesome.
In short: an employee was fired for disabling a GPS tracking app that was installed on her employer-provided work phone. Said app ran 24 hours per day, whether she was on work hours or not.
The employer required the employee to leave the phone on 24/7. Fine. But if it was in a Faraday cage, it would still be on, but it wouldn’t be able to receive or transmit radio signals. Alternatively, employ a GPS jammer. It seems that these might also block cell phone signals (up to 10 meters away), but hey, the phone is still strictly speaking *on.* I gotta wonder about the legality of a cell phone jammer that reaches out far enough to wipe out conversations in other cars while you’re commuting to work, though…
A “medical mystery” I’d not previously heard of… Terminal Lucidity. In short, there are a number of recorded instances of people with *extreme* cognitive failure – comas, Alzheimer’s, dementia, severe retardation and so on – suddenly becoming aware and intelligent to surprising degrees… and then dieing within hours or a few days.
Without invoking the supernatural, the explanation for this seems unavailable. There are enough reported cases that it is probably a real phenomenon; but the number of recorded cases is small enough that it seems to be quite rare.
As the body and brain start to shut down just before death, I wonder if – on rare occasions – the brains functions drop a certain amount and that actually opens a “window.” That there is a level of operation that produces a functional mind, but it requires some portion of the brain to have shut down. If this is the case, then a case might be made that for *some* rare cases of coma and Alzheimer’s and the like, the person trapped within can be brought back to the world not by trying to fix the brain… but by shutting parts of it down. In other words, the mind is there, but it’s been swamped by the operation of broken bits of the brain.
A few days ago, looking out my back yard. Sure looks like a whole lot of water falling out of the sky, but it sure hasn’t been resulting in a whole lot of water hitting the ground.
This photo was passed to me to identify. Much of it looks like the Grumman G-623 VTOL fighter concept from the mid 1970s (illustrated below), but the tail is obviously entirely different and the nose is much pointier. It’s my guess that the model might represent an early version of the G-623 design. Can anyone confirm/deny?
The Grumman G-623:
If you’ve got a hankering to find out what the super-secret Lacrosse radar satellites look like, the Russians got you covered. A Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia used telescopes to take photos of several of these satellites, and then, rather unconventionally, released the images. The images were collected and analyzed, and posted in a PDF album:
An Album of Images of LACROSSE Radar Reconnaissance Satellites
Made by a 60 cm Adaptive Optics System
at the
G.S. Titov Altai Optical-Laser Center
The images are not spectacular… nobody will be making details models based off them. But you can get a sense of the overall configurations(s), as well as the size of the antennae; from that, an analyst could give you a good idea what the capabilities of the sensor systems are.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.
