Compare and Contrast

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Sep 082015
 

Two wholly separate, yet somehow similar, news stories:

Kim Davis Freed From Jail in Kentucky Gay Marriage Dispute

And…

Muslim flight attendant suspended for refusing to serve alcohol, files discrimination complaint: advocacy group

Basically, both boil down to “I don’t want to do my job because my interpretation of my religion says not to. And any attempt to either make me do my job, or punish me for not doing my job, is discrimination. Help, help I’m being oppressed. Come and see the oppression inherent in the system.”

It’ll be interesting to see how many people who cheer Kim Davis *also* cheer Charee Stanley. Somehow… I suspect there won’t be a whole lot of overlap.

A few hours ago I watched live CNN as a rally formed around the release of Davis. While I thought jailing her was at best monumentally silly, I was rather more disturbed by the ridiculous rhetoric used by the likes of Mike Huckabee. I become further convinced than I already was that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that *craves* martyrdom, that sees being oppressed as the highest display of worth. And since, let’s face it, they’re *not* being oppressed (certainly not any form of oppression that anyone burned at the stake or shunned by their family or beheaded or sold into slavery would recognize as oppression), they need to invent oppression in order to feel holy.

 

 Posted by at 2:19 pm

Now, *here* is how you gimmick

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., youtube  3 Responses »
Sep 082015
 

A few days ago I bemoaned the way in which the makers of “The Making of Stanley Kubricks 2001” picked the gimmicky nature of the book layout format over the actual contents of the book. Well, seems the Monty Python folks also have a yen to go gimmicky with a 40th edition special edition Blu-Ray of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail…” but here it looks like that actually *adds* to the awesomeness of the product rather than taking away from it.

I mean, who *wouldn’t* want a cow-flinging catapult?

 

 

 Posted by at 11:14 am

S-N Art

 art, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  1 Response »
Sep 082015
 

The image quality is admittedly terrible (being a scan of a print of a microfilm), but this might be of interest… a piece of NASA art circa 1963 depicting the Saturn V with an S-N third stage rather than an S-IVb third stage. The S-N was not a fixed design, but varied over the years; here, it was a fairly stubby stage ten meters in diameter, same as the S-IC and S-II stage. The S-N would vary in diameter and length from design to design, but one common element was the use of a single NERVA solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. As shown here, the distance from the nuclear rocket to the Apollo capsule up front just isn’t terribly far; consequently, this depicted a design with extraordinary levels of shielding, or depicted an unmanned Apollo (but then, why the abort tower), or it was just artistic license.

S-N

 Posted by at 10:13 am

250 Megapixels

 awesomeness, news, photography  2 Responses »
Sep 062015
 

Yikes:

Canon develops APS-H-size CMOS sensor with approximately 250 megapixels, the world’s highest pixel count for its size

Canon Inc. announced today that it has developed an APS-H-size (approx. 29.2 x 20.2 mm) CMOS sensor incorporating approximately 250 million pixels (19,580 x 12,600 pixels), the world’s highest number of pixels1 for a CMOS sensor smaller than the size of a 35 mm full-frame sensor.

When installed in a camera, the newly developed sensor was able to capture images enabling the distinguishing of lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km from the shooting location.

I’d imagine that a limit on the utility of the system would be the optics. I know dialing in focus for long-distance shots is troublesome enough with my creaky old camera now… I shudder to imagine the utter failure of getting precise focus for a 250 megapixel sensor.

 Posted by at 11:39 pm

Spontaneous Conversions

 Hmm..., news, politics, religion  10 Responses »
Sep 062015
 

Hmmm…

At a Berlin church, Muslim refugees converting in droves

A few hundred Iranian and Afghani refugees have converted to Christianity at a Berlin church. In the article it is pointed out that the act of conversion to Christianity does not aid a refugee in gaining permanent resident status in Germany. But it is *also* pointed out that since rejection of Islam is a cause for the death sentence in Iran and Afghanistan, Germany would be hard pressed to ship an “ex-Muslim” back to those countries. So even though conversion to Christianity officially doesn’t help… it seems like it actually does.

A concept that just may be relevant: taqiya.

 Posted by at 3:13 pm

“The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001”

 AARRRGH, art, books, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, Hmm..., Meh., news, photography, science fiction, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Sep 062015
 

I’m of two minds on this book:

  1. On one hand, this book is filled with *amazing* images… set photos, diagrams and best of all concept paintings that would make damn fine art to hang on the wall. It’s a treasure trove.
  2. On the other hand… whoever laid out this book needs to have his ass removed.

Quoting from some of the reviews on Amazon:

In what will go down as one of the most horrific decisions in book making history… these amazing and rare photos and illustrations are force fit into pages that have a useable space of about 6 inches wide, and 14 inches tall. This makes presentation of these glorious visuals an impossible task… either the images have to be shrunk to postcard size… or, and this is almost criminal… the image must be split, down the center, across the book spline. OH. MY. GOD. The CENTER of these amazing images… hopelessly lost in the curving folds between adjacent pages.

and…

There ae incredible, beautiful, never before seen wonderful pictures and illustrations, with often interesting notes that fill up the book. VERY SADLY they are almost all cut in half by enlarging them to take up two pages, separated by the books binding. Even the many foldouts have a crease going down otherwise great pictures. This is totally annoying and disappointing and distracting. I guess they wanted the book to look like the Monolith. Instead, it should have looked like a book and given us all these pictures with no “interruptions.”

Basically… WTF were they thinking?

I have high hopes that someone will re-release the imagery in this book in a format that isn’t mind-bogglingly *stupid.*

Sigh.

 

The people who laid out this book should have used “2001: The Lost Science” as a guide. While not near as much stuff in a book that costs about the same, the format and size of the book is *excellent.*

 Posted by at 12:09 pm

Weather

 awesomeness, photography, Utah  1 Response »
Sep 062015
 

Had some interesting weather out here last several days. Nothing like the gullywashers I grew up with in Illinois, but any rain at all in early September is a bit unusual for this region… and it has led to some picturesque skies.

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 Posted by at 12:51 am
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