Pax Orionis: The Blast From Jackass Flats, Part One

 drawings, My Fiction, new products, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, Patreon, Pax Orionis, projects, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Dec 192015
 

It has been a while since I’ve put out a Pax Orionis story, but a new one has just been made available to the Pax Orionis Patreon patrons. This one tells of the maiden voyage of the Columbia and the resulting changes in geopolitics…

The bonus version (available to $2 & up patrons) includes diagrams and data on the Nova-class lofter as well as a bonus news article. If interested, check out the Pax Orionis Patreon. It’s cheap!

For those unaware: Pax Orionis is an alternate history project. In short, the Cuban Missile Crisis goes a little “funny,” resulting in the US fielding nuclear pulse propelled spacecraft (Orions). The goal is hard SF covering a number of decades of events, good, bad and really quite awful.

blast1

 Posted by at 1:17 pm

Bruce discovers catnip

 cats, photography  6 Responses »
Dec 182015
 

When Bruce was quarantined in the basement, one of the little perks I tried to give him was catnip… both a living plant in the window and some commercial dried-up stuff. He took zero interest in it. Until tonight, when I doled some out for Speedbump (I pour some out in the bathtub from time to time; this helps to reduce mess). For some reason, *this* time Bruce took notice of it.

WP_20151218_001 WP_20151218_003 WP_20151218_005 WP_20151218_008

 Posted by at 8:14 pm

Herbig-Haro 24

 art, awesomeness, photography, science, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Dec 182015
 

This is worth looking at… a Hubble photo of jets being shot out of the poles of an accreting protostar, Herbig-Haro 24 (HH 24), about 1300 lightyears away in the Orion B molecular cloud. The star itself is hidden behind dust clouds.  The jet is disrupted here and there due to hitting the gas and dust in the region, setting up turbulence and shock waves.

Once again… science is awesome.

 

 Posted by at 7:08 pm

Star Wars Review

 art, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Dec 182015
 

Short version: Approved. Would watch again.

Longer version: infinitely better than the prequels. Very entertaining, definitely a good Star Wars Movie. But I’m unsure if it’s quite as good as the original trilogy… didn’t come out of the theater as thrilled and exited as I was by the original. But then… I was seven when “Star Wars” originally came out, so that might have something to do with it. Also: by far the most applause I’ve seen in a movie. Not just at the beginning and end, but several times during.

There is a lot of spoilery stuff that I won’t spoil, but rumors of someone important dying were accurate. Now, this being space fantasy, maybe death ain’t death… Spock came back, after all. But the death here seems every bit as final as the Emperor’s in “Jedi.”

And this being space fantasy, you’re better off not trying to analyze the science. Because it’s pretty outlandish here. Such as a Very Big Gun on Planet A that is many lightyears away from some observers on Planet B shoots a hyperlight weapon at Planet C, which is many lightyears from both A and B. I can buy that the weapon gets from A to C lickety-split, what with the hyperdrive and all… but the observers on B *watched* the weapon cross the sky – from lightyears away – in real time. Buh?

Oh well. No Jar Jar, and no characters nearly as irritating, so it gets a pass. There are some CGI characters that still look pretty CGI, especially “Supreme Leader Snoke,” the replacement for the Emperor. You only see the character via hologram (a technology that has apparently greatly improved since the Empire went down), but he’s still pretty fake looking. Shoulda been done as a muppet or makeup, IMO.

Some good humor as well. The main bad guy, one Kylo Ren, is essentially a Darth Vader fanboy. Collects Vader memorabilia, wants to follow in his footsteps and be as powerful as him. Like Vader, he has anger issues. But where Vader would get mad and be a contained scary guy who’d just stand there and make everybody uncomfortable, Ren whips out his lightsaber from time to time and just whacks the crap out of anything nearby in a tantrum. This leads to one of the best laughs in the movie when a  couple stormtroopers who were walking down the hallway see this and turn around and decide to walk somewhere else.

 Posted by at 5:58 pm

Supernova update

 awesomeness, news, photography, science, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Dec 172015
 

Less than a month ago I posted about a gravitationally lensed galaxy many billions of lightyears away that had displayed a supernova in most, but not all, of the separate images, and that astronomers would be looking for the supernova to appear in one of the remaining images. The expectation was that it would appear in 2016… but the Hubble Space Telescope has just seen it:

Caught in the act

Hubble captures first-ever predicted exploding star

After word that there are people willing to spend millions to build museums and planetariums specifically to teach that the world is best explained via magic, there’s really only one thing to say:

gTRNR

 Posted by at 10:38 am

The new face of terror

 Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, religion, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Dec 172015
 

Enrique Marquez, Syed Farook’s former neighbor, likely to be charged

Seems Ricky here bought the two AR-15’s used in the attack. That’s not illegal. But he bought them for Syed because Syed didn’t want them listed in his name (even though he would have been legally allowed to buy them). This is a “straw purchase,” which is illegal. He also planned a terror attack with Syed in 2012, but they chickened out. This may or may not have been illegal, based on how far they got in planning. Shockingly, Ricky was a convert to Syeds religion. Purely coincidental, surely.

enrique_marquez

Yup, that’s him.

Feel free to caption. Possibilities include:

“Oh Boy! I get to further the political ambitions of Diane Feinstein!”

“Oh Boy! I’m gonna be *real* popular in prison!”

 Posted by at 9:44 am

This looks as fun as a barrel of monkeys

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, paleo, religion, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Dec 172015
 

Creationists expanding institute to include the ‘Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History’

Oy. The same cranks and crackpots that brought the world the “Institute for Creation Research” now want to build a dubiously named “Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History” that will teach that the Earth is a grand total of 6,000 years old. Even better, they’re proposing to build a 3D planetarium, also to promote the 6,000-year nonsense, in direct contradiction to everything astronomy has discovered.

Kinda like making a laser light show to prove that coherent beams of monochromatic light are a myth.

Behold the bullshit (yes, I generally prefer to avoid such colorful metaphors in posts… but there’s really no other world for the idiot lunacy spouted here). And before you hit “play,” ask yourself this: “Are they going to ask for money? ARE THEY?!?”

 

 Posted by at 2:10 am

Well. How about that.

 awesomeness, cats, news  9 Responses »
Dec 162015
 

The vet was surprised when I brought Bruce back into be re-tested for feline leukemia, since he didn’t seem to think there was much point. So imagine his surpris4e when, less than an hour later, he came out to speak to me and told me that the re-test shows that Bruce is FLV negative.

This was a pleasant surprise for me, and I guess a bit of a shock for the vet. He’s never had an FLV-positive cat turn into a FLV-negative cat. But he did some research and printed out some stuff from the database showing that in Stage Three of the infection, when it sorta busts out and spreads throughout the system, the immune system and sometimes rally and defeat the virus. Stage Three lasts just a few weeks. The database suggests that 2% or so of cats beat the virus. So… Bruce is a two-in-a-hundred cat.

So, he now has the run of the house. It’s a tentative thing… he’ll probably go back downstairs tonight. But overall it has gone well; no fighting. The process of keeping the critters separate but within sight of each other with a screen door seems to have largely worked… they’re used to each other and don’t feel the need to tussle. They’ve spent the past several hours playing, more or less.

Except for Raedthinn. He *hates* Bruce with a growling, hissing passion.

Note: my respect for Bruce went up a notch at the vet. He fought them so hard when it came time to draw blood that they had to gas him to calm him down. You go, Bruce!

So, the lesson here: when someone tells you that the best option is to pt down a cat… they might not be right.

 Posted by at 6:11 pm
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