And far more relaxed than any human being ever has been or ever will be.
Mar 082016
Mar 082016
The real value of *good* science is the ability to predict the future. And so, coming off January and February 2016, which were apparently the hottest months on record, with an El Nino that has been pretty impressive, some climatologists are predicting that the rest of 206 will be Damn Hot and filled with wacky weather.
El Niño’s Disastrous Worldwide Consequences Are Just Getting Started
The global warming “pause’ that seems to have occurred for a dozen or so years appears to be over. The thermal energy that didn’t seem to be jacking up the atmospheric temperature was instead being drawn into the deep ocean, warming cold waters. But with El Nino stirring things up, that thermal energy is apparently being dumped back into the atmosphere, leading to a remarkable temperature rise rate.
And so, if 2016 *does* turn out to be a year filled with extraordinary climatic horrors… you know who to blame: anti-nuclear activists. Had they not shut the program down in the late 1970s/early 1980s, we’d have a lot more nukes, a lot less coal & oil plants, a lot less CO2 in the air and a less wacky climate.
Mar 082016
Iran conducts new missile tests defying US sanctions
A number of apparently new missiles, with range capabilities of 300 to 2,000 kilometers were (apparently) successfully test fired.
I’ve got a good feeling about those nuclear agreements!
Mar 082016
Raedthinn & Fingers in the front window perch. I gotta say I get a kick out of the side-eye Raedthinn’s giving me in the first photo.
Mar 072016
This looks interesting… the entire movie is shot in first person. There’s a bit more shakeycam than seems strictly necessary, so I imagine there’ll be some people who’ll need Dramamine to get through this flick.
Mar 072016
Project Horizon was a late 1950’s US Army study for a military lunar base. It’s hardly a secret at this point… it has been written about for decades, and several volumes of the report have been available online as generally “meh”-quality PDFs for years. Still, as well known as Horizon is to the space-history community, I imagine it’s pretty much unknown to the general population. So imagine my modest surprise when I halfway caught a commercial for a special on Project Horizon to air tomorrow (Tuesday) night on the Science Channel, on an episode of “NASA’s Unexplained Files.”
From the bit I caught, it seems like the show will probably slant the story not as “hey, look as this neato-wacky concept the Army looked at sixty years ago,” but more as “what is the Army hiding on the moon, look, BEHOLD, for we have found Secret Plans.” In general this would be a turnoff, but it’s not like Horizon gets a lot of press. And from the brief glimpse, it *looks* like someone got hold of Project Horizon color artwork. So this might be one of those things where the show is spectacular if you simply put the sound on “mute.” Consequently, it might be worth digitally recording if anyone has the ability. And who knows… *maybe* they’ll actually produce something new, or give hints as to where a complete original *color* version of the reports might be found.
UPDATE: Bleurrrrgh. Good and shallow, added nothing new. The color artwork shown is *modern* lunar base artwork, from the 90’s or later.
Mar 072016
One thing you don’t want your high-tech safe to do is pop open if someone jams a stick into it.
Mar 062016
This. Is. Awesome.
Lovecraft Inspired Travel Posters
At some point, the trend of making sci-fi travel posters in the style of the old National Park Service/WPA posters will get old and stale. Ain’t there yet.
Mar 052016
Last episode of “Mythbusters” just aired. While a whole lot of the show was simply blowing stuff up (not that there’s anything wrong with that), a good fraction of it was actually pretty good at presenting a skeptical approach to commonly held beliefs – and then blowing them up.
In a world of innumerable crap shows about horrible vacuous celebrities, or brain damaged “paranormal investigators,” or inbred “bigfoot hunters” or insane gibberers about “ancient aliens,” “Mythbusters” was a bit of a rarity… a show about the scientific method and skepticism.
It seems to me that there are two kinds of science shows on television:
- Shows like “Cosmos” and “How The Universe Works,” which show, well, how the universe works, generally describing Big Things that your average viewer probably didn’t know too much about (black holes, atomic structure, cosmology, etc.)
- Shows like “Mythbusters” (and “Bullshit!” and “Adam Ruins Everything”) that deal with the everyday… and shows that What You Know May be Wrong.
The former type of show is reasonably well represented. In general, that type gets through an hour of television by just telling you how it is, and generally fairly uncontroversially. The second type of show, however, is a much rarer thing, and it is by definition controversial… because it tells a lot of people that their beliefs are *wrong.* In the case of Mythbusters, those beliefs were usually pretty shallowly believed… stuff people saw on the internet, or other such urban legends. But shows the “The Truth Behind” and “Bullshit!” dealt with a lot of stuff that your average newage aficionados took greatly to heart, and “Bullshit!” and “Adam Ruins Everything” dealt with a lot of things that people take as received political truth. And given how entertaining these shows have been, their rarity can’t be due to low ratings… and it’s not like they’re likely all that expensive. I imagine it’s the sheer skeptical nature of the shows that make them unpopular with certain groups… including studio heads and the like.
So, now that Mythbusters is gone… what’s left? “Bullshit!” is long gone. “The Truth Behind” was only a few episodes. Season One of “Adam Ruins Everything” ended some months ago; season two won’t start until August 2016. TV seems kinda empty, abandoned to the “monster hunters.” So… what we got?
Mar 052016
I managed to finagle a complete full-color scan of an original copy of Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report, Uber einen Raketenantrieb fur Fernbomber (A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers). A “meh” quality B&W PDF of an English-language translation of the report has been available online for a while, but it seems to me that the world needs a proper high-rez version of the original, in color where appropriate.
One of the pages I’ve cleaned up from the new scan shows the statistical damage potential if New York City was regularly targeted by a very large number of bombs. This image, at least a black-and-white English-translated version, several generations removed from the original, is reasonably well-known and commonly reproduced… and as described a few years back, is generally described wrong.
