It is, in fact, an alloy of titanium and gold, and appears to be four times stronger than straight titanium. The article points out that it is biocompatible, meaning that it can be used in implants (new hip joints and pins and such).
It would also seem to be good for exoskeletons…
So last night around midnight I dragged the garbage can out to the road for pickup this morning. I swept the area with my flashlight, on the lookout for things like coyotes and wild dogs and raccoons and shoggoths and socialists and other such rabid monsters, but only found one cat. This I took as a pleasant surprise, given the dearth of cats around here the last few years. He’s a juvenile siamese-patterned cat, and was *reasonably* friendly: he came to within about 4 feet when I called to him, and didn’t overly object as I accompanied him as he hunted the wheat for mice and such. He was.n’t interested in letting me pet him, so I went about my business
This evening I had a rare visit from Junior, who’s looking rather the worse for wear… pretty skinny. He wants *nothing* to do with me, though he will of course eat free food when available.
Tonight around midnight I went out again to check the weather and look at the stars; the sky kept flashing from lightning so I hoped there’d be a show (there wasn’t, sadly… the lightning was much too far away). But I saw the pseudo-siamese from last night, and realized that he was a she, and that she had at least three kittens… one all-black, two more siamese-colored. One of the siamese skittered off and didn’t come back, but the other two were reasonably brave. Mom there is barely bigger than her kittens.
While I was out there watching the cats I heard a nearby rustling sound in a tree near where the one kitten had skittered off. I figured it was the kitten coming back… but it was actually a full grown racoon. I don’t know if it threatened the kitten (or maybe even got it), but lil’ mommacat wasn’t having it, and the two rumbled. And even though the racoon outmassed the cat by several times, I’m happy to report that she successfully drove off the racoon. It was a short battle, but in the end the racoon hightailed it for the tree and the cat stood there hissing at it.
Out here in the Mountain West there’s a chain of stores called “Hastings.” They carry books, comic books, magazines, DVDs/Blu-Rays, video games, board games, collectibles, action figures, pop culture memorabilia. There are two within range of me that I visit on a fairly regular basis looking for magazines and books and such. Quite good stores.
Correction: There *used* to be a chain called “Hastings.” A month ago they declared bankruptcy, and today it was announced that they’ve been bought out by liquidators who will sell off their stuff and be done with them. When they are gone there will no longer be any book or magazine stores within a reasonable distance of me. Logan, Utah, a fairly major college town, will have no more book or video stores of any consequence. Logan used to have a Borders; that’s of course long gone. Used to have a really good hobby shop with long rows of model kits; long gone. Used to have one hell of a used book store; vanished like a fart in a tornado a few years ago.
Hmmph.
Get off my lawn, kid.
Bonham’s just wrapped up another one of their “no you can’t afford these” space history memorabilia auctions. Among the interesting stuff I looked at, sighed over and wished I lived in a world where somehow I was rich enough to afford, there was this item:
The other items listed all have their sales prices listed (like the $269,000 Sputnik model… yow), but this item seems to still only have it’s estimated price of $1500-$2500. My guess is that that means it didn’t sell. And if it didn’t, maybe it’s because it was advertised as being something far less interesting than it actually is. Consider: the description goes thus:
GEODETIC SATELLITE MODEL
Large scale model of a Geodetic Satellite. 37½ inch tall plexiglass pole topped with 16½ inch tall conical satellite with ten 21 inch long folding blue panels.
Employed by the United States Navy, the GeoSat was an Earth observation satellite launched in 1985. The goal of the GeoSat mission was to provide information on the marine gravity field.
Which, yeah, I guess that’s nice, but it’s not really one of the more exciting satellites out there. By the way, here is a geodetic satellite rendering:
And here is the model that was up for auction:
Are there similarities? Sure. But you know what that model *isn’t* a model of? A geodetic satellite. It’s a model of this:
Yup. That there is the business end of an SP-100 space nuclear reactor.
Now, I don’t know that the model is *really* anything special… the payload it’s attached to is dreadfully small and dull. It’s not like it’s attached to a neutral particle beam weapon or something similarly intriguing, and the SP-100 was hardly a classified program. But still a nuclear reactor powered spacecraft has *got* to be more interesting than a geodetic satellite, yes?
See also:
You know, there’s a reason why you never see monster movies and zombie apocalypses in Flyover Country: cuz we’d survive what would turn Manhattan into a ghost town. Behold:
Yumpin’ Yimminy!
It is a lab demo, which means it’s not ready for practical application. But it’s amazing data density: the entire Library of Congress in a cube 0.1 mm on a side (a very small grain of sand). One atom = 1 bit.
It’s not user friendly. A one-atom-thick grid of chlorine atoms is laid on a surface of copper; individual atoms are removed to create the ones and zeroes. Read/write speeds are slow, and the system needs to remain at liquid nitrogen temperatures. However… give it time and development. Compare the fractional-terabyte micro SD card in your phone with the “core rope memory” storage system from the 1960’s.
Using individual atoms as bits would seem to be as small as you can go. I don’t doubt that people are studying subatomic data storage, but that seems dubious to me. I suppose a way to improve the data density further might be some form of quantum computing… the actual physical data density might have reached its limit, but theoretically a quantum computer accesses a very large – potentially infinite – number of computers in alternate realities. So you could, maybe, have infinite data storage. Maybe. Of course, if you are accessing an infinite amount of data, you are probably accessing an infinite number of lies.
Assuming this system can be made reliable and stable over a range of temperatures and over time, the possibilities for data archiving become astonishing. If you could record all of human knowledge onto a grain of sand… stamp ’em out by the trillions. Use cement to form these memory-grains into bricks and build edifices. Paint space probes with these things. Record DNA strands onto them and record the DNA of many individuals of many species; use these to recreate whole species on distant worlds or in the future when species have gone extinct. A large number of copies can be carried at minimal mass; if there is data corruption, such as from cosmic ray impacts, the many backups allow a high probability of keeping the data clean.
Another day, another news item about how lllinois is a disaster:
Normally I’d not post a news item like this. But it gives me an opportunity to post this image:
Once again, Illinois needs to secede from Chicago. Illexit? Chicexit?
Currently scheduled for 10:45 PM Mountain time (12:45 AM Eastern). Live coverage of it *should* be available on the YouTube window below starting at 10:25 or so. This launch is sending an unmanned Dragon capsule to the ISS and, hopefully, a booster stage to a safe landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon is carrying a new docking adapter that will allow automated docking of the SpaceX and Boeing capsules.
Update: Huzzah! The payload is in orbit, the first stage is resting comfortably on the landing pad.
Every now and then something pops up on eBay that is historically terribly important, and I’ve sat here and watched the auction shoot *way* past my financial means. The items get sold and disappear into a black hole. Well, no more, dagnabbit. I just scored a treasure trove of vintage Convair F2Y “Sea Dart” documents and diagrams. The final price was about $400… well beyond my means. But as there were 15 contributors, it broke down to about $24.55 per person. Each of the contributors will receive a full set of 300 dpi color or grayscale (where appropriate) scans of everything in the lot. And the actual items themselves? When I’m done scanning and checking them, they will be donated to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. This is appropriate not only because they have an archive of Convair files, they also have an F2Y sitting on a pole out front.
The crowdfunding effort was announced and made available via the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon. I fully intend to do this again; I wish I had a time machine to do it with a couple of frustrating Boeing 2707 and hypersonic auctions from a number of months ago… So if you’d like to be in on this sort of thing in the future, check out the APR Patreon.
Behold:
H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos has been remarkably influential over the decades. It is thus not surprising that if you do a Google image search for “Cthulhu” you will find a *vast* array of depictions of the terrifying Great Old One, along with various other of Lovecrafts creations. But here’s the thing: most of them fail.
There are two reasons why there have been, so far, no real efforts at making a faithful adaptation of a Cthulhu story into a big-budget movie, despite their popularity. Firstly: Lovecraft almost never described the appearance of his monsters in great detail. When he did, like the “Deep Ones” in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the monsters are fairly mundane… fish-people, essentially. The biggies like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth are described vaguely at best. Secondly: the monsters often don’t even put in a visible appearance; or those few characters who see them promptly go insane at the sight.
And that’s what stomps on most of the artistic depictions of Mythos Monsters: no matter how skilled and talented an artist is, painting or sculpting a vision of Cthulhu that drives the viewer insane is pretty much impossible (not to mention unwise). Critters from the Mythos are some of the best examples of things that work great in your head, but not so great visually.
So, if you GIS Cthulhu, you’ll find a myriad of sketches, paintings, sculpltures, CG renders. A lot of them are exquisitely rendered and detailed with great clarity… and are just not terrifying. “Winged Squid Guy” just doesn’t really come off as a particularly spooky vision.
But there are a few exceptions. The image I posted yesterday from “The Cthulhu Wars” with Cthulhu getting nuked is all kinds of awesome, but it’s still not *quite* there with the terrifyingness. I think what you really need to do to make a truly effective depiction of Cthulhu is to render it so that you *can’t* see Cthulhu with any clarity. The creepiness comes not from clarity but from obscuration. Here, this one is good:
“Awakening” by Russian artist Alexander Andreev. Cthulhu paying a visit to St. Petersburg; nothing good is going to happen to that town. I assume that TU-160 is going to unload a thermonuclear “howdy” onto the visitor.
And this one I think *really* nails the right way to depict a Lovecraft monster:
Here, rather than seeing Cthulhu clearly, it is depicted vaguely. If you look at the image full-rez, it’s pretty clearly a fairly quickly Photoshopped image; the artist, Bulgarian Andrey Nazarov, took a photo of a road in his native country he found on Google and added the Cthulhu figure. Since this in the Internet, enough people actually *believed* this to be an actual photo that even Snopes had to get involved. Particularly amusing/distressing are the claims that this photo was shot during a tornado outbreak… in Oklahoma. The mountains of Oklahoma. That’s madness.
The distinctly Lovecraftian movie “The Mist” was at its most effective when the monsters remained shrouded in the obscuring mist. The bugs flying around attacking people inside the grocery store? Yeah, that was bad, but it was comprehensible. The things outside just yoinking people away? Bleah!
In short… you *can’t* do cosmic horror justice. And the more detail you show, the further you get from it.
