You want MGTOW? Cuz this is how you get MGTOW.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Jul 132016
 

MGTOW is something I’d not heard of until a week ago: Men Going Their Own Way. Depending on who you ask, the MGTOW movement is either:

  1. Straight men who are tired of the BS so often involved with Certain Things, and have decided to have no social interactions with women
  2. Losers who can’t possibly get a date, and are coming up with rationalizations.

I suspect thsere’s some of both. But if you want to jack up the percentage of #1, this is how you do it:

Nottinghamshire police to count wolf-whistling in street as a hate crime

Catcalling, wolf whistles and “unwanted physical approaches ” are to be considered “hate crimes.”

Behold:

Misogyny hate crime is classed under the new policy as “incidents against women that are motivated by an attitude of a man towards a woman, and includes behaviour targeted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman”.

Examples of such incidents may include unwanted or uninvited sexual advances, physical or verbal assault, unwanted or uninvited physical or verbal contact or engagement, and use of mobile phones to send unwanted or uninvited messages or take photographs without consent.

Ho. Lee. Crap.

Basically, among things that might be reasonably suspected of being inappropriate such as taking photos of people and assault, they are criminalizing a guy simply *talking* to a woman. Because a guy might want to do that.

It’s places like this that will lead to the creation of truly effective Marylin Monrobots and the extinction of the human race. Or, perhaps rather more likely, the population crash of the indigenous population and their replacement by colonists from different lands and cultures. Which, frankly, might well be partially the intent. You don’t actually think wolf whistles will be illegal under sharia law, do you?

 Posted by at 5:33 pm

Unity Adam Demo

 art, awesomeness, science fiction, youtube  8 Responses »
Jul 122016
 

This short film is a demonstration of the capability of a real-time videogame rendering engine. For that purpose it seems to succeed pretty well… the animation is largely smooth and flawless (some jerkiness here and there). But in order to do the demo, a fragment of a story is told, and, man, is it a disturbing one:

What *seems* to be happening here is that a prison is releasing a large number of prisoners all at once, to stumble out into an unknown wilderness. But the prisoners are all structurally identical androids. Weird as that is, the reactions of the main character android seem to indicate that there’s a *human* in there, presumably a human mind copied and uploaded into the androids artificial brain.

That… would be one nasty way to punish a criminal (or enemy of the state). Make ’em live forever, or at least a very long time, in a body that is not their own and which is pretty limiting, Yeesh.

 Posted by at 11:21 pm

Space Show now online for downloading

 blather, history, Hmm..., Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, politics, rockets, science, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Jul 122016
 

My interview on the Space Show is now available for downloading as a 26 megabyte MP4 right HERE. This one covers Project Orion, ol’ nuclear bang-bang. The discussion kinda wanders around some.

So, download, give it a listen, point and laugh. I’m listening to it now and recognizing once again that while I have a face for radio, I have  voice for print. At least this time, the audio troubles that plagued my last interview don’t seem to have arisen this time.

 Posted by at 10:28 am

Space Show: here we go…

 blather  5 Responses »
Jul 112016
 

In a bit over 15 minutes. So: will this be the time my phone explodes? My computers crash while looking something up to answer a simple question? My tiny little mind goes into meltdown on the air? Taking all bets!

 Posted by at 2:43 pm

Politics 2016: Japanese edition

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, history, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Jul 102016
 

From the point of view of weirdo bizarre politics, 2016 is the year that keeps on giving. Behold:

The Religious Cult Secretly Running Japan

I’d suggest that “Secretly” is not terribly accurate, since they seem to be pretty open about it. Specifically, Nippon Kaigi, a Shinto group that wants to restore Japan militarily and culturally to what it was prior to getting spanked in WWII, is a group that includes such government types as the current Prime Minister and many in his cabinet. Military adventurism, elimination of women’s rights, expulsion of foreigners, Emperor worship, all that rubbish.

This is *kinda* amusing. First part of the last century the Japanese were able to storm around east Asia because the US had, perhaps unwisely, kinda *forced* the Japanese to modernize in the late 19th century. They were burdened with a medieval culture but graced with advanced technology… while their neighbors were largely still medieval everything. But now… well, if the Japanese try that Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity schtick again, they’ll find that the Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese are a little closer to them technologically.

I wonder, though, what it is about certain ideologies that continue to persist well after they got their asses well and soundly *beat.* Knuckleheads who want to worship the Emperor, or people who think the Nazis were neato-keen, or people who think Communism is the future, or people who think the South will rise again more than 150 years after the profoundly failed War of Southern Aggression… all these schmoes are worshipping at the altar of failure. They are waving loser’s flags. And yet, here we are.

 Posted by at 5:07 pm

Can we get a *real* space station now, please?

 AARRRGH, blather, Hmm..., science, spacecraft  20 Responses »
Jul 102016
 

The mysterious syndrome impairing astronauts’ sight

Short form: zero gravity over a span of weeks or months shifts fluids up into astronauts heads, applying pressure to the back of eyeballs, trashing their vision. One astronaut went from 20/20 to 20/100. It’s not yet clear if this is temporary or permanent, but it’s moderately disastrous for long duration spaceflight such as trips to Mars.

There is, of course, a simple solution: artificial gravity. Centrifugal force will do the job. But the question is, what level of gravity is needed? If you go to 3/8 of a G, Mars gravity, will you be just fine forever, or will it just take longer? Can we get by on 1/6 G, Lunar gravity? 1/10 of  G? 1/20? 1/100?

These are questions that *cannot* be answered on the ISS. We need a real space station, one that either has different rotation rates over a span or years, or multiple levels with different G-levels. This would obviously be a better setup then pure zero-g fr a “space hotel.” It’s not even remotely certain that all space tourists will be able to well tolerate or even want zero-g non-stop for the duration of their stay; a rotating station, especially one attached to a zero-g module via a rotary bearing airlock, would provide both environments within just a moments travel.

Best solution: develop some good zero-g, vacuum-capable 3D printers that can work with aluminum and steel and titanium, and send to the ISS along with a modified woodchipper. Feed the ISS into the chipper then the printer a module at a time, turning it into a properly designed station, one with inflatable modules and artificial gravity.

 Posted by at 11:28 am
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