Looks like 2016 continues trying to kill celebrities: Carrie Fisher had a heart attack on a flight from the UK to LA. At this point there’s no word on her condition other than she’s in intensive care.
Dec 232016
Dec 232016
And that job is “history.” You know, to actually know what happened or, failing that, to make some minimal effort to look it up. Seems simple enough…
So there I was, minding my own business, watching the latest thrill-packed episode of “Hunting Hitler.” For those who have somehow missed out, this is the latest iteration of the “Ghost Hunter” and “Bigfoot Hunter” phenomenon… overpaid idjits use hyperbole and fairy tales to go run around in the woods and poke around in some abandoned properties looking for mythical entities. in this case, Our Heroes are stomping around Argentina attempting to prove that Hitler survived WWII and wound up there. The most recent episode was focused on the bullcrap notion that the Nazis actually got an atomic bomb up and running and set it off in Thuringia during the war, and then attempted to set up another A-bomb program post-war in Argentina to further the aims of the Fourth Reich.
Yeah, I know. “I’m not saying it’s Nazis… but it’s Nazis.”
Shows like this are really only good for two things: background noise while you’re working on something, and hate-watching. Now, I don;t know a whole lot about Argentina, so I don’t throw things at the TV when they undoubtedly make howleriffic errors about that country and it’s history. But there are a few things I *do* have some knowledge of. Some things I recognize right off the bat. And they trotted one of these things out and repeated a decades-old lie about it.
Early in the episode, someone who I guess is supposed to be one of their researchers pulls out a page from a German document, a piece of evidence meant to show that the Nazis were planning on nuking Manhattan. This page right here:
I bet there are more than a few reading along who saw that and went, “Hey, I recognize that.” And of course y’all should… I’ve brought it up before. It’s from Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report on his global-range rocket bomber. And, yes, it shows the bombardment of New York City. But *not* with atomic weapons. It’s simply a bell curve… a statistical representation of the distribution of bomb damage if a *lot* of bombs were dropped on a target and the bombs had the usual sort of circular error probability. There’s not a single damn word in Sangers report about nuking New York, very likely because Sanger probably didn’t know a single thing about atom bombs. If there was one thing the Nazi system was good at, it was compartmentalizing programs. If there was another thing the Nazis were good at, it was screwing up atomic physics, what with their hatred of Jews and their reliance upon Werner Heisenberg who either wholly misunderstood what is needed to make an A-bomb or who spent his time on the German A-bomb program busy designing faulty exhaust ports in it.
Way back in 2009 I posted about this map and how it has been misrepresented by charlatans and lazy authors for years. The abuse continues, it seems.
Dec 222016
Now this is just plain spiffy (see what I did there? Where else can you get this quality of high-larious wit?), an electric remote control airliner meant to be flown indoors. I don;t know what the wings are made of, but they are clearly low mass… and the fuselage is inflatable, and probably filled with helium.
Related:
Dec 222016
It’s an old, old complaint that MTV is no longer what it was. Of course, in the Old Days – you know, back when I was a kid and Things Were Awesome – MTV was all about the music videos… and in the years since it has stopped being about music videos. it became about reality shows and game shows and… well, I don;t really know, since I don’t watch MTV anymore.
Like most media outlets, MTV has blursted forth onto Teh Internets with their own little videos and such. And here is where MTV seems to have really gone off the rails. They seem to have become the “white people suck” network. I don’t know if this is because MTV’s leadership actually believes that white people need to be taken down a peg or three, or if they’ve simply made the business decision to suck up to those sweet, sweet social justice warrior dollars, but the end result is the same. They keep cranking out videos that smugly proclaim that anyone who doesn’t agree with this or that SJW position is an Evil Alt-Right White Supremacist.
They recently vomited forth one of their little efforts that was *so* insipidly racist that MTV actually yanked it off YouTube after it received virtually universal negative response. Fortunately, a number of people downloaded the video before MTV deleted it, and then they made mocking reaction videos about it. They make for decent entertainment… something that MTV seems to have forgotten how to accomplish.
Note that the full array of Anglo-Saxon colorful metaphors is on display in these videos. So, NSFW, I guess.
Dec 222016
Dec 212016
The current suspect in the Berlin truck-ramming terrorist attack is a Tunisian asylum seeker. He had been on the authorities anti-terrorism radar, and his request for asylum had been rejected. What kept the Germans from deporting him back to Tunisia? He didn’t have a valid Tunisian passport. Let me put it another way: he got to stay in Germany – he got to evade the legal repercussions of his actions – because he *didn’t* have his papers in order.
Huh.
Makes me wonder: if a German gets likkered up and heads out onto the Autobahn and causes a wreck that kills a bunch of people… does he get to go free if he doesn’t have a valid drivers license?
Dec 212016
A recently sold item on EBay was this piece of artwork depicting a Boeing concept for an airliner powered by two propfans. These engines, popular items of study in the late 70s and into the 80s, were somewhere between turbofans and turboprops, with contra-rotating unducted fans using blades of complex design and contours. The advantage was, of course, fuel efficiency; the shape of the blades meant that they could spin with tip speeds closer to the speed of sound compared to turboprop blades, and could push the plane faster than normally practical for a turboprop.
Given the NASA logo on the tail, this piece of art undoubtedly depicts a proposal for an unducted fan test vehicle. The gray areas on the wing upper surfaces may indicate laminar flow control via suction, as with the Northrop X-21; this would all conspire to make this a very fuel efficient, if also very complex, jetliner.
Dec 212016
I don’t know what the story is on the driver and passenger in this vehicle, but I can understand why they decided that backing the frak up was a good idea. This is the fireworks market in Mexico that went FOOOM yesterday, with, last I heard, more than 30 dead.
I’ve never been anywhere near an inadvertent pyrotechnic event on this scale. I’ve been not quite this close to *advertent* pyrotechnic events of greater scale than this… Shuttle boosters being tested, old propellant and explosives being burned off, that sort of thing. Close to 20 years ago when I lived near Denver I happened across a truck on fire on the road up to Boulder… a small pickup truck with a crappy fiberglass camper. Normally such things make a lot of smoke and some fair flames, but this one was a rampaging inferno. It had some sort of high energy accelerants toasting it along. I don’t know what, exactly… but there was one of those fly-by-night fireworks revival tents just a few hundred yards down the road behind the truck. And *that* fire was sufficiently energetic that it was like the laws of physics had taken physical form and set up a “do not approach” sign. Interesting, as I was inching my way past it (note: I wasn’t first on the scene, but probably half-dozenth, so it would have been counterproductive to stop), the first official “first responder” showed up: a fireman tear-assing down the road in a fire-engine-red Porsche with the fire department logo on the doors and emergency lights permanently bolted to the roof.
Dec 202016
11,000 penguins vs 4,000 Santas. Who will win?
Dec 202016
No great surprise I’m a fan of Star Trek. But there are some things about the world that has been built in Trek that are a bit disconcerting. This should not be a surprise given the sheer volume of Trek that has been put on screen, and how little control there has been over the “canon;” one movie or show will merrily steamroll the events or history put forward in another, so tryign to come up with a consistent narrative is pretty much impossible. Heck… watch the Original Series. What was Spock? For pretty much the first season he was a Vulcanian. Then he became a Vulcan. The ship ran on lithium crystals. Then it ran on dilithium crystals. It was an Earth vessel run by the United Earth Space Probe Agency, until suddenly it was a Federation vessel run by Starfleet.
Tack on another 50 years worth of writers cobbling together their own ideas and it’s no wonder than things don’t necessarily mesh. But one thing that has remained consistent: the only people you really get to know are Starfleet officers. So the world is seen from their perspective. This will of course color things. A long-running series based around the day to day doings at Vandenberg Air Force Base might lead people to think that the United States is all about launching satellites and missiles and little else.
Still and all, the glimpses of the world outside the various Starfleet vessels does often show a world that is a bit… disturbing. This video covers some of that. Note: the “pecan” joke right near the beginning made me laugh *far* out of proportion to jsut how funny I suppose the joke really is.
One thing the video seems to completely miss: the Maquis. Coupled with a whole lot of Deep Space Nine, the Maquis showed that a lot of humans, Starfleet and civilian, just didn’t like the Federation and wanted to be rid of it… and that the Federation didn’t want to let them go.
My own “Zaneverse” stories have a problem that “Star Trek” has: both are set in post-scarcity economies. Both feature essentially unlimited free energy, both feature machines that can replicate/fabricate anything you like from clothes to firearms to food at the press of a button. While these would be great to have, and would, at least theoretically, dispense with a lot of the motives for war and crime, they might also tend to make the world of storytelling pretty dull since they do away with many motives for conflict. Star Trek seems to deal with the problem by strictly rationing the technology. The only Federation citizens you ever see traveling are Starfleet members of Federation officials/employees; you get the impression that the rest of the Federation is populated by what are essentially serfs, but serfs believing they’re in paradise. That is one way to keep the peace, I suppose.