Seemingly as a followup to the post I made about a week ago about the “Hawking Radiation Calculator,” here’s a video that describes black hole dimensions from “the mass of schmoes like *you*” to “the mass of 40 billion suns.”
Jun 162017
Jun 162017
Dating from about 1963-63, this is a depiction of a high-altitude research aircraft equipped with “composite air-augmented turbo-jets” for launch and rockets for “near-space operations.” The general configuration was used many times over the decade, typically for scramjet powered aircraft. This was painted by Pat Shealy, chief of the Presentations Division, Air For Office of Scientific Research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Jun 162017
… even gambling organizations – basically licenses to print money – don’t want to do business in your state.
Powerball, Mega Millions to drop Illinois due to state’s budget crisis
Many cities and countries have had severe financial troubles and have gone through “austerity” measures. Seems to me that what Illinois needs to do is build a wall around Cook County and declare it an autonomous region, no longer dependent upon Illinois, nor allowed to send representatives to Springfield.
Jun 162017
History in a nutshell:
Jun 152017
Now that some fair imagery of the actual aircraft has been made public, it may be time to revisit the diagram I made for US Launcher Projects #2…
I think I got pretty close based on limited references, but things can always be improved.
Jun 152017
Ummmm…
Fashion label’s new crotchless jeans now selling for $570
Errrr….
I have two immediate questions:
1: Who the hell would spend $570 on those?
2: Who would wear those *at* *all?*
And a followup:
3: What the what?
Is… is this some sorta fetish thing? Is it for womenfolk with bladder control issues who need to dash off to piddle a lot?
Jun 142017
Cultural appropriation: Make it illegal worldwide, Indigenous advocates say
What they are proposing is making it illegal for anyone who isn’t a member of Tribe XYZ to sell *anything* associated with Tribe XYZ. That includes:
international law that would expand intellectual-property regulations to protect things like Indigenous designs, dances, words and traditional medicines
How the hell they’re going to protect *words* is anyones guess, especially given that states like Utah and Illinois are named after Indigenous Injuns. Are we going to have to change the names of states?
One of the advocates for this new governmental over-reach sez the law should:
“obligate states to create effective criminal and civil enforcement procedures to recognize and prevent the non-consensual taking and illegitimate possession, sale and export of traditional cultural expressions.”
“Illegitimate possession” of “cultural expressions.” Yeah. Good luck with *that.*
Now, some of this is actually pretty good. By keeping the dumbass white newagers from such things as “traditional medicines,” which pretty much invariably are useless or worse, people will have to fall back on western medicine… you know, the stuff that actually works. So that’s good. Additionally, by slashing the market for such things, even though the remaining market will be left solely in the hands of people of chosen ethnicities, the overall market will be so reduced that it may just kill the whole thing. “Traditional” medicine *might* get regulated right out of existence.
Additionally: if history has taught us anything about new laws, it is the near-universal appearance of “unintended consequences.” OK, so only a Navajo may sell something called “Navajo,” or that incorporates Navajo symbols or artistic styes. Great. So that means not only will most people simply to have no access to it, making the market for it dry up, government regulators will have a field day determining just who is Navajo enough to sell, say, a Navajo blanket. Imagine roaming government inspectors, traveling the byways of the South West, stopping at random roadside kiosks selling blankets and turquoise jewelry and other “native American” knickknacks, checking to see if the sellers papers are in order. They will doubtless have with them portable DNA testing equipment to see just how Navajo the seller is. “Sorry, but according to this it looks like one of your grandparents was Irish. You are not Navajo enough.” The process by which someone gets licensed to sell their own art will be made monumentally complex, filled with many pages of forms, innumerable lines one must stand in in government offices, wait times and registration fees powerful enough to crush dreams.
The result of this sort of thing will be that the “indigenous” people may have control over “their” culture, but it will be so much bother for everyone else that everyone else will simply put the indigenous cultures out of their minds. The same SJWs pushing this sort of law will be the ones complaining loudest – and listened to least – about “native peoples” being erased and forgotten. Because if I have to pay to remember them… guess what. Memory hole.
One has to wonder just how far they’ll try to go with this. If it’s worded broadly enough, then you’re going to have problems with only Italian people being allowed to sell Italian food. Only Scottish people will be able to make haggis (well, that one might not be much of a concern). Only people of western European descent will be able to engage in science or engineering. No more white Catholic priests… they’ll all have to be “Palestinian.” No more black Communists, only Germans. Even the Russians will have to give that up and go back to being serfs to the Tsar. Will there be an underground railroad to provide the consumers of the world with black market Lucky Charms?
Related:
White Author Warned: Don’t Create Black Character in Your Next Book
Jun 142017
The far left went buggo under Bush, but has gone truly insane under Trump. With calls for violence against “Nazis,” and redefining “Nazi” to mean anyone not on the far Left, it was only a matter of time before people like the fascists in Antifa and similar groups decided to step it up from simply assaulting people in the street to gunning people down. Well, here we are.
Lawmaker Steve Scalise critically injured in GOP baseball shooting; gunman James T. Hodgkinson dies in custody
The shooter in this case was a dedicated Bernie Sanders supporter and vehemently anti-Trumper.
And because in this era of social media Everything Must Be About Me, I found these quotes especially interesting:
I met him on the Bernie trail in Iowa, worked with him in the Quad Cities area.”
Orear described Hodgkinson as a “quiet guy” who was “very mellow, very reserved” when they stayed overnight at a Sanders’s supporter home in Rock Island, Ill., after canvassing for the senator.
Yup. Home town area. Joy.
Remember during the 2008 campaign when Jared Joughner shot and injured a Democratic Representative (and *killed* a republican judge, but never mind him), the Dems and the media went through the roof blaming it on Sarah Palin and her supposed rhetoric? it’ll be interesting to see if they do the same here. In fact, I kinda expect they will: in 2008, they blamed Republicans for violence against a Dem. Now, I expect they’ll *still* blame Republicans (specifically Trump, I’ll bet) for this violence. But even if they don’t blame Republicans specifically, they are already trotting out the “blame the inanimate object” argument. As an example, here’s the Democrat governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, informing the public that ninety-three MILLION Americans are gunned down EVERY DAY:
An interesting note: the BernieBro opened fire with a rifle (I’ve not seen a description, but probably safe to assume it’s an AR-15) and fired *many* rounds… and yet, killed nobody. He was a *terrible* shot. These socialist whackos might think they’re going to start a new civil war but, man, I don’t think it’d turn out well for ’em.
Jun 132017
Somehow the twentieth anniversary of “The Fifth Element” skipped right on by me (I was traveling at the time, so…). It premiered May 9, 1997… and it was, and remains, awesome. It’s dumb as a post, it makes no sense, the physics and biology depicted are clearly those of a different universe with some fundamentally different laws… and it’s still awesome. From the era before everything was CGI, the visuals are truly spectacular. New York City in particular is just astounding. It’s eminently quotable. The characters are damned entertaining. It’s set in the future and everything *isn’t* a dystopian craphole, although NYC is even more crowded. And one of the neatest things about it… the Hero and the Villain not only never meet (though they get withing a few feet of each other), they don’t even know who the other is and wouldn’t recognize ’em if they saw ’em.
So… here’s some stuff.
Perhaps the most entertainingly awesome sci-fi personal weapon, the Zorg EF-1:
Jun 132017
In a whole lot of sci-fi – Star Trek, Stargate, just about everything – first contact is always pretty easy. Not only do the aliens look like otherwise normal people with ill-conceived rubber makeup appliances stuck to their foreheads, they also conveniently either speak English or some form of alienese that the Universal Translator immediately grasps a command of. Communications, in other words, is a snap. The aliens dress funny, have a few weird practices, worship some ridiculous gods, but otherwise, they are understandable.
Of course in reality if we ever come across intelligent aliens, they will almost certainly be *alien.* Billions of years of wholly unrelated and unconnected biological evolution, ethics and beliefs and customs created under wholly alien circumstance. No reason to even assume that our sense of time will even be within orders of magnitude of each other… it might take them a week to say a single word, or they might be just a blur to us.
The main thing about “alien” is that it is essentially inconceivable and un-understandable. There have been relatively few truly alien aliens in sci-fi, and for some good reasons… they’re hard to create, and harder to depict. But if you want to get just a hint of the sense of just how alien an alien culture may well be, take a look at this. This video keeps popping up as “recommended” by YouTube since I watched that Japanese “Name Seal” vid. It’s a collection of Japanese… stuff. I honestly can’t make heads or tails of most of it. It’s as if it’s from a wholly alien culture,and here we’re dealing with a civilization that has been in contact with the West for half a millennium, really close contact for 160+ years, the people are fully human with barely detectable genetic differences from western Europeans (rather than entirely different genetics based on XNA)and with a language that is separated from English by probably no more than 5,000 or so years. And yet… WTF am I looking at?
Now imagine that *this* video was the first message the aliens were to pick up from Earth. WTF would *they* make of it???