Australia stole part of Canada

 Hmm..., news, science  1 Response »
Jan 232018
 

Just can’t trust them Aussies…

1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia

Researchers from Curtin University in Australia examined rocks from the Georgetown region of northern Queensland. The rocks — sandstone sedimentary rocks that formed in a shallow sea — had signatures that were unknown in Australia but strongly resembled rocks that can be seen in present-day Canada.

The researchers, who described their findings online Jan. 17 in the journal Geology, concluded that the Georgetown area broke away from North America 1.7 billion years ago. Then, 100 million years later, this landmass collided with what is now northern Australia, at the Mount Isa region.

A simple matter of plate tectonics over a really, really long time. Rather longer than 6,000 BC, I should think…

This joining of bits of Canada and Australia predates even the supercontinent of Pangea. The Earth has seen numerous supercontinents since the oceans began; they come together, then split, the individual continents drifting around, sometimes to the other side of the world and rejoin. Right now the Atlantic ocean is slowly spreading, shoving Europe and Africa away from the Americas. In the far future the continents will rejoin into yet another supercontinent. Conditions within that continents will most likely *suck;* the coasts will get rainfall, but the interior will be a blasted, dry desert. Not a drop of rain for tens of thousands of years, for hundreds of millions of years. Bleah. Supercontinents stink.

 Posted by at 12:13 am

TON 618

 awesomeness, science  14 Responses »
Jan 222018
 

Put this on your “places to visit” list:

TON 618

This is a quasar 10.4 *billion* lightyears away. It is a 66 *billion* solar mass black hole surrounded by an accretion disk so massive that the total luminous output is 140 *trillion* times that of the sun. It sits at the heart of a galaxy, unsurprisingly, but the galaxy cannot be seen because the accretion disk surrounding the black hole simply outshines the entire rest of the galaxy. It currently tops the list of most massive black holes known.

 

 Posted by at 6:29 pm

Re-Scaling Orville

 art, blather, Hmm..., models, science fiction, spacecraft  1 Response »
Jan 222018
 

Some while back I tried to rationalize the size of the Orville based on a cutaway shown on bridge displays. I did a serviceable job, IMO, given the data at hand… and with the caveat that going in I *knew* the diagram as shown to be wrong. Following that I was waiting for the “World of Orville” book, hoping it would come right out and say how big the ship was. When i heard that it gave no such dimensions, I was disappointed. This morning, however, I found out that the book has a scaled diagram of the bridge. And since the bridge is visible from the outside of the ship, I re-scaled the ship. Here’s what I used:

My assumption here is that the ellipse of the bridge dome is essentially the same dimensions as the ellipse of the bridge “footprint” shown in the diagram. The bridge ellipse is about 48.4 feet long, per the diagram. The bridge ellipse on my model is 6.72 mm long. The ship model as a whole is 240.1 mm long. So if 6.72 mm = 48.4 feet, then 240.1 mm = 1729 feet, or 527 meters. This is substantially bigger than the 337 meters I’d previously estimated, but it does mesh a whole lot better with what’s seen on screen.

So:
1/350 scale: 59.3 inches
1/1000: 20.75 inches
1/1400: 14.8 inches
1/2500: 8.3 inches

Clearly, the proper scale for this model is 1/350. But that might wind up being a bit on the spendy size. So… who agrees with my assessment? Who disagrees? What scale y’all want?

 Posted by at 1:34 pm

War With The Deep Ones 1: Honolulu

 art, blather, Crazy, critters, My Fiction, science fiction, War With The Deep Ones  26 Responses »
Jan 222018
 

Here is the first tale from Volume One of War With The Deep Ones, “Honolulu.” It’s provided complete in both PDF and EPUB (Kindle) formats. I would be interested in any and all constructive comments, criticisms, suggestions. Feel free to spread this far and wide… any relevant people, forums, discussion groups, whatever, that you think might like this, feel free. And if you do, let me know where.

Also interested in whether you prefer the PDF or the EPUB version.

The terribly short background for this story: it’s more than a century after the events of H.P. Lovecrafts “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The Deep Ones – a race of amphibious humanoids (think: kinda like the Creature From The Black Lagoon, except smarter and more froggy) have finally decided that they’re done with mankind. There are a lot of them. And the vast majority of mankind is wholly in the dark. They are hard to kill, they have commitment to cause and they have shall we say patrons and allies that are just plain bad new for Mankind. On our side, we have… us. And some associates at Brass Valley…

Some of the stories will have recurring characters. Most will be one-and-done. This is about an event of global scale, after all… there would be billions of stories to tell here. I’m not going to try that hard, though.

War With The Deep Ones 1 Honolulu epub format

 

War With The Deep Ones 1 Honolulu pdf format

Let me know what you think. I’ll release the other stories here and probably at Amazon from time to time, for probably something like a buck or two a pop. If you are a Big Time Publisher and you read this and want to throw a gigantic advance at me and/or movie rights… let’s talk.

If you read this and enjoyed it, please consider putting a little something in the tip jar.

 


Fiction TipJar


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 Posted by at 2:09 am

California. Enough said.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Jan 212018
 

California Democrats want businesses to give half their tax-cut savings to state

A proposed Assembly Constitutional Amendment by Assemblymen Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, and Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, would create a tax surcharge on California companies making more than $1 million so that half of their federal tax cut would instead go to programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families.

Why *DAHELL* would a business want to set up shop in California?

 

 Posted by at 11:13 pm

“War With The Deep Ones”

 blather, books, My Fiction, science fiction, War With The Deep Ones  17 Responses »
Jan 202018
 

On and off I continue to tap away on my “War With The Deep Ones” project. It started off blisteringly fast, but unsurprisingly slowed down; still, I’ve written around 350 pages for the first book.

I originally described “WWTDO” here half a year ago. But the short form is that it is a sequel to H.P. Lovecrafts’ “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” along with several other of his tales. As you may recall from “Shadow,” at the end of the story we find out that around 1930 the Feds raided the Massachusetts city of Innsmouth and took hundreds of “people” captive, hiding them away in concentration camps. The reason for this is that these people are hybrids of humans and “Deep Ones,” aquatic non-human entities who are somewhat interested in wiping out mankind. “WWTDO” takes place a bit more than a century later, when the Deep Ones finally get it together and make their move on mankind.

What I have so far are around 15 separate short stories all dealing with different aspects of the war. My plan at this time actually involves four books… “WWTDO 1” which covers the first few days of the war, “WWTDO 2” covers the first few weeks to months, “WWTDO 3” finishes out the war. The fourth book would be more of a historical novel covering the history of the Office of Insight, the secret government organization formed after the raid on Innsmouth to deal not only with the Deep Ones but also with the other Lovecraftian threats that are found.

I think what I’ll do with this is release one or two of the stories (probably Honolulu) here, posted in PDF & EPUB format, and then release the others either individually or as one solid book, self published on Amazon in digital format (like a number of US Bomber Projects I’ve got available there). Since I have no cover art I think I’ll dispense with printed versions, unless there is some deep abiding desire.

As seen from the list below, a few of the yarns kinda stalled out during the writing process.

 

 Posted by at 10:48 pm
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