There’s some really interesting stuff here. It’s not just “Kids these day stink. Back in *MY* day…” Instead, there are explanations about *how* music has changed… and why.
Mar 092018
Mar 092018
Courtesy the leftie “Guardian…”
No hugging: are we living through a crisis of touch?
The fashionable freakouts over Bad Touching has led to an understandable withdrawal away from touching other human beings. Experts seem to agree that this is not only damaging to society and the psyches of adults, but it also seems to be causing *physical* damage to children.
In the UK, doctors were warned last month to avoid comforting patients with hugs lest they provoke legal action, and a government report found that foster carers were frightened to hug children in their care for the same reason. In the US the girl scouts caused a furore last December when it admonished parents for telling their daughters to hug relatives because “she doesn’t owe anyone a hug”. Teachers hesitate to touch pupils. And in the UK, in a loneliness epidemic, half a million older people go at least five days a week without seeing or touching a soul.
I hear tell that physical contact is common among humans, or at least it is so in societies that haven’t been frightened into insularity by the threat of legal action if you touch someone innocently but they don’t like it. A need for physical touch is biologically wired into the DNA not just of humans but other mammals; this was adequately and rather cruelly shown through experiments a few generations ago where baby Rhesus monkeys were taken from their mothers and given two choices: a metal wire “mother” that provided milk, and a soft cloth “mother” that did not.
Because the results of those experiments were a bit disturbing, click to see the rest of the post and associated photos.
Mar 092018
Advanced “space guns,” typically lasers, railguns, coilguns, neutral particle beams and the like, have a problem: power. Nuclear reactors and solar panels can provide power for years at a time, but generally their steady-state power output is only a tiny fraction of the instantaneous power needed when the gun goes off. So to run a weapon that needs many gigawatts for a fraction of a second with a powerplant that produces kilowatts, you need an energy storage system that can convert that energy into power on a moments notice. Things like batteries are great in principle, but their weight is vast and their ability to release power at the high levels needed is generally poor.
Often this has resulted in space weapons that use chemical reactions to provide the power needed. This has meant that the total number of shots that can be fired is strictly limited.
In the 1980’s during the SDI heyday, Westinghouse looked at an alternate approach: rotating hoops. Giant wheels made of advanced composite materials would be spun up over time by a low-power system such as a nuclear reactor, and when needed these flywheels would be electromagnetically braked to generate vast amounts of power as the wheels ground to a halt. The system could be “reloaded” by slowly spinning the wheels up again… assuming the system hadn’t torn itself part.
The weapon shown below is probably largely notional, no masses or dimensions were given. But based on a smaller terrestrial unit (with ten hoops, each 14.5 meters diameter, massing 140,000 kg each, spinning at 1800 RPM to deliver a total of 1 gigawatt for 10 minutes to power anti-missile lasers and such), this can be assumed to be a fairly *vast* construction, far heavier than anything mankind has so far launched into orbit. Obviously such a thing would be impossible to launch as a unit; it would be assembled in space using spools of fibers wound in place. Presumably the weapon itself would be at least somewhat aimable independent of the flywheels… slewing *them* about to aim at a moving target would seem to be an exercise in futility.
This came from the paper “Rotating Hoop, Pulsed-Energy Converter” contained in “Transactions of the Fifth Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems.” A PDF of that can be downloaded if you go HERE and click the “PDF” button.
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Mar 082018
Sydney teen rugby player who swallowed slug on a dare left paralysed
Slug had a roundworm, which made it’s way to the kids brain and started gnawing on it. He fell into a 420 day coma an came out of it a quadriplegic.
Whoopsie.
I always knew that escargot was some evil scheme…
Mar 062018
Trump is going on about wanting to put a 25% tariff on foreign steel. This can be immediately seen to be a bad, and potentially economically tragic, idea, since everyone else in the world will naturally respond with tariffs of their own, which the increased cost of foreign steel will drive up the costs of domestically produced products, while exports will decline.
It’s therefore probably a good idea to understand just why the US steel industry might need bolstering. After all, within living memory the US steel industry was the envy of the world. Important figures in Axis powers knew that tangling with the US was not a good idea due to our industrial capability. After WWII, if it was made of steel, it was probably made of *American* steel. So what the frell happened?
How the U.S. Squandered Its Steel Superiority
Short form: prior to WWII, the US competed with Europe and Japan to crank out the worlds steel. After WWII… not so much. The steel manufacturing capabilities of Europe and Japan had been reduced to smoking rubble, while US facilities were still roaring along. So the US kept on using what we had. This of course makes sense… replacing functional facilities with other facilities when you have no competition and your current facilities work just fine… that;s silly.
But thre was a problem: the US facilities were based on old, and soon to be obsolete, technologies and techniques. There were cheaper ways to make better steel. So when the Europeans started rebuilding their own steel manufacturing infrastructure, they wisely started not with the old ideas, but the new ones. Their new plants were better than the American ones, right out of the gate.
Had the US steel manufacturers upgraded, they could have kept up being economically competitive. But they didn’t. They kept using the same old facilities, right up until the Europeans stole the market away from them. Then the US steel manufacturers started screaming for protectionism from the government. Rather than evolving, they demanded protection from the natural environment.
This is not a unique occurrence. World War II trashed pretty much *every* bit of infrastructure in Europe, and so post-war they got to start from scratch. And as a result they got to change things up, often resulting in better systems. The same sort of thing happens from time to time with biology… Europe was a cultural wasteland, a hidebound mess of serfs and Church and aristocracy until the Black Death came along and pushed over all the walls and people rebuilt into a better world.
And it cane be seen today, within the US: look to space launch. SpaceX started from scratch, about half a decade ago, working on the BFR heavy lifter. It may well fly in just a few years, for perhaps a few billion in total development cost. At the same time, NASA’s SLS started a decade and a half ago and has spent enough already to run a good sized war, and with luck it’ll fly at about the same time as BFR, at a far higher per-flight cost, using old, Old, OLD technologies (the safe and arms used on the SLS boosters are likely the same used on the Shuttle boosters, and those were the same as those used on the Minuteman I ICBMS from the early 1960’s). BFR looks to be better in every respect because BFR is the result of competitive thinking; SLS is the result of Intelligent Design.
So what’s the best way for the FedGuv to help the American steel industry? I can think of a few ideas:
1: Get the Europeans to blow themselves up again. Exactly how to do that, I leave as an exercise for the student.
2: Start a few government programs to build a lot of stuff that requires a lot of steel. Interstate infrastructure – especially bridges – would seem a good choice… it needs doing *and* it’s actually within the Constitutional purview of the FedGuv. Also: a few hundred Ohio-class-replacement boomer subs, a few dozen new supercarriers, a few hundred small, fast carriers, a few thousand 4,000 to 10,000 ton Orion spacecraft, But her’s the thing: put a provision in there that the only steel to be used is American steel produced by top of the line steel production facilities (say, they have to use XYZ production method, or something demonstratably better). You want part of that ten trillion dollar, thirty year program? Then build a new foundry. You’ll not only make bank off Uncle Sam, but when your done you’ll have a competitive production capability.
Mar 062018
Lab grown meat is nothing new; there have been edible “test tube” bits of meat for years. But mostly those have been terrible tasting (or terribly bland) and terribly expensive. This is of course not surprising to anyone who knows anything about how challenging new technologies and products are developed… the first one out are almost always extremely expensive. But it’s starting to look like the technology is finding its place:
Lab-grown burgers and chicken nuggets ‘could be on sale by the end of this year’
On one hand, if they can truly pull this off, there will be all kinds of advantages to this sort of thing. Tasty, nutritious and safe artificial meat will allow for:
1: Meat could be “grown” anywhere, including within major metropolitan areas. This would eliminate many of the issues of transport. If the meat can be grown from recycled sewage, even better. Poop-to-plate for the foodies of tomorrow!
2: The need to fish the oceans empty will fade as tuna and whatnot could be created artificially.
3: The scourge of cows can finally be dealt with. Without the need to grow them for food or for leather (since it seems that a perfectly cromulent leather can be grown from fungus), they won’t need to be kept on farms anymore, and they can be allowed to go extinct. Then sheep and pigs and turkeys and chickens can soon follow them onto the endangered species list. Soon, these boring animals will be interesting again as the only place to see them will be in zoos.
4: Without the need for grazing lands. ranches, feed lots and the like can be returned to a state of nature, grasslands or forests or just plain desert.
Of course, all these advantages will be downsides for many people. If your livelihood depends on food critters, directly or indirectly, you might be kinda up Hillary Creek. Ranchers, slaughter house workers, truck drivers, farmers growing feed… these will all be hit hard. Fortunately, it seems likely that the rise of synthetic meat will be relatively slow, taking at least a generation to truly come to prominence. Even if burgers and nuggets become dirt cheap and nutritionally better, people are still going to want their steaks and *actual* Thanksgiving turkduckens. And if the technology becomes very quickly standardized and industrially produced, there’s one group we can count on to put the brakes on full adoption of the technology: screeching SJW harpies. The same people who freaked the hell out about GMOs and “pink slime,” all perfectly good and safe foodstuffs, can be counted on to absolutely loose their beady little minds over lab grown food.
But if the tech works, I can foresee a few interesting possibilities:
1: A new “microbrew” industry. If the equipment can be reduced in size and cost so that a reasonably well funded enthusiast can do this at home, you’ll see people working on their own “specialty blends” of synth-meat. Hoo boy, just imagine the regulatory environment that’ll grow up around *that.*
2: One hell of a philosophical argument when someone inevitably starts growing *human* meat. Is it cannibalism? Will it be legal to consume? If it turns out to be tasty and safe, will a consumer of such be seen as a freak?
3: Dachsund weenies. Black Lab burgers. Beagle nuggets. Poodle salami.
4: Will Jews and Muslims be allowed to consume synthetic bacon?
Mar 062018
Given my own religious views, or lack thereof, it may surprise some that I have watched a number of “Christian” movies. A very large percentage of modern Christian flicks are, in a word, UNFRIGGENWATCHABLE, and thus when I say “I watched that movie,” what I actually mean is “I watched ten minutes of the movie then hit fast forward a whole lot.” Holy Crap are they bad. The video below, made by a Christian feller who wants *good* Christian movies, explains what the problem is: these movies are not made by movie makers. Companies like “Pure Flix,”who have inflicted such execrable cinematic war crimes as the “God’s Not Dead” series onto the public are, first and foremost, *preachers.* They are message first, movie making a distant second.
This is not to say that *all* religious movies are like this. Back in the day, Hollywood used to crank ’em out on a regular basis… the Fifties was loaded with Swords and Sandals epics like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments that, regardless of what you thought of the supernatural elements on display, you can’t argue that they were anything but top-notch quality film making. More recently there was Mel Gibsons “Passion of the Christ,” a really rather remarkable achievement. And then… there are the “Left Behind” movies. There’s anything with Kirk Cameron.
Most of these religious flicks are by Hollywood standards “low budget.” But we’ve seen amazing stuff on YouTube shot on a shoestring. A low budget movie – and here the budget is still likely measured at a million dollars or more – need not *look* low budget, yet somehow these Christian propaganda flicks manage to pull it off.
Additionally, from an outsiders perspective these movies look even worse than they do on the pure artistic level. These movies generally have non-believing characters, or characters of non-Christian faiths, and they are generally shown to be mustache-twirling one-dimensional villains. They are the sort of people that actual non-Christians look at and recognize to be an insult directed squarely at them. What, then, is the purpose of the movie? It sure as Hell isn’t going to do much to win converts if it insults those who are to be converted, while at the same time making the Proper Believer look like a bunch of smug jackasses. Plus, a *lot* of these movies feature interminable scenes of actual preaching. Yeesh, if you want to drive away a potential convert, bore him to death with a church scene. And then there are the “arguments,” where the Believer puts forward something patently ridiculous and easily refuted by a real-world skeptic, but the movie Nonbeliever is of course utterly flummoxed by in a way that real-world nonbelievers find laughable. Some of these religious flicks are so bad at the task of conversion that one might be tempted to wonder if they are, in fact, skillful efforts to *prevent* conversion.
See? There ya go, Christian movie makers. I’ve just given you your next religious blockbuster: an honest, earnest religious person stumbles across the greatest conspiracy of our time…most of the bad religious movie makers and televangelists are in fact secret Satan worshippers using their awful and ridiculous religiosity as a way to tarnish and destroy the faith from within.
Mar 052018
This seems to be an effort by a single professor to influence the educations of her students, but do not be surprised to see it expanded further in an effort to make STEM less… STEM.
Pomona Physics Requires “Decolonization” Project
The course is Physics 101, required by *everyone* intending to go forward in Physics. It was tainted with Leftist nonsense such as “learn and discuss implicit bias, microaggressions and other similar topics.”
I can hope that at least one student turned in a report that extolled the virtues of “colonization.” Because physics is physics across the universe, but the *understanding*of physics is a result of a fairly specific set of events and discoveries made by a limited set of cultures. That people in *other* cultures can understand and utilize physics is only possible because of “colonization.”
No Western Science… no science.
Mar 042018
Yay, turbulence in a small commuter jet (a United Express Bombardier CRJ-200 flying from Charlottesville, VA to Dulles). You know it’s bad when the pilots are about to hurl.
Mar 042018
Audiences love “Death Wish.” Critics hate it. Full disclosure… I’ve seen it and I thought it was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. It’s clearly aimed at something of a niche market, a niche that doesn’t seem to include the sort of gated community hoity-toity types who are convinced that crime is for other people: i.e. critics.
