NASA and the search for technosignatures

 awesomeness, Crazy, Hmm..., news, science, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 282018
 

This is interesting on its own:

NASA and the Search for Technosignatures: A Report from the NASA Technosignatures Workshop

Link to PDF file HERE.

In short: technosignatures are “stuff produced by technology.” More specifically, *alien* technology. So… starships, space probes, debris, laser beams, radio signals, Michael Jackson. This workshop is about the *search* for such things, evidence that aliens are out there, or were near here. They could be detected as close as sitting on the surface of the Earth, to detected lightyears away through optical or radio telescopes. It’s a reasonable task for NASA to look for this sort of thing, and to make plans on how to analyze them if they are found. The report summarizes a number of detection strategies, and provides a lot of interesting information about just what some of the products of advanced civilizations might looks like – everything from altered climates to Dyson spheres – from lightyears off.

It’s all perfectly reasonable.

But then…

Alien search BOMBSHELL: NASA reveals Earth may be home to extraterrestrial ‘artefacts’

Ugh.

 

 Posted by at 11:17 am

This is what happens when pop culture meets obsessive racism

 dumbassery, Forward!, Meh., politics, science fiction, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 272018
 

As I mentioned a few days ago, I found the Nextflix movie “Bird Box” to be quite entertaining. In short, it’s a horror/post-apocalyptic story set in a world suddenly being overrun by entities that, if you see them, you go nutty as a chipmunk and promptly off yourself.There is really no allegory to be had here, as “monsters that make you kill yourself if you look at them” is an idea that doesn’t really have any real-world basis.

But that won’t stop some people from jamming their crackpot worldview and political ideologies into an analysis of the flick. Gentlemen, behold:

Netflix’s Bird Box Is Really About How White People Don’t Want to See Racism

One might assume that this is a bit of satire. But then, this is The Root, a color reversed and politically correct version of Stormfront, where both the writers and the commenters actually seem to buy into the BS the site is built on.

 Posted by at 10:27 pm

SPS Launchers: A Collection

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., models, projects, rockets, US Launch Vehicle Projects  No Responses »
Dec 272018
 

Continuing to rough out some Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle CAD models. Instead of lumping them all together I’m breaking them into “genres,” partially because my computer is starting to balk at the the size of the full collection. Below is the “Solar Power Satellite Launchers” collection. Included, from left to right, Rockwell Star Raker, Boeing TSTO, Boeing “Big Onion” SSTO, Saturn V, NASA Personnel Launch System ( a Shuttle derived design), Boeing Space Freighter, NASA-JSC HLLV. There are a few more designs that could probably be added to this collection. Suggestions?

As previously indicated, there is a good chance of a 1/288 scale model of some of the designs such as the Saturn V and the Star Raker. But *all* of them? Probably not in that scale. What seems reasonable is something akin to the old Monogram “missile collection” kits, with all of the HLLVs in something like 1/500 or 1/700 scale. A similar collection of Nova/Post-Saturn boosters is possible.

The Space Freighter would be substantially impressive in 1/288… but really rather enormous.

 Posted by at 5:04 pm

Now is probably a good time to start divesting in California

 AARRRGH, Forward!, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 272018
 

Proposition 13 is no longer off-limits in California

Prop 13 was a 1978 measure that capped property taxes.But as the Democrats gain increasing power across the state, they are looking greedily at more and more sources of potential income. Pesky laws that have stood in their way could not fall due to their numerical dominance. Prop 13 made it so that property taxes for businesses are reassess only when the business changes ownership, meaning that some businesses are still paying taxes based on their 1978 assessment. This means that getting rid of Prop 13 will massively raise property taxes for businesses in California.

People often forget that California was once a Republican stronghold. Ronald Reagan was governor there until 1975, just three years before Prop 13. But Reagan was arguably partially responsible for the demographic shift in his own state; when he signed an amnesty for three million illegal aliens in 1986, that opened the door for millions more illegals who came in under the not-unsupportable belief that once they were in, they were safe. Now there are more than two million illegals just in California, and their millions of non-illegal descendants who vote overwhelmingly Democrat.

And now that they have cleaned California of the scourge of politicians who even pretend to have conservative economic ideals, they can scrape up every last little bit of property taxes from those eeeevvviiiiillll businesses.

SpaceX: time to bail. Pack up yer stuff and move to a friendlier state. Wyoming. Montana. Utah.

 Posted by at 9:51 am

Northrop artificial-g space station art

 art, history, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Dec 262018
 

A piece of concept art circa 1960 depicting a Northrop concept for a space station. Not much to say about it as there are no good scale references, nor do I think I have anything else depicting the station. It is, however, not dissimilar from a lot of other space station concepts of the time… replace the four “habitat” cylinders with a single torus, and this would be pretty much every space station from the Colliers series until the Manned Orbital Space Station concept from the early 60’s.

 Posted by at 11:04 pm

They really don’t understand

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 262018
 

Actor Chris Pratt seems like a stand-up fella. He and I do not share religious views… but more importantly he does not share religious views with much of Hollywood. Nor does he share cultural views with much of Hollywood. Hollywood projects the image of being a pack of weirdos who think that food literally magically appears in a Whole Foods, that there is not real effort involved in the creation of the things that people eat to stay alive. Chris Pratt, on the other hand, owns a functioning farm where he not only raises livestock, he slaughters and eats them as well, and seems to take joy in all of it. And to that I say… good on ya, ya religious goofball.

But there appears to be a “coastal” worldview that cannot understand farmers, ranchers or anyone who actually raises the food that appears on their tables.

TV Guide’s Hit Piece on Chris Pratt’s ‘Problematic’ Life as a Farmer Is Everything Wrong With Hollywood

Here’s the biggest surprise in the whole thing: TV Guide is still a thing.

 Posted by at 7:40 pm

Documentary recommendation

 art, blather, Crazy, history  No Responses »
Dec 262018
 

So I blandly turned on Netflix in order to find something innocuous to use as background noise while I did some work. Looking at the “newly added” category, I saw a documentary titled: “Struggle: the Life and Lost Art of Szulkalski.” What the hell, I turned it on… and didn’t get much work done. It was a surprisingly engrossing documentary about an artist I’d never heard of, a Polish-American painter and sculptor active from the 1920’s into the 1980’s. His art style is odd, very definitely pre-War (a lot of would have really fit in well in Fritz Langs “Metropolis”), not for everyone… and he was most assuredly bugnuts. Before WWII he was an anti-Semitic Polish nationalist, but the war seemed to cure him of his antisemitism and his strident nationalism; by the 80’s he was exploring a whacko pseudoscientific notion of his own that all of mankind descended from a pre-Deluge civilization centered on Easter Island, and that humanity is threatened by the offspring of Yetis or some such thing. But with the whackadoodlism came a *substantial* artistic talent. Like his art or not, there’s no denying he was damn good at it.

So if you have Netflix and an hour and three quarters to spare, you might find this of interest.

 Posted by at 3:28 am

Nothing says “Christmas” like a skyscraper structural collapse simulation

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., science, youtube  No Responses »
Dec 252018
 

This is an interesting video illustrating how a standard steel construction building might collapse if half of the ground floor gets taken out. Not so long ago this would have been the province of supercomputers. Exactly how accurate this is, I don’t know.

Now, if you think this is an odd choice of video for the day… you should see the dismally depressing video I was considering linking to. But “ha ha this is sad,” only works just so well for just so long. So a building collapse is a nice cheery compromise.

 

 Posted by at 10:14 pm

Prof Tosspot vs. the Star Wars Holiday Special

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, history, humor, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 252018
 

I don’t imagine there are too many people who read this blog who haven’t seen the Star Wars Holiday Special. If not on TV when it aired forty years ago, at least on a terrible third-generation VHS copy or on YouTube. But whether you’ve seen it or not, the good Professor gives an excellent and hilariously NSFW rundown of the thing. Stay tuned for the Christmas carol at the end!

 Posted by at 2:24 am
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