Notre Dame: now what

 art, blather, history, Hmm..., politics  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

The fire destroyed pretty much everything within the cathedral that was not made of stone, but for now it appears that the stone structure is actually in good shape. So what should France do with the shell? Seems to me there are three main options:

1) Tear it down, build something else. This is a TERRIBLE idea and should be rejected out of hand.

2) Leave it as a ruin. This has of course been done (including a castle with the same name as me, which fell into ruin less than a century ago because the last “Earl” in charge of the joint was a friggen’ moron), but man, it’d be depressing. This idea should be rejected.

3) Rebuild it. This is the obvious choice, and apparently has already been announced.

So, let’s say France chooses to rebuild. No matter how they go about it, it will be a massive project likely taking decades to complete. But how should they go about it?

Clearly (to me) they should rebuild it so that it looks and sounds just like it did. The stained glass windows are likely all gone, but those can be remade; the organ is likely a puddle of solidified molten lead. there are a vast number of wood carvings, wood pews, wood etc. that are gone but which can be remade. But… should everything be made of the same *materials*? Whatever it’s made from should be made to last for centuries. Thought should be given to making it fireproof, or at least fire resistant.

What could the pews and wood carvings be made from that *look* like wood, don’t weigh a whole lot more than wood, are as durable as wood, and burn less than wood? The wooden beams that formed the structure that held up the roof and other stuff… those could probably be made from something like stainless steel with a wood-like (or perhaps even actual wood) outer covering. It would look the same, weigh a little less, support a lot more, burn a whole lot less. The organ and the stained glass windows: I don’t know if those could be meaningfully improved upon. It’s not like stained glass window technology today is centuries more advanced than it was centuries ago. I would imagine that the lead framing melted and the little bits of glass fell to the floor. If those bits did not themselves melt or shatter, it would be great if they could be collected and used in the reconstruction.

It would not surprise me if there are a bunch of high-rez 3D laser scans of all the artistic goodies. It’s entirely possible that a lot of the lost wood art could be remade in relatively short order on CNC mills. Would that be the way to go, though? If a machine could spit out a relief panel that is indistinguishable from one hand carved, but vastly faster and cheaper, should they do that? Or should everything be hand-carved because Of Course It Should? And if so should it be a “worldwide heritage project” with bits carved all over everywhere, or should the French people do it themselves? I would recommend the latter, if at all possible. That would be just the thing to bring the nation together and give them a sense of unity and purpose.

Probably the most important thing for the people of France to keep in mind: 9/11 and the World Trade Center. Take a good hard look at how New York went about rebuilding… and then DON’T DO THAT. An army of bureaucrats with a truckload of regulations, with infighting and corruption and CYA and politicking. Gah.

 Posted by at 8:41 pm

Next: the Series Seven Sports Heart by Jensen

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, science  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

Israeli Researchers Print 3D Heart Using Patient’s Own Cells

The heart took about three hours to print… and is a bit subscale at 2.5 centimeters, said to be the size of a rabbits heart. But it has all the chambers, ventricals and blood vessels. It’s suggested that a full-size heart might take a full day to print. Imagine that… a full day to a replacement heart. A heart that doesn’t have any known flaws, is the right size, doesn’t come with hepatitis and won;t be rejected. The researcher say that it’ll probably make more sense to just print *bits* of a heart as patched for damaged original bits.

This story doesn’t say if the heart came equipped with nerves. I’m a little fuzzy on how the body – and even the mind- controls how hard and fast the heart beat, but clearly current transplanted hearts more or less do the trick, and any nerves there likely don’t link up to the existing nervous system.

And it does raise an interesting idea: how would the body respond if you plugged in auxiliary subscale hearts? The advantages of that evade me at the moment… but then, people poke ink into their skin, pump thickeners into their lips, jam bits of metal through their ears and nose and other parts, and some even chop their junk off, all for no medically necessary reasons. eventually *someone* will pay to have secondary hearts grown and implanted. Maybe swimmers of bicyclists would benefit from thigh-mounted hearts to boost blood flow to the legs, I dunno. Seems almost just as likely that the secondary hearts will actually interfere with blood flow, especially if you go to Thailand to get the work done on a budget.

 Posted by at 4:35 pm

A Year In Space

 Hmm..., news, science, spacecraft  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

We’ve known for a long time that long durations in microgravity does the human body no favors. Scott Kelly’s year in space has helped nail down the effects, but a lot of confusion remains.

What a Year in Space Did to Scott Kelly

A lot of it boils down to “things changed while in orbit and changed back when he came back to earth. Some effects went really weird… his cognitive function went *up* in space, dropped well below normal when he came back, and slowly crawled back up… but not to the pre-flight standard.

 

So far as we know, there are three main influencers on human physioloy while in space:

  1. Stress
  2. Lack of gravity
  3. increased radiation

The lack of gravity, of course, can be dealt with… just build your space stations and long duration spacecraft with artificial gravity in mind. Stress… shrug. Being in a tin can in space is probably gonna be stressful no matter what you do. Radiation… a few tricks can be played, but until the time we’re building spaceships so vast that several *meters* of physical shielding separate you from the cosmic rays zipping around, radiation is just going to be one of those things.

 

 Posted by at 4:16 pm

Notre Dame

 AARRRGH, art, blather, Crazy, Gah., history, news, religion, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

As is doubtless news to nobody at this point the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire earlier today and is, as I type this, still burning. From the looks of it, the cathedral looks like it will end up being a virtual total loss; the main spire has collapsed and the entire wooden structure is likely to end up as ash, with the stonework fire damaged and likely to at least partly tumble. The artworks and relics inside are likely gone.

‘Everything is burning, nothing will remain’: Famed Notre Dame cathedral ablaze in Paris

I am not a religious person; certainly not a Catholic. Still, there ain’t nothin’ funny about this. Nothing culturally or economically useful to be gained by burning this 800-year old cathedral to the ground. This is just *bad.* When the Big Butter Jesus caught a lightningbolt from Thor and burned to it’s steel structure, leaving only the Terminator Jesus endoskeleton? Sorry, that sh!t was damned funny… because it was cheap, tacky, recent and easily replaced. The Notre Dame cathedral was a monument to the heights that man can aspire to and achieve even when mired in the muck and superstition of  medieval Europe.

In all probability the fire was the result of the restoration work being done on it. A grinder or a welder shedding sparks, an electrical arc, spilled paint thinner, oily rags… there are a *lot* of possibilities. Doubtless an investigation will nail it down, though it’s entirely possible that some worker right now *knows* exactly what happened. And he *knows* that he’s responsible. Imagine having that on you conscience, especially if the feller is a Parisian Catholic. Yeesh.

As for turning this tragedy into a political screed, I’ll hold off on that and leave it to, of all people, German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has said that the cathedral was a “symbol of France and our European culture.” An ancient  construct of surpassing beauty and genius, the envy of the world, taken for granted, inadequately cared for and finally burned to the ground: yup, that’s a good symbol of European culture.

 

 Posted by at 3:46 pm

CBS All Access

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 152019
 

I was never all that likely to pony up cash for CBS’s paid streaming service. The world is already far too full of such things. The only show they had that even close to tempting me was “Star Trek: Discovery, and that was only *before* I started seeing what a trainwreck the show would become; once I saw the pilot that aired on regular CBS, the whole idea of signing up became laughable.

I never spent a dime on CBS All Access.

But after seeing how they are now advocating violence against American citizens who express political views they don’t like… I want my money back.  They have a show called “The Good Fight,” which is apparently about people trying to overthrow American society and replace it with a Lenin-approved wokepocalypse, and recently posted an ad to Twitter. This ad advocated physical violence against those you (or at least the writers at CBS) disagree with. The Twitter ad seems to have been pulled down, but chunks of it are up on YouTube:

This is based on the tired “is it ok to punch a Nazi” thing. Sure, if there’s an *actual* Nazi advocating violence…. then, maybe. But the far left has so futzed with the culture that virtually *anybody* can be declared a Nazi. I was originally going to type “anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders can be declared a Nazi,” but then I remembered that BLM didn’t think he was woke enough and took the mike from him. Raving loonies on Twitter are claiming that Disney polling indicates that more than a quarter of Star Wars fans are literal fascists. Clown world, indeed.

And note in the video that even thought they show Richard Spenser, white nationalist, the riotous actions shown are from an American point of view almost entirely the province of *left* *wing* activism, and the “blue vest” rioters seem to be a takeoff on the French “yellow vest” protestors, who seem to be to a very large degree leftists.

So CBS All Access is openly declaring that it is not only acceptable, it is *right* to commit acts of violence against people who express views you do not like.

So, yeah, no STD for me.

Is it OK to clothesline a commie yet? “Some speech is not equal. Some speech requires a more visceral response.”

 Posted by at 11:02 am

Where’s the police state when you need it?

 AARRRGH, blather, dumbassery, Gah., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Apr 132019
 

California has a lot of money, and a *lot* of regulations. There are laws against all manner of wacky things… an average American citizen can’t even own a Tommygun (which I discovered *after* I moved there in 2000). And yet they don’t have the policing wherewithal to bust a bunch of eminently bustable heads here:

Now, on one level, I could hardly give a damn less about some flowers. To first order, who cares. But on the other hand… these idjits *know* they’re not supposed to go romping around out in the poppies, but they do so anyway because of their sense of entitlement. They need to be educated to the fact that they don’t get to do whatever they want with other peoples stuff just because they have a following. otherwise these morons will be running for Congress or starting their own idiot religions based on ancient space aliens blowing up volcanoes with nukes, and we already have quite enough of that nonsense.

Person A: “The rules don’t apply to me because I’m an influencer.”

Person B: “Have some pepper spray, scarecrow.”

The human brain is an amazing thing, but it needs to be exercised to reach its fullest potential. I don’t know if these people are inherently truly stupid, but getting to spend a few weeks in jail, a ten grand fine and a five-year social media ban would learn ’em some smarts right quick.

 Posted by at 7:34 pm

My God, they’ve actually succeeded!

 art, blather, Meh., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Apr 122019
 

I never thought it could be done… but they’ve actually succeeded in making a major new Star Wars movie look *dull.*

The only to interesting things here:

1: A chunk of a Death Star sitting on a planetary surface… presumably either the moon of Yaavin or the forest moon of Endor. The latter would be my guess… and it would actually be lice if the desert scenes were *also* on the now-former forest moon. Because having a 160-kilometer-diameter space station explode directly overhead and rain down gigatons of high velocity toxic waste, charged magic batteries and a bagrillion citybuster warheads is just exactly the sort of thing that would utterly trash a planetary environment.

2: Palpatine is back in some fashion. Presumably force ghost, presumably lurking around that trashed Death Star.

#1 is kinda interesting, but it of course raises questions. Considering the scale of the Death Star, that chunk of it shown probably extends well above the sensible atmosphere of the world it’s sitting on. It seems unlikely that a structure not meant to sit on a planetary surface, that got kerploded by the detonation of a reactor powerful enough to make laserblasts that themselves can blow up a planet, and then fell a couple hundred miles out of the sky, would be in even that good of shape, rather than just a flattened smear of metal on the ground.

#2 Seems like a lame attempt at fan service.

I suppose my apathy about this first look trailer means I’m a sexist/racist, because that’s the only possible reason why anyone would ever be unimpressive with this sort of thing these days…

 Posted by at 8:17 pm

Boeing Model 767-85M

 aircraft, drawings, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects  No Responses »
Apr 122019
 

A Boeing diagram of the Model 767-85M, a pre-767 jetliner concept from 1971 designed to cruise at Mach 0.98. In order to achieve that, the design was massively aerodynamically optimized for transonic efficiency… with “wasp-waiting” taken to something of an extreme. The aircraft would have been fuel efficient at high (but still subsonic) speed, but would have been a nightmare to manufacture.

I’ve made the full-rez scan of this large format diagram available to above-$10-subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program/Patreon.

If this sort of thing is of interest, consider subscribing. Even a buck a month will help out; but the more you subscribe for, the more you get… and the more you help me get from eBay and save for the ages.

 

 Posted by at 7:52 pm
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