Deep Fakes are getting better. Still not perfect; Elon as Dave Bowman isn;t quite totally convincing at the best of times and there are some mistakes that stick out (his chin overlapping the helmet ring, frex), but it’s still pretty good.
The end of “video as believable evidence” is nearing its end.
There is currently an item on ebay that the *title* of had me very interested, but the actual photos fire off my BS alarms:
A vintage F-108 display model made by the NAA model shop or by an official contractor for NAA would be a very interesting item. But… that’s not what we’ve got here. Observe:
This is not a North American Aviation design. It is, in fact, copied from the 1960 ITC “F-108 Rapier” model kit. This was designed before the F-108 design was revealed to the public, and was basically a fictional concept based on the North American “Navaho” intercontinental cruise missile.
The model is not actually an assembled ITC Rapier kit. It looks like one of the Asian specially-made “genuine Philippine mahogany” models that you can have made. Which is fine if that’s what you want, but that’s not what the ebay listing says it is. Quote: “For sale is a rare XF-108 Rapier contractor style model. I am unsure of the manufacturer -possibly Topping/Precise. ” Note: “style.”
As of this writing there are 15 bids, up to $140. This seems a bit much for a meh-quality modern replica of a meh-quality model kit. If this is something you’re interested in bidding on, keep in mind that this is *not* a North American Aviation design, but a design by a short-lived (1957-64) model kit company that had no special insight.
I recently watched the Clint Eastwood movie “The Mule” about an old feller who falls into the role of drug running, driving a truck from city to city with a hundred kilos of coke in the back. He is successful at it because he’s a good, nondescript driver. It got me thinking… in ten to twenty years, technology should provide an even better mule: the self driving car. Even better: self driving Uber-like cars.
Consider: you want to transport two hundred kilos of drugs, or ammunition, or vintage MAGA hats, or guns, or Jordan Peterson books, or whatever is illegal in the 2030’s, from Orlando to Anaheim. You use a burner phone and a non-personalized account to call up a HAL-Uber. It meets you somewhere public yet quiet; you load up the car, install a realistic mannequin (a second-hand “Real Doll,” perhaps) in one of the front seats, then send it on its way. You aim it towards, say, an unoccupied house at the target city. If it all goes to plan, you have some of your boys waiting there to unload. If it gets intercepted en route… shrug. You lose the shipment, but you don’t lose the driver. Probably a minimal concern given the line of business you’re in, but a driver un-caught is a driver who can’t rat you out. You could always hire a *number* of such self-driving cars, either to spread the load or to serve as distractions and decoys.
There are doubtless a lot more details than that; my experience in the field of drug running goes little further than knowing that there are storage compartments under the floor panels of your standard Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 Light Freighter that can be used for smuggling things. Such as how the frak does an unoccupied self-driving vehicle drive for thousands of miles without someone onboard to either refuel or recharge it. But the big question is how does Uber, Lyft, or whoever *prevent* the use of their vehicles for such an obvious illegal use? Package delivery services at least theoretically prevent this sort of thing by occasionally scanning and/or drug sniffing the packages they handle. But if the HAL-Ubers have drug sniffers built into them, they’re going to lose a *lot* business by constantly ratting out the drugged-up partiers loading into them. I suppose AIs could track the origin/destination points and come to learn that certain combinations – starting in some quiet out of the way park, ending in an abandoned Chinese restaurants parking lot, perhaps – is the sort of thing that the DEA would be interested in. But in that case, the cartels will simply change up the plans while hiring a bunch of decoys to run the “expected” routes while filled with candy bars.
Netflix has aired their Invader Zim movie “Enter the Florpus.” Is it any good? Is it, like a whole raft of other nostalgia-based revivals, any good? Or is it just a series of memberberries and woke nonsense?
In short, I was surprised at just how good it was. They brought back the same writers, the same voice actors, the same guy to do the music. And it all freakin’ worked. If you were a fan of Zim back in the day, you’ll almost certainly be a fan of Zim today. If you have never been introduced to Zim… well, Enter the Florpus won’t exactly be the best possible introduction, but it should do the job. (Where would someone go to watch Invader Zim these days except by buying the DVDs?)
The writing is good, the animation is well done, the characters are the same. Zim still chews up the scenery; GIR is still an adorable freakin’ homicidal psychopath, Dib is still a dollar store Mulder and Gaz still lives to torment him. The only change of note is a revision of the design of Professor Membrane, for reasons that are mostly unexplored. He’s now stouter for some reason, more hair and with longer gloves (though *that* is explained). But he’s still a spectacular supergenius, even if he is a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to accepting the reality of aliens. He is now a bigger, more important character than he typically was back in the day, and when he decides to do somethin’ about somethin’, it’s worth seeing:
“Enter the Florpus” is just plain old-school Invader Zim fun, well worth watching. I don’t know if there are talks afoot to revive the series, but if Florpus is an indication, a series revival would be well appreciated.
Importantly, Zim retains the zenith position in the field of maniacal cackling, a skill everyone should practice.
My man. Invader Zim, patron saint of emotional restraint in the face of awesomeness. The above image would make an accurate image of me, standing on a bluff near Jackass Flats watching the first US Space Force Orion battleship taking to the heavens.
Remember the halcyon days of 2010, before Twitter led to the downfall of mankind? I made this point:
Where I pointed out that Star Trek: Voyager led directly to the election of Obama as President.
And now, someone else:
Continuing. This time, discussion of possibilities of swapping out existing Orbiter structures with graphite composites. The advantage would be lowered dry mass of the Orbiter, leading to potentially higher payload performance. This would, presumably, be of interest for USAF launches from Vandenburg, a possibility that Challenger put to bed.
If this sort of stuff is of interest or use, why not subscribe to the Unwanted Blog? Doing so comes with Absolutely No Rewards Whatsoever, other than the warm comforting glow that comes from donating money to someone you’ve never met. That and it helps put food in front of a quarter of unappreciative cats.
The title is misleading. The algorithms probably don’t know anything about the people whose posts it reads other than the words they use. What the algorithms do is their job. If some people use certain Naughty words more than others… shrug. Computer don’t know from context. And they certainly can’t tell if Person A using the exact same word in the exact same sentence as Person B is permitted because Person A is in a special protected class while Person B isn’t.
On of the big problems I have with “hate speech algorithms,” apart from the whole BS notion of hate speech in the first place, is the mutable nature of the English language. Until a few days ago, almost nobody knew that “Fredo” was an ethnic slur, the Italian equivalent of the Naughty-word. Largely, of course, because it isn’t and hasn’t been. but let’s say someone in a position to make such a determination determines that, indeed, “Fredo” is a Bad Word. Well, for a while you’re going to have people utterly stumped when every message to their cousin Fredo goes missing, until they learn that they now need to use cutesy euphemisms. And do the algorithms work backwards? Will messages to, about and from Fredos posted over the last thirty fookin’ years be erased from Yon Interwebs? Will Facebook pages devoted to fettuccine alfredo be insta-nuked? Will Frodo Baggins be pre-emptively dumped down the memory hole because his name is just too close? Will invocations of the Norse goddess Frigga cause the servers to melt down and the FBI to be called over the Super-Hate that comes from merging two Naughty words into one?
But in the mean time enjoy the spectacle of yet another Social Justice Initiative turning around and biting the SJWs square in the taint.
Hmmm.
As more information dribbles out about the recent Russian missile explosion that released radiation of an undefined sort, this story is kinda interesting. There is some hey-didn’t-I-see-that-sort-of-thing-on-that-Chernobyl-show level paranoid bureaucracy skullduggery going on with doctors not being given all the facts, but one of the more interesting bits is that one of the doctors who treated the incident victims was found to have cesium 137 in his muscle tissue. There are a whole lot of useful bits of data left out here, such as how *much* cesium 137 and whether he could have picked it up elsewhere or whether any of the many other doctors and nurses involved were also contaminated with cesium 137. Given how often cesium 137 shows up in lower left nuclear incidents, such as industrial radioactive sources being simply lost or misplaced, it’s entirely possible that that one doctor came across it somewhere else. But if the doctor was contaminated internally to an important degree by a victim flown in from hundreds of mils from the incident site, it would indicate that there must be a *lot* of cesium 137 floating about. because cesium 137 would be an odd substance here. It’s a byproduct of the fission of U-235, but you’d imagine that uranium would be the bigger story if that was the source. It’s not seemingly terribly useful for military applications.
Cesium 137 is a beta emitter; it’s pretty much useless in a reactor, though I imagine someone clever might be able to find a way to harness the beta emissions somehow. It won;t make a bomb, though you might turn very fine powder into a cladding for a dirty bomb. Cesium salts are water soluble and play hell with biological systems since it infiltrates easily. But it’s actual practical uses in industry all seem kinda pointless for a missile:
Caesium-137 has a number of practical uses. In small amounts, it is used to calibrate radiation-detection equipment.[5] In medicine, it is used in radiation therapy.[5] In industry, it is used in flow meters, thickness gauges,[5] moisture-density gauges (for density readings, with americium-241/beryllium providing the moisture reading),[6] and in gamma ray well logging devices.[6]
I *suppose* it might have been used in a propellant flow meter for a rocket engine? Maybe?
I’m no nuclear expert, but for the life of me I can’t come up with a good use for the stuff.
Around three years ago I posted some rather cruddy images of a saucer-shaped nuclear-powered spacecraft that the Chrysler corporation drew up in 1956. At this time a manned spacecraft was a perfectly normal sort of thing for Chrysler to design; their aerospace division was responsible for the Redstone missile and the Saturn I first stage. One of the images was a small scan of the cover of the August-September 1957 issue of “Saucer News.” I finally managed to score a copy of this “fanzine”on ebay a while back and have scanned the cover at high (600 dpi) resolution. The image quality is a bit regrettable, but what can you expect from a 1950’s UFO magazine.
As always, if anyone might happen to know anything more about this design, I’m all ears. Chrysler long ago got rid of their aerospace division and whatever archive it might have had.
I have uploaded the full resolution scan to the 2019-08 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
