The USAF’s reference design for an operational space based laser missile defense platform, circa 1990. Details such as mass and dimensions remain elusive, although the fact that it was to be launched by a “Titan V” might be instructive.
Jan 312020
Jan 312020
CBS All Access has decided to put the first episode of Picard onto YouTube. So, view and judge for yourself. Offer may not be valid in countries other than the US of A. Also seems to disable viewing anywhere but YouTube, so click the link…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PPm5l3o2zw
UPDATE: I’ve watched it. It… was ok, I guess. It’s a weird mishmash of Canon Trek and Fake Trek… there is “Romulus destroyed by supernova” from the JJTrek flicks, and the lameass STD ships. But there were also a bucket of visual references to canonical ships such as the Ent-D, Ent-E, Stargazer, Cousteau; there was a still image showing Picard alongside Canonical Worf, who is distinctly *not* a JJTrek mutant Klingon nor an STD Klingork. The production values, apart from the use of STD digital assets, are top-notch. But at least so far it didn’t really seem very much like Star Trek, just generic modern sci-fi.
As to why CBS posted this for free… shrug. Seems likely that viewership numbers may not have been what CBS would’ve wanted, so they’re trying whatever they can to get people to watch. Example:
Google Trends Show Star Trek: Picard Interest Plummeting After Premiere Episode
Sadly it appears that the best hope for the future of Star Trek may have faded.
Jan 302020
The “Quantum Eraser” experiment is simple enough to understand… but the results make my brain hurt. Start with the double-slit experiment that shows the particle/wave duality of photons. Weird enough from an everyday perspective, but the interference patterns are comprehensible. But when you shoot individual photons, rather than vast numbers, they *still* end up producing interference patterns. Buh?
That should be adequate strangeness. But wait! There’s more!
A modification of the experiment that seems to make photons change what they’re doing if their entangled partners are observed. More to the point, this collapse in the wave function propagates *backwards* in time.
Jan 292020
Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with the space amoebas from Star Trek. That I am aware of, anyway…
NSF’s Newest Solar Telescope Produces First Images
This new solar telescope can see details as small as 30 kilometers on the surface of the sun. And while the still images are interesting, it’s the video that’s really interesting. What appears to be data dropout or some sort of glitch in the image are actually intensely bright little regions of high magnetic activity between the convection cells.
Jan 292020
Here we go again…
Did an anti-gun activist stage a ‘death threat’ for Twitter?
Short form: a trauma surgeon who was shot in the neck as a teenager became an anti-gun activist (it is not uncommon for those who have been abused to become abusers themselves). His latest activity was, it seems, to print out a clip-art “death threat,” place it on his own vehicle and then photograph it. His claim was that the “flyer” was posted on his vehicle out in public, yet the photo he took of it was clearly taken within a residential garage. He has since deleted his Tweets on the subject, and the local police have confirmed that they’ve received no complaints from the “victim.” Nor has the printout itself been turned over for analysis.
Why did he do this? Presumably to earn himself some additional Victim Status Points. Maybe he’s playing Victimhood Bingo or something.
The mainstream media ran with the “victims” Twitter claims uncritically. Why? On the one hand, many journalists want to change the world rather than simply report on it, and authoritarians love anti-gun stories because that tends top fit with their “control everybody” ideology. On the other hand, the story was nothing but a handful of Tweets, pretty much the very definition of a non-story. So perhaps it was a slow news day and they had to dream up something, *anything,* to help fill the columns. Heaven forbid that they do actual journalism rather than just breathlessly parroting the latest Jussie Smollett… investigation takes effort.
Jan 282020
I haven’t seen “Star Trek: Picard” for the same reason I haven’t seen the second season of STD: the first season of STD was so gawd-awful that I ain’t gonna spend a dime to see anything made by these hacks. And everything I’ve heard about “Picard” has backed that up… it is set not in the universe of TOS and TNG and DS9 and Voyager, but in the STD universe merged with the 2009 reboot universe.
So… meh. I’m giving it a pass and letting other people deal with this, and it seems to really be an abomination.
Sigh.
Jan 272020
Point the first: it’ll be a bit lax on the blogging for the next little while. Got stuff to handle. Not, not coronavirus… not yet, anyway.
Point the second: color me stunned, Boeing done failed another aerospace project.
Jan 252020
Spacedock lays out one of the clearest examples of why the latest (last?) Star Wars movie was so disappointing:
A whole lot of very different concept art was created not only for “Rise of Skywalker” but also for “The Force Awakens” that could have been *easily* modeled. Hell, there are boatload of amateur Star Wars modelers who have produced their own Star Destroyer models who could have been contacted and bought off. The fact that the art department simply took an existing and inappropriate model, photocopied it about 50% bigger and tacked on a Big Space Gun and called it a day indicates that the art department had a possibly terminal case of senioritis. they just wanted to be done with Star Wars so they could move on to something else.
Jan 252020
In 1985 Rockwell thought that there might be a business case for a small unmanned spaceplane for recon purposes. At the time, the answer was apparently no… but within a few years Rockwell developed the “REFLY” spaceplane which, over a span of a couple decades, transmorgified into the X-37B which has flown a handful of top secret long duration missions.
Jan 252020
The dumbth overfloweth.
Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology
Nicholas, in her 40s, is transforming horoscopes from generalizations about finding true love and stumbling into financial good fortune to pointed calls to action with a left-leaning, social-justice agenda.
Is this stupid? You betcha. Do I support it? You betcha. I want all the lefties and SJWs to put more and more of their faith into patent bullshit.
This is of course nothing new. The left wing war on science, on rationality, on not being a freakin’ loon continues.