Each gear has a reduction ration of ten to one. There are one hundred gears. That means for the last gear to turn once, the first gear must turn 10100 times…a googol times. The guy who built it says that the device will require more energy than the entire universe has to complete a single rotation. I don’t know what the power consumption of the device is, but given that “there are between 1078 to 1082 atoms in the known, observable universe” this means that the device will have to turn the first gear a minimum of 1018 times per atom in the universe. The video seems to show that it takes about 4 seconds per rotation of the first gear. Pretty sure that no matter how efficient the motor, how well lubed the bearings, spinning that first gear 1018 times is going to require a lot more energy than you’d get by converting an atom of even uranium into pure energy.
Not a terribly useful or practical device. Cool, though.
I have watched Star Wars and Star Trek, beloved American science fiction franchises from my childhood (and in Trek’s case, before), become fouled craptacular garbage thanks to awful writing, bad intentions and unfortunate business decisions. I’ve never been much of a fan of Dr. Who; it was always just too goofy for me. Too British, perhaps. But a whole lot of other people have loved Dr. Who as much as I loved Star Trek… and boy howdy are they cheesed off at how the current crop of hacks writing and producing the show have turned it into garbage.
Not being much of a fan of the show I’m not too up on the canon. But even so I know there are a few things that are important: “Who” is not the Doctors actual name. You’re never supposed to find out what it is. And his history before the show is *supposed* to be a permanent mystery. The people he comes from, the Time Lords, are supposed to be terribly powerful, almost godlike beings.
Not anymore, it seems. Not only has the BBC seen fit to explain the backstory of the Doctor (now no longer a Time Lord), it has turned the Time Lords into merely a science experiment, and jammed in a whole lot of identity politics in the process. Ooof. And as a result, ratings have fallen through the floor:
Sunday’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Timeless Children,” saw 3.78 million viewers tune in, but what is especially troublesome for the BBC is the fact that the shows preceding Doctor Who and following both had a higher amount of viewers all in the same range.
Prior to Doctor Who saw Countryfile with 4.44 million viewers, and following Doctor Who saw Antiques Roadshow with 4.41 million.
Antiques Roadshow drew in more viewers in Britain than the season finale of Doctor Who. Which fits given the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes:
I gotta wonder. The BBC, as with Disney (Star Wars) and JJ/CBS (Star Trek): have they ever considered just, you know… not sucking?
“Psycho Goreman,” by the director of “The Void” (an imperfect but reasonably effective Lovecraftian cosmic horror flick made on a very low budget). As with “The Void,” the effects look entirely practical.
The lesson of this movie seems to be “gosh, maybe it’s not such a good idea to give little children the power to command bloodthirsty murder-monsters.” Who woulda guessed.
This video purports to be a rather bold robbery at a drugstore in San Francisco, demonstrating the inevitable results of policies that decriminalize theft.
The one where Mike Bloomberg is asked to defend his anti-gun position while surrounding himself with armed guards packing heat that he wouldn’t allow YOU to carry (starts at about 12:46):
He trots out the usual politician-speak of babbling incoherently on tangential subjects to pad out the time and make you *think* he actually answered… but he accidentally said what he really thinks and tried to justify his position with what boils down to “I’m more important than you and thus my life is more worthy of being defended than yours, thus I get to have more rights than you do.”
Pretty computer graphics of their Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft concept, which is a helicopter with a pusher prop akin to the now half-century gone AH-56 Cheyenne:
Wait. A place that miraculously cures illness is being closed to keep people from getting sick? It’s almost as if the people who run the place don’t have complete faith in the miraculousness of their miracles.
Wouldn’t this be a FANTASTIC opportunity to prove out the effectiveness of their “healing pools?”
There’s nothing like a worldwide media freakout over what is *probably* going to turn out to be a flash-in-the-pandemic to bring out the cranks and the crazies, selling crackpottery and woo as fake cures to assuage the fearful.
