Mar 152023
 

Huh.

Surface changes observed on a Venusian volcano during the Magellan mission

In short, a volcano on Venus seemed to be active from 1990 to 1992. It could be that the mountain simply slumped, but more likely it that it blarped up some lava.

 

So if you decide to go for a hike on Venus, add “volcano” to the list of things to be careful of.

This would make Venus the third world in this solar system to have active volcanoes, after Earth and Io. But some form of geological activity is much more common, with ice geysers all over the place out among the larger moons.

 Posted by at 11:16 pm
Mar 152023
 

Apparently life is bad for women in South Korea, with a heavily patriarchal society that treats ’em like garbage. So, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of South Korean women are doing what they can to avoid the worst of it. And for some number of them, that means avoiding men entirely:

A World Without Men

The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely.

The “4B” movement is essentially the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement of South Korean women, separating themselves from any relationships with men, including family and male friends. They’re cutting their hair short (or bald) and avoiding makeup in order to be less attractive, and are either living alone or shacking up with other women. And according to the article, a lot of these women seem satisfied with this arrangement. There is, of course, the inevitable result:

In December of that year (2016), as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world)

The birth rate has plummeted from 1.2 to 0.78 in well under a decade. And 1.2 was *well* under replacement rate. South Korea will soon begin to run low on young people, though likely not on old people. This will mean that the burden of caring for an elderly population will fall more and more on fewer and fewer younger Koreans, likely driving some kind of an exodus… And quite possibly driving an *influx* of cheap, low-paid “migrants.” This will lead to South Korean culture being gradually replaced with some other culture. And the question will be… what is this other culture’s views on such things as women’s rights? Just as Europe celebrates gay and trans while not making their own babies and importing *vast* numbers of people from cultures that not only like to make babies but also like to throw gay people off rooftops, there will be an inevitable clash. A South Korea filled with elderly Koreans and young non-Koreans seems like a poor force to stack up against an invasion of young, armed North Koreans. All the Norks needs to do is wait and keep making babies, and the peninsula is theirs.

If you won;t make the next generation, someone else will. That might well suck… but there it is regardless.

 Posted by at 10:06 pm
Mar 152023
 

Nancy Meyers Netflix Movie Shut Down Over Budget Issues

Netflix was in the early stages of a rom-com. You know, the kind of movie that tends to be set in the present day, in the real world, without much need for explosions, car chases, major set pieces, whole armies of extras, Marvel-sized special effects budgets. And thus, this seems a little weird:

Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Michael Fassbender and Owen Wilson were circling roles in the feature, budgeted at $130 million-plus.

One. Hundred. Thirty. MILLION. Dollars.

Ummm.

 

Oh, hey, apropos of nuthin’, here’s a video made almost entirely by AI. You know, for cheap. Is it good? Meh. Did it require the involvement of busloads of Hollywood deviants, freaks and weirdos? Seems not. Is it the future? Most likely.

 Posted by at 3:20 pm
Mar 132023
 

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a list of all the Best Movie Oscar winners. For no readily apparent reason I decided to look them all up and see how many I’ve watched. Starting in the forties (because why not):

40s: 4
50s: 5
60s: 4
70s: 7
80s: 8
90s: 9
00s: 4
10s: 2
20s: 0 (out of three)

Hmmm. Seventies through the 90’s seemed to make movies I actually wanted to watch. But how about just the movies that were nominated?

40s: 16/50 (32%)
50s: 15/50 (30%)
60s: 21/50 (42%)
70s: 27/50 (54%)
80s: 27/50 (54%)
90s: 32/50 (64%)
00s: 14/55 (25.5%)
10s: 27/88 (30.7%)
20s: 2/28 (7.1%)

It’s less stark here, but again the 70s through 90s won. The outlier is the 20’s… so far it’s looking like a big pile of yawn.

One could argue that the older movies have the advantage, as I’ve had more time to watch them. But in the age of streaming, DVD, Blu Ray, 4k… any movie I *want* to watch, I can. If I haven’t by now, it’s most likely because I’ve seen the trailer or read the propaganda… and it’s just not interesting. Granted, not every movie is for everyone; I’m never going to be a big fan of “chick flicks” or artsy indie flicks about gay cowboys eating pudding any more than some people are never going to be fans of science fiction. But the fact that there seems to be a decline in movies I give a crap about might mean something to someone, I dunno.

Hell, here’s the list of nominees from the 2020’s:

Nomadland
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
CODA
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
Everything Everywhere All at Once
All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

How many have you actually even *heard* of? And how many, when you look them up, look like unwatchable preachy or artsy garbage?

 Posted by at 11:13 pm
Mar 132023
 

Circa 1980 Lockheed jumped on board the “X-Wing” bandwagon. For those unfortunate enough not to have been graced to grow up in the 80’s, the X-Wing was a concept for a four-bladed helicopter where the rotors were rigid and could be stopped in flight, turning into two forward swept and two aft-swept wings (see Aerospace Projects Review issue V5N6 for a whole fat article on the concept). one of the Lockheed concepts that was publicized at the time was a one-man research/proof of concept vehicle, smaller than a Bell Cobra. I’ve got fair to middling diagrams and data on it, but what I don’t have is a designation. Which is terribly frustrating because I’m convinced that, many years ago, I *read* a designation for it, CL-something, decided “that’s interesting information, I shall surely remember where I read that for future reference,” and have never been able to find it again.

ARRRRgh.

Anyway, here’s some art of the thing.

 Posted by at 11:05 pm
Mar 122023
 

The very latest in breaking news from a year and a half ago:

Armed ex-soldier allegedly storms animal shelter to get cat back

An Australian former soldier broke in to an animal shelter to get his emotional support cat back. The cat had apparently been lost and someone found it and took it to the shelter, and the dude wanted his kitty. I get that. I can even get behind the idea of a soldier with PTSD being so enthusiastic about it that he breaks in after hours. But he brought a fake firearm with him and full tactical gear and ended up holding a woman hostage… and in the end, he didn’t leave with his cat. Not cool. He was sentenced to six years in prison for this.

 Posted by at 8:22 pm
Mar 122023
 

English traditions confuse me:

I guess that slots in somewhere between “Cricket” and “Blimey.”

Oh, and something to look out for in the future of a culturally enriched Britain: “Taharrush.”

Such as:

Get used to it, Brits. It’s the future you chose when you installed (or at the very least allowed) a government that took your guns and decided to replace you and your culture.

Americans: witness this. Keep it in mind when you vote.

 Posted by at 6:07 pm
Mar 122023
 

So it looks like Silicon Valley Bank employed people to do fundamentally pointless time- and resource-wasting stuff. This, sad to say, is hardly unique; lots of companies devote surprising amounts of effort end employees time to things that have nothing to do with the companies business or mission. Company baseball teams, for example, have nothing to do with, say, an auto manufacturers core function; claims about “building morale/cohesion” *might* have some validity, but if the company is in dire distress, spending resources on that is a bit unwise. However, a baseball team is unlikely to be a major source of revenue drain.

DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives, however, CAN be a major drain on a company. Not only directly by consuming payroll in hiring these people, but in consuming productivity in redirecting employees to do stuff on company time. And probably more importantly, indirectly by tearing apart the fundamental cultures that promote productivity and setting employees at each others throats and by causing HR departments to drive away – or not hire in the first place – good employees due to them not filling Enough checkboxes, and retaining less qualified employees because they identify with the current politically favored victimhood groups.

So, any time, money, resources devoted to “woke” policies is of course a bad thing. But how bad it was for SVB is yet to be determined, but it looks like they were at least at the standard American major corporate level of wokist self-sabotagery.

While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs

Perhaps this will serve as a valuable lesson to other companies to avoid this sort of nonsense. I’m not optimistic, though… a century of blood driven by big-government collectivism, from the socialists to the Nazis to the Commies, has hardly stopped people from “but this time we’ll get it right.” Additionally: since the list of “conspiracy theories” being proven right seems to grow day by day, conspiracy theories that hold that failures like this are all part of some long plan to centralize power into fewer and fewer institutions seem undismissable.

 Posted by at 3:40 pm
Mar 122023
 

My preference with the cyanotype diagrams is to not tinker with the actual image other than the needs of cleaning them up. However, in a few cases the diagrams are such that they make inconvenient fits, or could be made into convenient sizes… or need additional stuff added to them to flesh them out. One such case is the Aerojet Sea Dragon launch vehicle. The diagrams I have come from reports, rather than blueprints; this stripped them of the usual data blocks, and left them with just the diagrams. Putting the external profile next to the internal profile gives an aspect ratio that is *almost* perfect to fit within an off-the-shelf 11/75X36 inch frame. I need to do a bit more to add a bit of something to the blank spaces.

The question here is whether the cyanotype-buying public would rather have this formatted to display horizontally as shown here, or vertically?

 

As an aside, I just noticed that the original GIF that I’d put together (for APR issue V4N6) was dated as March 9, 2003, just over twenty years ago. I posted the full-rez diagram on my website many, many years ago; since then it has filtered out into the wider world, such as HERE, HERE and HERE.

 Posted by at 10:41 am