He returns to review “The Northman” and “Prey.” One he liked, one he hated. Agree with him or not, can’t argue that he’s not entertaining.
Sep 102023
Sep 092023
Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world. There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres of solar panels and fill the seas with whale-confounding wind turbines. But there are issues beyond just what method will produce the volts and amps. For instance… all the batteries will need to be filled with metals dug out of the Earth; electric motors and a billion miles of power lines will need to be processed from all the copper we can scrape up. And the problem seems to be that at current resource extraction (i.e. mining) rates, we’re nowhere near able to deliver those materials.
So it seems we have a few options:
1) Turn Earth into a giant open pit. To hell with the environment… we need to save the environment!
2) Go all-electric… and just tell people to suck it up, they’ll learn to live with less. 15-minute cities will seem like the wildest dream of raving libertarians. Personal vehicles? Gone. Traveling any sort of distance at all? Prohibitively expensive to simply prohibited. Air conditioning? A myth from the Old Ones.
3) Asteroid mining. Everything we might need is available a million times over floating out in space; the effort to retrieve it will open spaceflight to mankind in a way never before dreamed, spreading civilization and terrestrial biology to the furthest regions of the solar system.
Which will it be?
There is physically not enough material at current extraction rates to produce one generation of technology (which needs to be replaced every 20 years or so) to phase out fossil fuels. We either better start ramping up our mining efforts or drop this fantasy. pic.twitter.com/XMNngP9cc3
— Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki (@MatthewWielicki) September 9, 2023
Challenges and Bottlenecks for the Green Transition
Sep 072023
Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices.
But then there’s this:
It’s not immediately obvious why the owner of a heating & cooling company would use a drone to drop dye packs into private and motel swimming pools. This makes the pools undesirable for swimming and costs the owners large sums to not only flush the pools but clean them. And it does not seem like his business benefits from that; if his company specialized in pool maintenance, it’d make sense. Maybe he just doesn’t like swimming pools.
The dye packs seem unlikely to be much of a health hazard… even if they are somewhat toxic, the sickly green color would dissuade people from getting in the water. But there are other things that could be easily dropped that would be much less obvious and far more dangerous. If the drone operators goal was terrorism or simple mayhem, I can think of a *lot* of things that could be dropped in a pool (or elsewhere) that would be nightmarish.
The goal of *most* crimes is not terrorism. Most criminals, I suspect, would be just as happy if their crimes went un-noticed. In those cases, drones are somewhat limited. They are useful for smuggling… crossing borders with drugs, say, or dropping drugs, phones, weapons, cash into prison yards. Most crime would seem to involve some sort of theft, and, so far, quadcopters seem of limited utility there. Given that shoplifting is not only a largely unopposed crime, in many of the worst districts it’s not even a *crime* anymore, you hardly need to make much effort to technologically innovate in the field.
Maybe there’ll be a bank robbery (or a heist movie) where the thieves get out of the bank and, instead of trying to escape with large sacks of cash, they hook them to waiting drones. The cash flies off, and now the thieves are unburdened as they attempt to make their escape.
And then there’ll be the *darker* bank heist movie: drones are used to make off with the sacks of cash. But that’s not the end: on some sort of predictable basis, subsets of that cash are released by drone over a public area. So people begin to gather in their masses to snag the bills. And then once a big enough crowd is gathered, another set of bills is dumped on them. This time, though, the bills have been soaked in smallpox or some such…
Sep 062023
It sure seems like the era of “superhero movies” being a license to print money is over. Granted the DCEU flicks have not had a great track record, but the latest outing, “Blue Beetle,” seems to be shaping up to be a *disaster.*
The production budget was $104 million. The marketing was probably the same, so the cost of the movie was $208 million. As of today, it has taken in $59M domestic, $46M foreign. But the studio only gets half the US box office ($29.5M) and about a third of the foreign ($15.3M), for a total of $44.8M. The movie was released 19 days ago, so it still has time to rake in some more moolah, but unless some amazing miracle occurs I have trouble seeing it reaching $60 in actual returns to the studio. If it does it will have lost Warner bros “only” $148 *million* dollars.
Couple “superhero fatigue” with “Blue Beetle? Who’s that?” and you could have predicted that this wouldn’t do so great. Add in the disastrous marketing (a DC superhero movie that features a prominent character calling Batman a fascist is not a great idea) and this flick was doomed from the get-go.
Sep 022023
Methane levels in the atmosphere seem to be rising steeply. Since methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2, this could, perhaps, maybe, result in the end of the ice age that we’re currently in… within a few decades. The one good thing is that methane does not have a long lifespan, getting oxidized within a few years. But that’ll only help if the methane release – which seems to be coming from African wetlands – stops. of course, if the climate suddenly gets way hotter, the African wetlands releasing methane via decomposition of dead vegetable matter might turn into desert area, resulting in the eventual end of the methane release. Which means within a dozen or so years of that the methane will have burned out and the climate can descend back into good ol’ ice age status. *Proper* ice age, with glaciers covering continents and land bridges everywhere. This will be aided by the fact that humans will have been largely wiped out at that point. Doubtless industrial civilization will have either moved off-world or simply been exterminated; and with no easy access to oil or coal anymore, anthropogenic CO2 emissions will be minimal.
Yaaaaaay.
Sep 012023
A sad percentage of my cyanotypes fail… faded, blurry or spotty. Sometimes these failure are due to bad craftsmanship; sometimes to material deficiencies, and surprisingly often, environmental factors (humidity has wreaked havoc, see the “spots”). Mostly these get simply tossed, meaning a lot of material, time and effort are wasted.
But it occurred to me that while they’d stink as proper blueprints, they might make dandy giftwrapping paper. So I’ll try that. I’m thinking of ebaying this lot of A-12 diagrams. These are all about 24X36 inches. Five sheets; if these were all successful, that’d be more than three hundred dollars worth of blueprints. Obviously not worth that, some fraction. And instead of being mailed rolled, they’ll be simply folded and sent in a padded envelope. If interested, send an email. 
If I get an offer that overcomes my depression at the failure these otherwise represent, that’d be great. Otherwise, ebay.
Sep 012023
The rewards for August, 2023, have been released. They include:
Document: Report No. ZD-013, “Preliminary Detail Specification for United States Navy Class VP Long Range Patrol Seaplane,” Convair, 1 April 1946
Document: “Space Shuttle: What Will It Do?” A 1970’s brochure describing the Shuttle, with six full-color full page illustrations
Art: McDonnell-Douglas lithograph of “NASA Earth Orbital Space Station”
CAD Diagram: Northrop Grumman Next Generation Long Range Strike
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
And as happens far too often, I’ve been remiss in my PR campaign. The rewards for July, released a month ago, included:
Document: “C-5 Galaxy Pocket Guide,” brochure giving info on the C-5
Document: GDIC-64 O29-21, “Alighting Gear Convair Model 48 Light Armed Reconnaissance Airplane,” an illustrated report on the landing gear for Convairs competitor for the OV-10
Document: “Police Department Lecture #3 Effects of Atomic Weapons,” an early-50’s paper describing what NYC could expect int he event of a nuclear strike
Diagram: EMW “Wasserfall,” German WWII surface to air guided missile
CAD Diagram: Boeing 2707-100-derived bomber
Aug 312023
It’s well known that a lot of cops are not great people. Ill tempered, quick to anger and violence, ready to smack someone around, break rules, break laws, corrupt, willing to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Why are they like this? Well, part of it is doubtless due to some of them having been not great people before they were cops, and were drawn to being a cop by the allure of power. But then there are doubtless other not great cops who started off as great people, intending to protect and serve. And then they spend years encountering the very worst of society. Murders, rapists, thieves, Socialists, the worst of the worst. This has got to grind a person down. But it seems to me that even more damaging to a cops psyche are the run of the mill scumbags they run into more commonly than TV-movie villains. People who are riding the Dunning-Kruger effect *hard,* marrying stupidity with unearned entitlement. Making every second of the interaction a misery. People like these specimens:
And then you get the lunatics, the type who are celebrated by our social betters, but who really aught to be in loonie bins:
Said it before, will say it many, many more times: we need phasers with stun settin
Aug 312023
Before there was the Budweiser Disaster, there was Gillette. Back in 2019 they released one of the worst ads in history… a company whose primary market was men used an ad to tell men that they were evil for being men. This, unshockingly, did not result in an increase in sales. It did do some damage to the brand and to their stock price, but nothing like what happened to Bud; perhaps this indicates a shift in the culture, with sane people beginning to realize their power to boycott.
I thought the ad was simply bad planning married to bad marketing. But then, I don’t spend my time trying to analyze propaganda techniques (perhaps if I did, I’d have better sales). However, this feller seems to have a channel devoted to such things, so, perhaps somewhat delayed, he went through the ad almost frame by frame. He came up with some interesting discoveries and conclusions, both about what was done and what was done wrong.
Aug 262023
Tony Landis has just released – for free – his book on the F-16XL:
https://wss.apan.org/public/AFMC-History-Office/Shared Documents/F-16XL Book_Final-web (1).pdf
It’s a 285-page heavily illustrated PDF; highly recommended. It will soon also be available as a paperback through Amazon:
Neat.
