Turkey always seemed an odd choice for NATO membership. Maybe time to rethink where they belong in the grand scheme of things. Sweden and Finland certainly seem like better fits than Turkey.
Much more lore-accurate than the “Sequel Trilogy:”
This feller (somewhere in Asia… somewhere where monkeys are a thing) makes steel-reinforced concrete miniature bridges and similar structures. I wonder at how permanent they are… not exactly because of build quality, but because of the fairly vast footprint they have and the fact that they are anchored not to bedrock but to dirt.
About two years ago I posted about some very deep structures in the Earth near the core; a few years before that, I posted about an “Atlas of the Underworld” showing a bunch of subducted former continents. There is a new theory about those deeper structures: they are remnants of Theia, the Mars-sized planet that plowed into Earth billions of years ago and shot out the rubble that became the Moon.
I suggested the faint possibility that hundreds of millions of years ago some Terrestrial species evolved to intelligence, built themselves a civilization and then got wiped out, their continent then being subducted. A hundred kilometers down there may be the superheated remnants of some ancient civilization. We will almost certainly never be able to go there to pick through the molten or semi-molten rubble… but if they built big enough, and out of the right materials (say, they made *vast* stone pyramids in regular grid patterns) it might just barely be possible that someday advanced tomography of the interior of the planet may detect signs of that civilization. An alien civilization mere kilometers away… and more difficult to get to than the forest world circling Alpha Centauri.
Well… who knows how far things got on Theia before it smacked into Earth. It might have been the seat of a galactic empire. The whole surface of the planet might have been covered with a ten-mile-thick solid city structure and equipped with several levels of orbital rings. And then it hit Earth. A thousand kilometers down, laughably far away, may still reside some of the tougher megastructures built out of heat resistant alloys that mankind hasn’t even come to dream of yet.
Likely? No. Possible? Maybe. An intriguing enough idea that paramount should promptly stop funding STD and STP to instead start work on a series about this ancient civilization? Yes.
The structure imaged above is about the size of the orbit of Mercury. That sounds pretty big… but given the distance to the center of the galaxy, it’s about the same apparent size as a donut on the surface of the moon. Take THAT, “other ways of knowing.”
An earlier video showing stars orbiting around the supermassive black hole. I remain impressed that we can watch stars move from this great distance. The James Webb Space telescope should return some even better footage in the years to come.
Well, here’s another “this is why we can’t have nice things” -ism that Current Year has gifted us:
In short: Women who think they’re pretty, pretending to be stupid and being stupid as a result and bringing everything else down with them.
Playing up stupidity as a way to get out of responsibility is no better than pretending to be a cripple to get out of responsibility. It’s a a scam.
*WOW.* Not a fun day to be a tanker.
Chinese TV crew captures Russian tank turret going rocketing into the sky. A design flaw in many Russian tanks is that the ammo store is directly underneath the turret – if a hit detonates it, the turret goes straight up, sometimes reaching extremely impressive heights, like here pic.twitter.com/Flli1DK4t3
— Euan MacDonald (@Euan_MacDonald) May 11, 2022
Before Star Trek, I was a fan of the 1950’s run of “Tom Swift jr.” books back when I was in grade school. Those were some of the first books I read, kicking off a love of science fiction literature that has lasted for more than forty -five years. The whole idea of A Kid Like Me being a scientific/engineering genius appealed, and undoubtedly played some role in my becoming an aerospace engineer. So just imagine how thrilled I was when I saw this trailer for an Extra Special version of Tom Swift soon to premier as a series on the CW:
I *defy* anyone who read the 1950’s run of Tom Swift to suggest with a straight face that this has any resemblance beyond the name and the concept of “genius inventor.”
Is there any intellectual property that modern Hollywood *can’t* or *won’t* turn into crap? The existence of this series does not negate the original books, of course… but the existence of *this* series negates the possibility of the good series that *could* have been made.
When you over-use and abuse a derogatory word, it loses it’s sting or outright changes its meaning. Remember when “Nazi” used to mean something inherently bad? Now, thanks to Antifa and Putin, it simply means “anyone who disagrees with my insane rants.” The same will happen with “racist.”
