Jun 092021
 

An interesting piece of “fan animation” depicting a test flight of a Starship/Superheavy stack with subsequent water landings. I have high hopes that a flight will look this good… but realistically, we can expect a few flights with a bit more energetic ends. And that’s ok: failure is an option here. Failure can be a fantastic teacher. Certainly a far better teach than “not trying.”

Also of note: there are some bits of the animation here that are distinctly not “Hollywood A-Game.” But compare what just a few guys managed to do with, say, the first couple seasons of Babylon 5.  Technology progresses.

 Posted by at 12:54 am
Jun 072021
 

I was under the impression it’d be another couple months before it was available, but I’m hearing that it is starting to show up in Britain. No reviews as yet, though I hope to see some (and obviously hope that they’re positive…).

It is available directly through the publisher for £8.99 (Approx $12.41 or €10.34). It is also available through Amazon for pre-order for $12.99.

 Posted by at 10:47 pm
Jun 072021
 

Arctic animal revived after being frozen for 24,000 years in Siberian permafrost

Small, but multicellular. Along with bacteria and maybe some form of algae, if there is a planet in the Alpha Centauri system capable of harboring life, we might be able to send it there in frozen form. Radiation might raise hell with the DNA of frozen critters; maybe the thing to do is to thaw them out every 500 or 1000 years, let them swim around and eat the sick ones, reproduce, repopulate, freeze and repeat as needed. and hopefully by the time the unmanned slowboat gets to the Alpha Centauri system the lifeforms it has stored will be ready to begin terraforming the local world. Or to be collected and installed in the Centauri City Museum of Ancient Human Artifacts, built by the humans who got there 23,500 years earlier via warp drive and left the place in the care of the AI after the local humans transcended.

 Posted by at 10:39 pm
Jun 072021
 

Gotta admit this surprises me.

First on CNN: US recovers millions in cryptocurrency paid to Colonial Pipeline ransomware hackers

Colonial paid $4.4 million in Bitcoin ransom and the DOJ recovered $2.3 million of it. Details are, unsurprisingly, pretty lean here, but the DOJ suggests that these particular hackers were amateurish and left exploitable back doors open. Thus this sort of recovery of assets probably won’t be the norm. Especially as the West Taiwanese ramp up their efforts to destroy and loot the rest of the world.

I have high, unconquerable and not at all sarcastic faith that that commanding presence, President Joe Biden, will use his tack-sharp iron trap of a strategeristic mind stand up to Putin and put him in his place, getting him to stamp down on the innumerable Russian hacking operations that have caused and will continued to cause trouble for the world economy.

 Posted by at 10:19 pm
Jun 052021
 

NYC shrink tells Yale audience she fantasizes about shooting white people in head

A New York City-based psychiatrist told an audience at the Yale School of Medicine in April that she had fantasies of “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.”

Dr. Aruna Khilanani spewed the race-hating virtual remarks … at the Ivy League institution’s Child Study Center on April 6.

“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f–king favor.”

There’s a lot of Really Interesting Opinions at that and other articles on the subject.

Her profile on the Independent Doctors of NY website seems, oddly, to have vanished. Fortunately, the internet never forgets, and archive.org has it archived from March and before:

Aruna Khilanani, MD, MA
Specialities: Psychiatry
Focus of Practice: Forensic Psychiatry, Grief, Self Esteem, Racial Identity
I am a female academic psychiatrist who has taught at Cornell NYPH, and run a process group for resident physicians at Harlem Hospital. I have a private practice in Morningside Heights of Manhattan, devoted to the treatment of mental illness, psychopharmacology, and psychotherapy. I am also a psychoanalyst. Here, I treat high functioning individuals who have jobs and significant relationships, but may struggle in certain areas that impact their personal or professional lives.

Also gives her address and phone number. Which I suspect will be changed soon, if not already. Now here’s the part that will shock, SHOCK, I SAY, you to your very core:

I completed a Masters of Humanities at the University of Chicago in critical theory, around issues of gender, race, sexuality, African American Studies, embodiment and class.

If you are one of those poor innocents who wonders why some people seem to be up in arms about “critical race theory” and are wondering why it should be excluded from government funding, programs and education… here’s why. CRT makes you racist, sometimes violently so.

Special Achievements/Awards:Arnold P. Gold Foundation: Gold Humanism Honor Society 2006
Golden Key Honors Society
Board Certifications:American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
Forensic Psychiatry (Psychiatry and Neurology)

Somebody might want to look into those. A humanist fantasizing about genocide? Seems an odd mix.

An aside: is “psychiatrist goes insane and turns into a villain” a wider trope than just Harleen Quinzel? Of course given “Doctor” Khilananis course of study it seems she was cuckoo for CRT puffs before she started, so this seems to be more a matter of a loon taking up psychiatry.

 Posted by at 1:11 pm
Jun 052021
 

So, a bit of a “fail” here. As I’ve been working on the books, I’ve had things on in the background, TV and YouTube videos and the such. The perfect thing to have on is something interesting enough to serve as functional background noise, but not interesting enough to distract from the work. The YouTube channel “Fascinating Horror” turned out to be a mistake by that reckoning… every time one of his vids comes on, book productivity grinds to a halt. His videos are descriptions of historical events you may or may not have heard of, events where horrible, horrible things happened. Some, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Carrington Event, resulted in no known deaths. others, like the Halifax Explosion, were mass casualties.

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:54 am
Jun 052021
 

A judge recognizes the Constitution:

The state government reacts as you might expect: “think of the children!”

It’s interesting… as the Biden-Harris cabal continues to claim to want to delete the Second Amendment, more and more states and judges are preemptively going “nah.”

 Posted by at 10:26 am