South Africa: not even once.
Jul 142020
Jul 132020
Grant Imahara, Host of ‘MythBusters’ and ‘White Rabbit Project,’ Dies at 49
Forty-nine, huh. Well, damn.
Jul 132020
Larmarckian evolution, or Lamarckian inheritance, is a discredited, obsolete idea that the traits parents pass on to their offspring came not from genetics, but from physical exertion that the parents carried out. The usual example given is that if the giraffe, which, under Lamarckian thinking, got its long neck because generations of giraffes stretched out their necks real long to reach treetops. Lamarckism arose in the decades before Darwin and was largely discredited by the end of the 19th century…. but Stalin was enamored of the idea due to Trofim Lysenko. Lysenkos ideas became Soviet policy with regards to agriculture, and as a result the USSR suffered crop failures and famines in the 1930’s when they should have been getting fat and bloated on glorious harvests.
By the 21st century, anyone buying into Lamarckism is a dull-witted as someone buying into Flat Earth or evils spirits rather than germs. So imagine my complete lack of surprise to hear that the latest bit of idiocy being promoted is the Lamarckian concept that since American slaves prior to the 1960s were usually sleep deprived, their ancestors 150 years later are sleep deprived as a result and deserve to be given all the time off they might possibly want for naps and vacations.
Black Power Naps Is Addressing Systemic Racism in Sleep
What’s especially hilarious is that the people behind this are claiming that they aren’t getting the sleep they should because they’re spending so much time out in the streets protesting.
We really are not only in the Crazy Times, but the Stupid Ages. People are strenuously and often violently demanding that they be given things that with even a moments cogitation they’d realize will only harm them. Demands that an entire racial group be given the ability to go on permanent vacation will not lead to the betterment of that group. Betterment comes not through relaxation, but from hustle.
Jul 132020
If you get fired for your religion, race, sex… you can sue the bejeebers out of your former employer, and chances are good you’ll win settlements painful enough to make them not do that again. In fact, the legal protections are strong enough that if a mob of activists protested your employer to fire you because of your religion or race, even the weakest-willed of employers will probably stand strong at least for a little while. But if you are guilty of expressing politically unpopular opinions and the woke mob shows up… chances are quite good that your employer will eject you more or less instantly. But… what if political views had the same protection under law as religious views?
To stop ‘cancel culture,’ protect people’s viewpoints under civil rights law
One might argue that “political viewpoints are nothing at all like race or disability.” That’s true. But political viewpoints are a *lot* like religious viewpoints. They are, in fact, pretty much exactly the same, just with different labels.
Jul 132020
So CBS All Access released the first trailer for the new Star Trek animated show premiering in August…
I remain unconvinced that spending money on CBS All Access makes any kind of sense. Sure, *finally* CBS made a Star Trek show that looks like the designers have actually seen an episode or two of Star Trek before… the ships and shuttles and tech all look like they’d fit into the TNG timeframe. But CBS does not yet seem to have figured out how to *write* Star Trek. This is a trailer, so it should contain some of the best stuff… and since the show is supposed to be a comedy, the trailer should be funny. But yet…
Pass.
Sigh. Used to be a time when “This new Star Trek Movie or show looks not good” would fill me with righteous indignation that the franchise was being degraded and squandered. Now it just fills me with a gray nothingness.
Cancel all the Trek. Collect all the rights back into one place, let Trek sit fallow for three to five years… then give it to Seth Macfarlane. It’s the only way to be sure.
Jul 132020
Before 9/11, I *liked* flying cross-country. But after that it quickly became not only annoying, but physically painful as I was forever getting shoved into seats with nowhere near enough legroom. A flight a couple years back, after a gap of several years, convinced me that I was correct in my disdain for modern flying.
Then the Commie Cough comes along, and now you have to assume that you are going to catch whatever boogems are being spewed by all the other people trapped in that metal tube with you.
And *now* you have to worry about religious Antifa/BLM-worshipping nutjobs:
Unruly Passenger Forces Alaska Airlines A320 Back To Seattle
“I will kill everybody on this plane unless you accept Jesus was a black man.”
Special.
The feller, who at least wore his facemask, appears to be a white guy. There’s no zealot quite as zealous as the recent convert; I assume that this guy is therefore a convert to the religion of BLM. Flying out of Seattle, he may well have been one of those recent CHAZ/CHOP losers.
There is a video there of the incident that is well worth watching.
The other passengers react as well as you could expect… there doesn’t seem to be any panicking, but they do put a stop to the incident and everybody seems to remain reasonably calm and rational. The loon is put down by a pair of passengers *notably* bigger than he is. I hope the airline at least bought them some beers.
That said, “calm” and “rational” are sure to be personality traits that our cultural betters will soon tell us are inappropriate:
Co-founder of BLM Vancouver says that ‘reliability’ and ‘loyalty’ are white supremacist concepts
Vancouver is a stones-throw from Seattle. This is the same Vancouver that is criminally investigating the appearance of tire tracks on a cross-walk as a “hate crime”. Must be something in the water out there.
I expect that I will never again leave the surface of the Earth. For a former aerospace engineer who grew up wanting to be an astronaut and who earned a private pilots license… this realization seems a bit disconcerting.
Jul 132020
In the face of incessant yapping about “white fragility… behold:
The Unintentional Racism Found in Traffic Signals
Where the heroic, strong and brave – and not the least bit fragile – author of the piece whines about the fact that traffic signals have a “little white man,” and how much he hates asking a little white man for permission to cross a street.
The author does make a useful point: used to be a time when crosswalk signals weren’t simplistic icons of walking humanoids, but the actual words “WALK” and “DON’T WALK.” As some point that changed because were can’t rely on people being able to read… certainly not being able to read *English.*
Jul 122020
No, this is not about how the news media is distorting and underplaying important facts to sell a dishonest narrative, but about modern architecture and how it’s… well… awful.
As an engineer, for me function is far more important than form. Building a supersonic aircraft to look “cool” is insane because the margins of performance and profit are narrow enough as-is. But *buildings?* Civil engineering has big fat margins. Here you have the capacity to make things actually seem livable and comfortable. So modern architecture which *looks* like soulless boxes of cheap concrete and metal and glass are, at best, wasted opportunities.
Jul 112020
I learned a new word today. “Bardcore” are modern pop songs redone in a medieval style. The results are… interesting.
This one is lesser, but still interesting:
Jul 112020
The big news – apart from whatever Trump is tweeting about, Bidens handlers are telling the press to ignore, and the rise of the fascist Marxists – is the Commie Cough and how the United States is doing such a monumentally, criminally bad job of handling the pandemic that the ChiComs dumped on us. To buttress that narrative, the data generally pointed out is new cases per day, which does indeed look bad (per http://www.91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/):
And the *total* number of cases normalized by population:
In both cases, the US looks *really* bad. We are right near the top of the chart in terms of the percent of our population that has caught the Pinko Pox and continues to come down with it. We looks like the freakin’ third world. But then… there’s another metric that seems kinda important that doesn’t seem to get mentioned so much… the mortality rate. BEHOLD:
The US has a current mortality rate of about 4%, with a max near 6%. That’s bad…. but it’s also the lowest one on the chart. Canada is 8%. Sweden more than 7%. Italy is above 14%, France above 15% and Britain and Belgium are pushing 16%.
The data seems to indicate that more Americans are catching WuFlu, but fewer are dying. I suspect the truth is more along the lines of differences in testing and reporting. But if it’s therefore not accurate to say that the US is doing better than everybody in the mortality sweepstakes, then it’s equally invalid to ramble on about how bad we such in preventing the pandemic in the first place.