Heh.
Mar 182023
Mar 182023
“Zipline” is an American company specializing in drone delivery systems. While package delivery via drone has been promised in the US for some years, Zipline has been operating successfully in Rwanda since 2016 as a medical supplies (meds and blood) delivery system. And it seems to work *really* well… something like 90 seconds from receipt of order to launch of the drone, which flies at 60+ mph at a radius of up to 50 miles, delivering up to 4 pounds of payload via parachute. Since startup, Zipline has made over 20 million miles of flights. This system seems not only remarkable successful, but remarkably efficient to run; their main distribution center launches 500 drones a day, and they’ve made this Really Neato System as run of the mill as SpaceX is making launch vehicle recovery.
While this is great for emergency deliveries in rural Africa, it would not be a great system for package delivery in American cities and suburbs… you want your package *delivered,* not dropped, and delivered accurately, not somewhere in a dozen yards radius. A big enough quad/octocopter could over course do this, landing right on your porch and dropping off the box. This type of drone delivery has been proposed for years, but there are obvious problems. First, the things are *LOUD.* Second, all those blades spinning about would pose a hazard to people, pets, property. Third… have you *seen* city folk? Chances are real good that in the half second it takes to land and drop off, some “youths” would spring upon it, not only stealing the package but beating the drone to death with baseball bats. Because that’s where we are now, I guess.
Zipline has what looks like a decent answer to those, though. They still use a big quadcopter, but it lowers a “gondola” up to 400 feet. The gondola has some basic maneuver capability, but no more than needed for translation; all the lift is provided by the main drone. This keeps the “loud” and “dangerous” far overhead. And with the “loud” further away, there’s less chance of Cultural Enrichment spotting it and ambushing it. Additionally, their 50-pound drones are *really* quiet due to special props.
Below is an interesting video on the topic, covering both systems. There is definite cringe… the YouTube goes to Rwanda to see it in action, which is fine; he somehow finagled his way into the operations system, working to get an order processed and launched, which is fine, but his “I just saved a life!” schtick gave me a headache.
The military applications for this are obvious, but somehow were left completely out of the video. Never mind the dullsville of dropping off medical supplies or even ammunition… Zipline has figured out how to make a nearly silent drone delivery system. An inherently quiet drone with a sensor platform/bomb pod suspended 500 feet below it? You could likely drift along over a trench at night, the gondola maybe only ten feet up, dropping off small care packages as you go. The drone itself would be virtually silent, and so far up that it would be virtually impossible to shoot down with small arms. Ordnance that was set to go off via timer or remote activation would allow this to scatter bomblets around and set them all off at once. Or, heck, just pack the gondola with high explosives, napalm, thermite, WP, drift it right up to somebody or something your really don’t like and BLAMMO. Won’t hurt the drone none.
Mar 172023
I’ve added some more things to my eBay: “Dynascott.” There are some new cyanotypes, some books, a piece of vintage NASA test equipment that I bought *years* ago to serve as a prop for The Alternate History Movie That Shall Not Be Named. Some cyanotypes I’ve had before; the photos are of the *actual* prints I’m selling. I have more cyanotypes and a lot more books to add soon, but this gets the ball rolling. I’ve included Buy It Now for them.
Large Convair “Super Hustler” Mach 4 bomber Cyanotype Blueprint
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NERVA nuclear rocket engine NASA model construction diagrams Cyanotype Blueprint
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Trident II SLBM Cyanotype Blueprint
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Vintage NASA Hydrogen Detector, General Monitors Model HP1000A
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Northrop B-2A stealth bomber Cyanotype Blueprint
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And some old listings that are still up:
Aerofax Minigraph #14 Lockheed F-94 Starfire by Francillon & Keaveney 1986
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Wasserfall German WWII Surface to air missile Cyanotype Blueprint
Mar 162023
At last, my collection of “Tom Swift Jr.” novels is complete. Since I’m a miser/dirt poor, I was only willing to spend a pittance for each book, but if you wait long enough pretty much everything shows up on ebay.
Woo.
And because why not, here’s the next shelf over:
On a related note: turns out that last year a bit of good news slipped by me un-noticed. The CW a few years ago decided to make a TV series about Tom Swift Jr… it could have been good (I mean, it’s not beyond the bounds of the physically possible), but CW decided instead to make an abomination. The series began airing on May 31, 2022. It was promptly cancelled on June 30, 2022, due to low ratings. And of course: Tom Swift had been turned from a no-nonsense STEM-focused blond blue-eyed teenager with a girlfriend into a flamboyant gay black adult. Thus assuring that the existing fanbase would be uninterested. And who among that fraction of the population for whom “flamboyant gay black man” is a draw would be interested in a crappy sci-fantasy show?
From the Wikipedia article on the series:
Lead actor Richards said of the adaptation, “The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented. At the time, that was the face of young boys, All-American kids full of possibilities. But in 2021, that can look so different. It can look like someone like me—a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo.” He added, “We’re going to dive into so many sectors of identity. We’re going to talk about Blackness—and a different kind of Blackness than we’re used to seeing, which is the Black elite, the 1 percent, the billionaires. We’re also going to talk about a queer boy’s journey into becoming a queer man. Not only self-acceptance, but acceptance as a whole, having the community and people around you.”
Gosh. I wonder why it failed to grab ratings.
Mar 162023
This video from at least 7 years ago lays out some of the reasons why the Russians may well have gotten rather adventurous of late: they are running out of Russians, but they’re not running out of routes to invade Russia. So rather than cultivate good relations with the surrounding nations or get on about the task of making more Russians, they seem to have gone the other route of trying to seize all the invasion routes while they still have a military with which to do it. As the last year of their little two-week “military operation” has shown, that hasn’t gone so well.
Note the “demographic pyramid” he shows here. It lays out the population of Russia by age; a growing population has a wide base of young people, but back when this video was made (circa 2015) Russias base was looking kinda weak. However, it did seem to be growing somewhat:
So how is it looking today?
Oh, dear. It looks like baby-making fell off a cliff right after this guy made his video, so instead of things maybe getting better they’ve gotten much worse.
“Population pyramids” are interesting things to consider. Nations like this with shrinking young uns are in serious trouble; the pyramid for South Korea looks especially dire:
China’s not looking so good:
Nor is Japan:
Iceland, in contrast, looks kinda ok:
but if you really want to see where the population of the future is coming from, you need pyramids that look like this:
Or this:
The nations with wide bases will have greatly increased populations, with greatly increased pressures for those populations to leave and colonize low-population regions. The dying nations will, like Russia, likely try to defend themselves with constantly diminishing human resources, or they will, like much of Europe is currently doing, simply allow themselves to be colonized and replaced, culturally, religiously, ethnically.
Gonna be an interesting century.
Mar 162023
Not every idea pans out.
Virgin Orbit pauses operations for a week, furloughs nearly entire staff as it seeks funding
In a world where SpaceX is doing it’s thing, other small launcher companies had damned well better have a *really* good idea. And while dropping an expendable rocket from a 747 might have been neato-keen in the 1990’s… right now it looks kinda dumb. Sure, the ability to launch from anywhere with a big enough airport is nice… but it doesn’t seem to be enough.
Mar 152023
This is a “cut scene” from a video game (“Star Wars: Squadrons”) and is a few years old… but it’s the best official non-“Rogue One” Star Wars that has come out since Disney bought the franchise.
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.
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.
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.
This video was made almost entirely by AI.
I used ChatGPT to write a script, Midjourney to create reference images, Runway Gen-1 to apply the style of the images to my source video, and Boomy AI for the music.
Workflow breakdown w/ comparisons in thread.
— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) March 14, 2023