A physics simulator that allows you to drive, and smash cars up, on other planets. With gravity levels ranging from “Pluto” to “Sun.”
I don;t have the game, and what with the difficulty I’ve had with Steam in the past (basically you have to play the game on the machine you download the game on, which doesn’t work for me since I use a low-end pawn shop chromebook for the internet and my actually capable machines are perpetually unconnected tot he internet) I won’t be getting it, but BeamNG Drive does indeed look like a hoot. Seem that racing other players on the surface of Mars would be quite a novel experience.
As described here, this HC-130H was configured for rescue operations using the Fulton Skyhook. More information, including links to videos, can be found here.
So, CBS All Access finished up their run of “Star Trek: Picard,” and it was apparently such a rousing success that in a desperate bid to get *anyone* to watch it they’ve made it free to watch until April 23. Well, what with lockdowns and working on the computer and such, what they hell, I binge watched the series.
Summary: five “mehs” out of ten.
There are a number of reviewers out there who can give you chapter and verse about how STP craps all over Trek… and they’re not wrong. Taken as a followup to TNG, it just lands with a baffling thud. Pretty much everything is just “off” enough to grate, like someone dragging their nails on the chalkboard two rooms down. And since these reviewers are better at that sort of thing than I am, I’ll let their reviews speak for themselves at the end. I will instead focus on two things… one bad, one good.
The bad: starship design. The ships that appear in STP are video game generic ships for the most part. The Hero Ship looks like it could have come out of damn near any video game from the last 20 years, and were you to see it outside of the Trek context there’s almost no chance you’d think that it belonged in Trek. Worse: not only do the shuttlecraft from Star Trek: Discovery make several appearances, the mutant STD All Wrong Enterprise NCC-1701 *also* shows up in the form of a prominent holographic display. Thus “Picard” takes place in the STD timeline, not the TOS/TNG timeline. This can be used to explain why everything seems wrong: because everything *is* wrong.
The Romulan ships that show up, everything from small fighter-like designs on up to capitol ships, do not look remotely like Romulan ships. With the exception of a TOS-era Bird of Prey that shows up briefly under the control of some sort of space pirate, once again you’d likely never guess that these were meant to be Romulan ships unless you were tipped off by the green coloration.
Starfleet almost never appears. Near the end of the last episode, though, an entire fleet of Starfleet vessels shows up. Huzzah! The ships actually look like something more or less Starfleety. But… there are hundreds of ships, and they are THE SAME EXACT DESIGN. Feh.
OK, the good.
As the ten-episode series drags ponderously onward, it becomes clear that STP is as much Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror as Star Trek. Attend:
1: There is an ancient secret left behind by a vanished race.
2: The secret is held by a secret society
3: Most of the people who learn the secret promptly lose their fricken’ minds… one caps herself with a pistol, another rips her face up with her fingernails, another bashes her noggin in with a convenient rock.
4: And the nature of the secret? There are vast elder beings out there in the dark beyond the stars just waiting for the time to be right to come back here and lay waste.
5: There are cultist-like folks (a small number of folks almost completely lacking visible character traits) yearning for just that to happen.
6: How does the great evil come back? By way of a portal that the cultists open up.
7: And when the great evil starts to come through the portal, what do we get?
Now, I’m all in favor of blending Star Trek with Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror. Hell, that’s a little project I’ve been pecking away at for probably well over a year now, complete with dozens of pages of text, 3D CAD models and gravity maps of things that distort spacetime (it involves something that makes Vulcans go buggo when they come to understand The Secret). But to have a proper blending of Cthulhu and Trek, ya *gotta* have proper Trek. And Picard just ain’t. Never mind the design issues I raised, it’s just wrong. And here’s a hint as to why:
See, now, *no.* If you start off Trek with the intention of annoying the fans… what the hell is wrong with you. So they could have had something really interesting, but ended up with the sound of something large, squishy and uninteresting going “splat.” So, in summary… a wasted opportunity. Pretty much like all Trek since 2009.
It seems that the 150,000 test kits sold to the Czech Republic have a failure rate of 80%, while the 9,000 kits tested in Spain show a 70% failure rate.
Seems unlikely that this was an intentional ploy by the Chinese; it’s much too small to make a major impact on the western world. But it does demonstrate an apparently massive failure in design, manufacture, methodology… something. It demonstrates that it is time to withdraw all medical manufacturing from China. Letting the ChiComs have *any* influence with or power over the welfare of the west is *insane* to a damn-near criminal degree.
All those self-important publicity-hounds cranking out insipid selfies and ridiculous little videos… if you want to produce something of actual value, try something like this:
The X-34 was the first aerospace project I worked on after graduation. Sadly, one week after I was hired to work on the X-34 the whole program was cancelled. “Welcome to aerospace, kid. Here’s your layoff… last one in, first one out.” Feh. Anyway, Orbital Sc iences proposed two vehicles:
1: The X-34A was a small-ish vehicle carried under the same Lockheed L-1011 jetliner that OSC used to launch the Pegasus. The X-34 needed greater volume than the Pegasus, but since there was limited clearance under the L-1011, the X-34A had a wide lifting body-like fuselage.
2: The X-34B was a larger, better optimized vehicle to be launched from atop a Shuttle-carrying 747.
Both the A and B models had payload bays that would contain an upper stage and an orbital payload. Neither was built (apart from a full scale mockup of the A); after the program was cancelled it came back as the X-34C. the C model *was* built, but it never flew.
I am a naturally pessimistic feller. I prefer to think of it as holding to proper engineering standards: engineering tells you with certainty that some things WILL fail, some things WON’T work… what it won’t tell you is that something is assured of success, but only “probably.” When you can see a hundred ways in which a situation cannot work and only a few ways in which it might, this makes you a good engineer, but also someone that other people find kind of a bummer to hang around. Still, while I’m focusing on the worst case projections and looking forward to a likelihood of a dim personal future (because failure to recognize how things can go terribly wrong leads you to walking directly into terrible things), I expect the American people to be able to deal with this problem the way we’ve dealt with so many others. Yes, the government can certainly help, but as with FDR’s Depression Extension Programs and LBJ’s Eternal War To Perpetuate Poverty, the government is a dubious ally at best. But when the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people is unleashed, there are few things we cannot tackle.
An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19
See how the US infection rate looks like a fairly straight line? Yeah…. that ain’t good. On a logarithmic chart like this, “straight line” means “incoming ᛋᚺᛁᛏᛋᛏᛟᚱᛗ thanks to the magic of compound interest.” A daily growth factor of 1.35 works out to a factor of 8.17 per week, or 8,129 in thirty days. There are currently about a thousand dead in the US. What’s one thousand times eight thousand?
In a month, we should be in an interesting new era. Hopefully it’s one where testing and isolation has flattened the growth rate enough that the death rate drops substantially… but given how freakin’ stupid so many people are, holding “COVID Parties” and the like, I wouldn’t bet large sums on the optimistic outcome. That said, the pessimistic outlook will probably mean the death of somewhere around one to two percent of the population. Heartless though it may be to say, most of those lost will likely be of the “economically unproductive” classes, and the country should be able to pick itself back up. But as the Black Death resulted in societal upheaval due to the survivors tossing the prior institutions and partying themselves into the Renaissance, and the Spanish Flu walled the west into the Roaring Twenties, our own Roaring Twenties could be interesting. With luck people will realize the value of self reliance. Concepts such as mass transit, high population density urban centers, gun control, celebrity worship, dependence upon the government will, if there is any wisdom in mankind and justice in the universe, fade away as the bad ideas that they are.
If there’s one thing that celebrities seem to need, it’s the spotlight. And thus when there’s a crisis like the Wuhan Coronavius Kung Flu Chinese Communist Attempt To Kill Us All, the celebrity class can be relied upon to crank out self-aggrandizing pap in an effort to stay in the public eye. The vast majority of such can be either ignored or paid attention to solely to be laughed at… and not because those making it are trying to make it funny.
But then you get the rare celebrity like Ryan Reynolds who has an *actual* sense of both humor and proportion, while still maintaining that urge to publicize himself.
