Photos taken at altitude a few weeks back showing the scale of the air pollution produced from the numerous wildfires in Utah, Nevada and California. The first three were from the outbound leg, from Salt Lake to Chicago:
The last three are from the return home, from Dallas to Salt Lake.
That last one shows how the ground vanished under a layer of smoke as the plane passed over the Wasatch/Uinta mountains (i.e. the Walls of Mordor). The mountains run north and south and provide a pretty effective block preventing lower level air pollution from being blown away.
I suspect this was in South Africa. From the looks of it, the homeowner needs something a bit more than an automatic gate to separate herself from the criminal element. The Indian Ocean, maybe.
Flying out of Chicago I caught sight of the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. It’s an impressive sight, even though it is now relatively dinky compared to the likes of the Large Hadron Collider. It was shut down in 2011.
Beginning next year, ammunition dealers across the state will be required to maintain logs of all sales — one of many steps California has taken to limit access to bullets. … Next July, California will begin requiring stores to conduct point-of-purchase background checks on ammunition buyers.
I can buy ammo and magazines at the grocery store. Because this is Utah, and we’re not a pack of crazy cowards, ammunition is no more challenging to buy than a can of soup.And yet, Tremonton has had a total of one murder in the last 53 years.
In the mid-80’s, the Army wanted a light, fast, stealthy and armed helicopter for battlefield recon and the like. It was not meant to be an attack chopped like the AH-64, but rather something much more akin to the OH-58 Kiowa… it would spot the targets and target them, with the missiles like as not coming in from another source. In the end the LHX program resulted in the RAH-66 Comanche… which, as per usual, was cancelled after only a few were built.
While the Comanche was a more or less coventional sort of helicopter, early in the program the requirements were both aggressive enough and vague enough that very unconventional aircraft types were considered. Single-seat NOTAR and tiltrotor concepts were some of the least unconventional of the unconventionals, and those types got a fair amount of press at the time. It’s difficult to be certain just how serious some of them were, though companies like Bell put some considerable effort into tiltrotor ideas.
One image that I saw fairly commonly at the time was in an ad for turbine engine manufacturer Garrett. It’s a wonderful bit of art for engineering types like myself, and I always hoped that it was a serious design… but it was almost certainly not. Rather, it was either art-department guesswork or, at best, a notional design put forward by an engine company to show to aircraft manufacturers what their engines could do. It shows a single-seat design (the Comanche ended up being a two-seater, because flying a helicopter is difficult enough without the added burden of futzing around with sensors and weapons) with Kamov-style counter rotating rotors, stub wings and numerous air-to-air missiles. The Soviet Hind helicopter was giving NATO conniptions at the time, and an important role for the LHX was to sweep those flying battlewagons from the sky. The design is also shown as having a tilt-rotor option… something that would be truly unique in the history of aviation design. The tail of the craft (if any – it might have been meant to be a really, really stubby aircraft) is not shown, probably because it was never designed. I’d love to be wrong, though… teenage-me loved this thing back in the day.
A couple photos I took during the nearly empty showing of “2001” in an IMAX theater a few weeks back. Nothing terribly meaningful, but possibly interesting. Looks like two projectors projecting the same thing. Without going to the hardship of Googling it and finding out for sure, my supposition is simply that two projectors create an image twice as bright as one projector. Possibly this is a 3D projector being put into service for 2D in this fashion. Gotta make sure that the projectors are aligned to a microscopic degree, though, or otherwise the image would be blurry.
Now, if you’re a modern moviegoer, your first thought upon watching this will be to note that the cast seems to not have the adequate level of diversity. Outrage! For example: Colin Firth was chosen to play Royal navy commodore David Russell. What’s wrong with Margaret Cho? And Max von Sydow is playing – according to IMDB – Boris Yeltsin. But couldn’t they have gotten someone like Donald Glover to play a more diverse, woke and pansexual Yeltsin?
Say what you will about the style of presentation, the arguments laid out in the video below about the importance of adhering to established canon in our common cultural myths – Star Trek, Star Wars and the like – are hard to dispute.
The willingness of so many property owners to violate their own canon (an example given in the video is “Star Trek Discovery” Klingorks having a cloaking device ten years before the Romulans invented the thing) is irritating on a number of levels But for me, there are two primary sources of annoyance:
1: The cognitive dissonance, the destruction of the possibility of willing suspension of disbelief
2: The pure laziness of it.
One of the reasons why I prefer *good* science fiction to *good* fantasy is that science fiction lives in a world of rules. Even if you have established that your spaceships have hyperdrives, grav plating and deflector shields (all things that violate currently understood laws of physics), you still have rules… the laws of physics may be different in Star Trek than in reality, but Scotty will still point out to you that those laws exist. If you box your characters into a corner, they can only get out by working within the system. In fantasy, you can have magical crap happen that comes out of the blue. The wizard pulls an obscure spell out of his grimoire. A ghost walks through the wall and drags the bag guy to Hell. That sort of thing. Being forced to work within the established rules makes the writer be smarter, which makes the characters smarter.
Similarly, not violating established canon of timelines and character background and character *appearance* may make things marginally more difficult for new writers in a franchise… but that difficulty forges better product. Let’s imagine that there was an Arbiter Of Star Trek Canon who had the legal ability to utterly quash anti-canon stuff. The creators of STD would have had a massive problem. No “spore drive.” no cloaking device. No Klingons who suddenly care very deeply about the corpses of their dead and who eat their enemies. No ships that look not only far more advanced than those in TOS, but which barely look like they belong in the same universe. These and other rulings would have pretty much doomed STD as a prequel series. But you know what? Make it a post-Voyager sequel series and a lot of these objections go away. A *lot* of the fanbase would have been a whole lot happier.
Only touched upon in the video is the politics of canon-busting. If you make a sequel series to some sci-fi series from the mid 70’s that virtually nobody remembers and you decide to mess with the established canon…w ell, really, who cares. By definition it had little to no cultural impact.But if you meddle with Star Trek or James Bond or Superman, you’re meddling with something of great importance to not only individual fans but to the culture at large. This is not exactly revelatory. So if someone is changing a “cultural myth,” you have to wonder *why,* especially when there’s no good reason for them to do so… apart from political reasons. And when they respond to your opposition with accusations that have nothing to do with your opposition… then you know.
