September 10, 2018
Bottled Water and Generators.
I haet them
Amusingly enough, in addition to all the hurricane supplies, today at work we shipped a surprisingly large number of snow shovels and bags of rock salt.
"So...there's just a "WEATHER! " button for these contingencies then?"
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September 09, 2018
Razorfist on Immigration
This video is a year old, done by a youtube shock-jock, is littered with profanity, and, yet, somehow turns out to be an exceedingly reasonable, and even nuanced take on the issue....with a somewhat unexpected perspective.
I was particularly surprised to learn that in addition to Heavy Metal, comic books, video games and cussing; Razorfist's hobbies include building houses for homeless people south of the border.
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Battening Down 2
It's still a week out, but this one is looking bad. It's very likely Florence will be CAT 4 or worse when it makes landfall. Meanwhile the ground here is saturated. There are still streets impassable due to high water and power is out in a few places due to a string of back to back rainstorms. As I type this, it is about to rain again.
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The situation is similar at my parents house down between Cape Hatteras and Wilmington, so I'm assuming those conditions extend from Norfolk to Wilmington. This means when the hurricane dumps its rain the ground will be soup. When 80 -100 knot winds arrive (let alone full cat 4 winds, which will cover a limited area) it will be knocking over trees, power poles, streetlights and causing taller buildings to settle and topple.
This storm is not getting as much coverage as it warrants and people seem oblivious to the menace that is approaching, Certainly, I'm not seeing anything like the sense of urgency I witnessed in the week before Isabel hit.
If this system follows its predicted path and has winds even 2/3 as high as predicted then this storm has the potential to be a first order catastrophe.
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September 08, 2018
Meanwhile: On Drudge
Drudge has not updated his web design since 1996 and almost never removes anything from his list of newsfeeds.
Curiously, Apple News and Google News seem to be missing all of a sudden in exactly the same way Info-Wars isn't.
Huh.
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Battening Down
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September 05, 2018
Stein's Gate
Stein's Gate is a series from 2011 that was popular and fairly well regarded. I'd missed it at the time, but as the one reported beacon of goodness in the vast wasteland that is this season is a sequel to that show, I decided to check it out before starting Sten's Gate Zero.
This turned out to be a sound decision, not only because Stein's Gate Zero makes exactly zero sense without the prequel, but because Stein's Gate is a very neat show.
The story begins with Rintaro Okabe and Itaru Hashida two nerdy male college students and Mayuri Shiina, a moe-blob cosplayer. They run a small applied sciences lab in an apartment rented over a used electronics store. Their current project involves a highly modified food service microwave oven which has been modified to operate via cell phone and internet connection. As the dumpster derived device had no working magnetron, they're also working on a magnetron analog of their own design which is performing...rather erratically.
When two of them decide to go to a physics lecture being given by a controversial scientist, they bump into Kurisu Makise, a neuroscience graduate student on summer break from her studies in the U.S.
And then things get weird.
This is an odd show with all sorts of overused cliche's, gratuitous fanboy references and adult onset Chuunibyou.
It also manages to be absolutely riveting.
In the course of 24 episodes our band of 3 nerdy tinkerers and their otaku shield bearers find themselves involved with a whole slew of science weirdness, international conspiracies, the Akihabara chamber of commerce, the Large Hadron Collider and...traps.
Be advised that the superficial wackieness serves as comic relief and a tension breaker. This is dark science fantasy. The story is absolutely gut wrenching at times, almost to the point of sadism in some scenes. However, the characters are endearing and there is a most definite thread of hope that runs through the whole show.
All the characters tend to have surprising (often hidden) depths. My only complaint is that Kurisu Makise, the awesome female lead is somewhat underutilized, at least at first.
All in all, I quite enjoyed Stein's Gate. It's smart, enjoyable and full of surprises.
Aside from the caveat that you go in understanding that it is occasionally quite brutal, I highly recommend this series.
It's just really well done.
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September 03, 2018
Oddly Enough, I have Mixed Emotions About This Headline
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Orion Space Battleships Could Still be Built in a Nuclear Space Race
An Orion Spaceship, albeit not a battleship drawn by Adrian Mann
Next Big Future gives a concise overview of the Orion Project, though aside from the headline no explanation for why the political hurdles to nuclear pulsed propulsion might be overcome.
Note that as I type this, the post over there seems to stop in mid-sentence while discussing Casaba Howitzers.
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September 01, 2018
Speculative Technology in Sci-Fi
Sometimes it doesn't age well..
I've started watching Stein's Gate a well regarded series from 2011 that I'd never gotten around to. There's a short bit in the first episode where we learn that one of the future technologies our scientist protagonists are working on is household appliances that can be remotely operated by cellphone.
Alas. No one went back in time and warned them about the internet of things.
That aside, I must say that, one episode in, this show has me quite effectively hooked.
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Panopticon Peculiarities
Two weeks ago I noted that I'd been logged into You-Tube automatically and found in the course of some browsing, a number of surprisingly risque MMD videos. I'd half-joked that teh Googleplex was thus made aware of my observation of certain MMD channels of debatable societal merit.
Last night I got an alert that some site I was unfamiliar with had published another video. I initially ignored it as a phishing scheme, but later looked up the site name through You tube search and discovered that it was one of the aforementioned sites.
Now I double checked and I'm subscribed to two channels...both of them safe for work.
So I'm getting alerts for these male gaze oriented channels, which would not be an issue if not for the fact that this means I'm on Google's perv list.
I really can never get married now.
One odd bit. The Channel in question, seems to have had several updates since my initial visit, though this was the first new content alert I'd gotten from it.
The channel is here if you are interested in doing scholarly research of this troubling privacy issue...or perhaps low gravity fluid dynamics. It is likely to be of dubious utility for researching anatomy since I don't think boobs work that way.
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August 31, 2018
Oh.
Well, this seems newsworthy.
The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command is investigating a serious equipment and ammunition theft from the US Army’s Fort Hood base. A quantity of ammunition and Chemical, Biological, Radological and Nuclear equipment has been stolen from a storage cage at Fort Hood in Texas.
It looks like the quantity of ammo was 480 rounds, hardly a massive arsenal (about a day at the range). It might, or might not be significant that in contrast to the 9mm rounds, the type of 5.56 ammo was not disclosed. Still, even assuming some armor piercing-explosive 22 round, it seems that the radiological equipment would be of greater concern.
More on this here.
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August 30, 2018
Meanwhile; In Space
It appears that the ISS was hit by a micrometeorite.
Actually, it looks the Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station was hit.
NASA image via
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Meanwhile; In Florida
A family was being pestered by a large monitor lizard and hired a trapper to deal with the invasive reptile.
Yesterday the trappers trap tripped and trapped a tetrapod. Sadly, said tetrapod was not a big lizard but something far, far worse.
A cane toad.
Florida now has a case of the Cane Toads.
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August 29, 2018
Many Many Rockets
A really big truck with a whole lot of Turkish T-122 rockets.
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Ah!
Some of us have been wondering what exactly is up down under and have strongly suspected that we'd missed something obvious.
Now that we've received a detailed explanation from the people on scene, it appears that the one detail we were wondering about is actually lacking a generally accepted explanation.
This is both reassuring and of some concern.
For we live in interesting times.
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August 28, 2018
Slightly Less Fun Than the Last Post
This video is three years old and it looks like Extra Credits was not only ahead of the curve on this story, but, due to their area of expertise, had some very interesting perspectives about the Chinese social credit system. The video also has some facinating bits of info regarding the Orwellian nightmare in question that haven't been widely reported.
One of the entities that runs the SCS is Tencent, the company that owns Riot Games, Epic Games and... Blizzard.
Furthermore, it looks like a couple of specific features of the social credit system seem to have been given beta tests in Blizzard's popular MMO, World of Warcraft.
The whole social credit system is the stuff of nightmares, but the fact that western game companies are so heavily involved in the development of this is even more worrying as this has some...implications.
Perhaps Twittermobs are a beta test to explore more social manipulation of a more kinetic nature.
This might sound paranoid. And you might think to yourself "That's retarded!" ...but if you didn't just think that...but you tweeted it, well, then you just got banned.
So who's retarded now?
UPDATE: OK, so you so you just got suspended for a week. These things add up.
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August 27, 2018
See?...SEE? It Could Have Been Fun!
Art by Ueyama Michirou: Buy his stuff here.
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August 24, 2018
Low-Brow High-Energy
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THIS JUST IN: Stupidity Still Rampant
more...
"He should change his name to Jack"
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August 22, 2018
I Blame The Lawyers
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August 21, 2018
Today's Facebook Follies
Facebook is instituting a TRUST-RATING FEATURE because their Panopticon is not just creepy enough yet.
Oh look! They're helping India weed out online purveyors of unpopular views. How...civic minded of them.
It looks like Facebook is all about civics today! They're suspending and doxxing politically problematic Latin American moms now.
Also: If your Facebook page gets...big*...then you need to let Facebook know where you live.
People who manage these pages that have significant followings are going to be asked to complete an authorization process in order to keep posting on their page.
"Well...that doesn't have any troubling implications."
Oh lighten up Sarcastic Coffee Girl. It's obvious that the idealistic nerds are just building a road to a glorious** future that we can get a glimpse of in this two year old Wired article and these two pieces that (entirely coincidentally I'm sure) ran on Drudge today.
* definition of "big" is not firmly established at this time.
** definition of "glorious" may involve momentary discomfort.
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