Edith Hamilton LIED to Me!
For one thing, she gave a completely inaccurate and quite possibly actionable description of Hephaestus.
From episode 2 of Is it OK to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon?. I did not expect to be following this, but, despite some harem overtones (and undertones...and sidetones), is a surprisingly clever and eminently enjoyable yarn thus far.
1
I'm enjoying it, but I'm starting to wonder how they're going to wrap it up. The title for episode 12 is ominous, but that may just be the revelation of Ryu's past.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Mon Jun 15 13:52:20 2015 (fpXGN)
2
Yeah. Ryu is awesome though. I got caught up last night. HOW many episodes is this supposed to be?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Jun 15 16:13:07 2015 (ohzj1)
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13, last I checked, which is good, because they're in book 5 now, and book 8 just came out Friday. Unless they wanted to switch to the Aiz-PoV set of novels or go original, they're done for a while.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Mon Jun 15 17:43:08 2015 (fpXGN)
4
Well then, they only have two episodes left in which to screw this up.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Jun 15 18:42:13 2015 (ohzj1)
5
As far as I can tell from the scattered entries on the Danmachi wikia pages, there are really only two more things that happen in book 5: Ryu reveals her past to Bell, and the girls bathe. Both should be interesting, but neither one really wraps up the show.
Unless the last ten minutes is set to Yakety Sax.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Mon Jun 15 19:07:48 2015 (fpXGN)
6
Higgins!
That's why Ryu is so awesome. She's a female, elven Higgins (from Magnum P.I.). She's this side character who is just a quiet, professional and not very sociable Maître d' at an inn, who is in her deadpan, aspergery way, helpful, despite an occasionally intimidating visage, and who has very useful thoughts on things that a waitress ought not to. Of course then you find out when they've put together the dream team rescue party that "WAIT! We need some legendary talent! Someone go get the waitress." Yeah...She's seen the elephant...many times.
Unless the last ten minutes is set to Yakety Sax.
LOL
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Jun 15 19:47:59 2015 (ohzj1)
Another Great One Passes
As many of you know, Christopher Lee died on June seventh. An exceptional actor who generally played villains, and he was remarkably active into his 90's. Indeed, her started a new career as a heavy metal musician at 88.
He served with distiction in World War 2 and after the war, hunted Nazi war criminals before starting his august acting career. Cdr. Salamander has much more on that and points us to Christopher Lee's impressively long entry over at Badass of the Week.
He's also a 6'5" tall world champion fencer, speaks six languages, does all of his own stunts, has participated in more on-screen sword fights than any actor in history, served for five years defending democracy from global fascism as a British Commando blowing the shit out of Nazi asses in World War II, and became the oldest person to ever record lead vocals on a heavy metal track when, at the age of 88, he wrote, performed on, and released a progressive symphonic power metal EP about the life of Charlemagne ...
Pic Via Bryan Adams/Instagram
A true renaissance man has passed. May he rest in peace. He certainly earned it.
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If they're going to do all this line dancing, why do they never do it to country music?
Pavanes would be nice. I wonder if anybody Scadian is doing anime pavane videos.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Fri Jun 19 13:59:35 2015 (ZJVQ5)
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I looked. Several videos with music called "pavane," but no actual dancing of pavanes.
Here's a good pavane video with live action! The music's Dowland, and "Lachrymae Antiquae" is just his instrumental version of his hit madrigal,"Flow My Tears."
The dancers don't start until about 1:45.
Medieval dancing is usually more fun to do than to watch, and it's more fun to do with people you know well enough to be able to flirt non-seriously with. Hence all the eye stuff, and sometimes people's handclasps or palm touches are also flirty. These dancers manage to convey a lot of that to the audience, too, so they can join in the fun. I'm not great at dancing or socializing, but I always had a lot of fun at SCA dances.
Stick around for the Arbeau galliard on the second bit of the video. One of the guys looks suspiciously like he took an Irish stepdancing class as one point.
Anyway, I don't think I've seen much physics for handholding, pulling along the line of dancers, or swinging of wenches in previous videos, so
possibly that's not there yet.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Fri Jun 19 14:28:30 2015 (ZJVQ5)
3
Well, I decided to run a search instead of just wondering....
<A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKkz4Pp1SSA">Apparently the answer is that anime-ish country line dancing videos tend to get nuked by YouTube</a>, even if the band likes them. But they're out there.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Fri Jun 19 14:55:27 2015 (ZJVQ5)
And I guess I have seen linked arms before, and there are MMD waltzes out there and even whole ballet numbers of pretty high quality, so I guess it's just a lot of work to link hands realistically. I have now seen an awful lot of animations where the models suddenly turn into Kitty Pryde and phase through other models' bodies.
I have also had my brain scarred by the continuing saga of "people who don't look up what medieval European clothing looked like."
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Fri Jun 19 15:35:07 2015 (ZJVQ5)
5
Wait, what.... You're saying that Linedancing is actually real?
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sat Jun 20 02:31:02 2015 (RqRa5)
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No. There is no such thing as line dancing. Its a myth like Mothman or chocolate cornets.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Jun 20 22:59:38 2015 (ohzj1)
From what little I've read, it sounds like the new CEO of Reddit is so wed to political correctness that she doesn't mind destroying her company in its service.
I wonder why the board of directors hasn't stepped in yet. She's only been CEO for a few months but at the rate she's going the company will be dead within a year.
I just read part of the Metafilter thread about this, and my initial impression was wrong.
Apparently the "hate fat people" group wasn't shut down because of political incorrectness and hate speech. It was shut down because it was being used to promulgate attacks on other uses elsewhere on the site. Their announcement says that hateful subreddits are being permitted to continue as long as the people keep their hate in their own back yard.
I have no idea whether that's the case, but I'm willing to sit back and eat popcorn and watch the carnage.
Wait...I Have a Question
Said inquiry is not about what may be the most annoying version of Bad Apple ever, but the video here, IS there actually a licensed Touhou series?
Several fanmade anime had been made for Touhou. An unofficial dÅjin anime project by the dÅjin circle Maikaze, titled A Summer Day's Dream (æ±æ–¹ 夢想å¤éƒ·?), is a fan-made anime adaptation with an original plot featuring Touhou characters, with two episodes released in 2008 and 2012. Albeit created by an amateur studio, the animation project notably featured high-ranking professional voice actors. Another dÅjin anime by the circle Manpuku Jinja, titled Fantasy Kaleidoscope ~ The Memories of Phantasm (幻想万è¯é¡?), was released at Comiket 80 in 2011, with one episode released based on the storyline of Perfect Cherry Blossom. A short derivative animated project, Anime Tenchou x Touhou Project (アニメ店長 x æ±æ–¹Project?) was produced by Ufotable in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Japanese goods chain, Animate, as a promotional video for the store combining the world of Touhou with Animate's mascot, Meito Anizawa.
I found a copy of "Memories of Phantasm" on Youtube and some of the images in your AMV came from it.
It would be interesting to find the one done by Ufotable, since that's pro.
I just noted a story that seems to me to be rather significant, but is getting very little play. Indeed it is several days old already.
It's almost as if the powers that be are offended by the story and do not wish it to see the light of day. Certainly this development is frankly, likely to cause much upsetedness in some circles, as there is a certain, aroma of scandal attached to it.
We here at Brickmuppet Blog find ourselves struggling to find the proper words to describe this turn of events.
With a probe in orbit around Ceres and another rapidly approaching Pluto, this summer promises to teach us a lot about Dwarf Planets (or planetoids, which just sounds better to those of us at Brickmuppet Blog).
First off, regarding Ceres, NASA has put together this retouched animation of the innermost Dwarf Planet.
Ceres has the potential to be quite important in the future, since it is hypothesized to have more fresh water than the Earth. (This assumes that the two bright spots are not exhaust vents of course.)
MUCH farther afield. Pluto's system is going to be visited by New Horizons in July when that probe does a fairly precarious flyby. In the process communications will be cut and hopefully resumed so it can beam the info back at 1 KBps. In the meantime thanks to Hubble, some neat things have been discovered about Pluto, which is actually a dual planetoid system with its moon Charon.
This video is an interesting talk by DR. Mark Shoalwater on, amongst that and many other fascinating things, how his team discovered the "new" moons Styx and Kerberos.
Its an unusual story of bucking the bureaucracy, as his proposal was not just rejected, it was rejected with prejudice.
Father afield still, in the vanishingly unlikely event this is not a mistake, it is significant!
This is Fascinating...
One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us news of ..... Protodogs!
Monkeys with PETS?! It's like the Planet of the Apes!
Actually this is a really interesting bit of info. Next Big Future notes a New Scientist article that concerns the recent discovery of African wolves that have developed a symbiotic relationship with baboons. This is similar in some ways to how it is hypothesized that dogs came about with early humans or their hominid ancestors.
Even though the wolves occasionally prey on young sheep and goats, which are as big as young geladas, they do not normally attack the monkeys – and the geladas seem to know that, because they do not run away from the wolves.
"You can have a wolf and a gelada within a metre or two of each other and virtually ignoring each other for up to 2 hours at a time," says Venkataraman. In contrast, the geladas flee immediately to cliffs for safety when they spot feral dogs, which approach aggressively and often prey on them.
While not specifically mentioned in the article, it looks plausible that the wolves might scare off predators, which would seem to be an obvious avenue for further study.
Customer Service
A recent filler post generated more comments than any other in the history of this blog. While I do not, in general, subscribe to the creative fallacy that is "chasing the hit"; filler posts are generally compensation for a lack of regular content. Thus, it seems prudent and polite to take stock of what is generating reader interest.
After careful analysis of both the content of the much discussed post and its comments to determine the precise focus of my reader's interest, I have tentatively ruled out the Moon Pies.
With that in mind, here, gentle reader, is another short girl with an atypical body type who is sporting a ribbon...
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It's two hands, However, they seem to both be right hands. One is palm up underneath the body-hand, the second is holding the nail brush and painting the nails.
Posted by: ReallyBored at Tue Jun 9 11:04:09 2015 (ulGxe)
1
Just finished reading my wife's copy of this a few days ago. (She was fortunate to get her copy signed when Weir made a swing through JSC, so kid gloves and all that.) We've both expressed skepticism about Damon as Watney. We shall have to see how he handles it. Hopefully, they don't dumb down the science too much. That's a huge part of what drew us to the story.
I do see a few changes already just in the trailer. No idea how much of an impact that may have on the whole arc.
Posted by: Will at Tue Jun 9 06:54:24 2015 (1EtXn)
This is the best international news I've heard all year. Turkeys descent into crazy was particularly disturbing for a couple of reasons. Turkey is in NATO. Furthermore, the ascent of islamism in a nation that had made great strides by embracing disestablishmentarianism and secularism in government was a grim barometer of the mood of the people in that part of the world.
Methods by Which a "Junior Varsity Squad" Might Reach Critical Mass
This post was initially a long, rambling tangent to an earlier post where it didn't really fit. Now it is a slightly longer rambling post that attempts to build off this article with a creative dateline that that was linked to Saturday by Elizabeth Price Foley. . In my estimation it does warrant some more extensive consideration.
The linked piece talks about the likelihood of ISIS buying a complete atomic bomb. It is a worriesome read to be sure, however, that is not the only way they could mischief with fission.
The notion of a "dirty bomb" which is an explosive that disperses radioactive waste is already well known. Less well appreciated however, is the very real possibility that a terrorist outfit could actually build an actual fission device that could realistically be in the same class as the weapon that devastated Hiroshima in 1945.
Matthew Bunn, who was involved in nonproliferation issues during the Clinton Administration testified before Congress in 2008. amongst his testimony was this bit of joy...
One study by the now-defunct congressional Office of Technology Assess- ment summarized the threat: "A small group of people, none of whom have ever had access to the classified literature, could possibly design and build a crude nuclear explosive device . . . Only modest machine-shop facilities that could be contracted for without arousing suspicion would be required.
"How is that possible?" one might ask? After all The Manhattan Project, was a vast undertaking that took six years , thousands of people and most of the electrical capacity of the TVA so one might be excused for skepticism..
However, the crux of the endeavor was not manufacturing Little Boy, Little Boy was an afterthought. William Tobey and Pavel Zolotarev suggest (on page 7 of this presentation) that over 90% of the effort of the Manhattan project was getting the fissionable fuels (Oralloy and Plutonium) for the bombs. The initial bomb bomb design"Thin Man" was found to be a dud, so effort went into developing the complex implosion system needed to detonate plutonium for what became the Mark 2 bomb design (Gadget, Fat Man, Able and Baker) Mark 1 was redesigned and simplified as Little Boy, a weapon that was so simple that it was not even considered necessary to test it.
In fact to keep from impacting the main (Fat Man) effort, its construction was contracted out to 3 machine shops! According to Wikipedia, these were The Naval Gun Factory in Washington D.C. , a Naval Ordinance Contractor in Centerline Michigan and The Expert Tool and Die Company in Detroit. These Government and commercial contractors were given plans for only the components they were to build (so none of them knew what they were building). Little Boy was a hedge in case the much more efficient Fat Man design did not work.
Well they both worked, but the big difficulty was not their design or construction, it was getting the plutonium and enriching the uranium.
So...If ISIS can get its hands on 140 odd pounds of Oralloy (highly enriched uranium), and if they somehow had access to a machine shop,...
...then it's entirely possible that they could build something akin to Little Boy. Its significant that the people who built Little Boy were not atomic scientists and did not even know what they were building, only that they were building machine parts to spec.
This is in actuality, probably more likely than getting ahold of a working nuke. It's disturbingly non-far-fetched in fact, as both the Tobey / Zolotarev presentation linked above and a seperate presentation by the aforementioned Mathew Bunn have overviews of relevant incidents involving weaponizeable fissionables.
This CRS Report for Congress comes to similar conclusions and makes for sobering reading. The scenario involving a crude nuke in a supertanker taking on oil in the Houston Shipping Channel is particularly worrisome, given that so many of out geopolitical opponents would really like to get oil prices up.
It should be noted that oralloy is not terribly common and the crude, Little Boy type weapons we are discussing here are quite wasteful (needing 140 pounds of oralloy for a critical mass) so any conceivable heist is unlikely to enable for than a few bombs. On the other hand, global stockpiles of the stuff are measured in tons.
How much damage could a small, crude nuke do?
Well, Little Boy was the crudest of crude bombs ever made. It probably serves as a template for what a non-state group could realistically do given that it was right at the minimum amount of Oralloy for a Uranium weapon without really advanced gadgetry. Bombs made by state actors such as Iran or stolen from Pakistan are likely to be significantly more powerful unless they are advanced weapons designed to be small.
Little Boy therefore should probably be taken as good ballpark estimate of the yield a crude terrorist weapon might have.
There are uncertainties about how powerful Little Boy was, with estimates ranging between 13 and 16 kilotons with most references saying around 15 kt, therefore, it seems appropriate to again post a video of the 15 KT Upshot Knothole-Grable test.
(An extensive overview of the damage assessment can be seen here)
A good overview of what would be done to something other than a desert can be found in this report by FEMA and Lawrence Livermore which details the effects of a 10 kiloton improvised nuclear device on Washington DC.
Reactor grade plutonium is much more accessible, but is harder to handle and requires challenging processing. Additionally, if plutonium is used in a gun type weapon (which is what "Thin Man" was) it will fizzle and blow apart before a full detonation, however the Tobey and Zolotarev presentation mentioned previously seems to indicate that a fizzle could approach a kiloton.
Even if significantly less than a kiloton such a weapon could cause considerable havoc. A Texas City sized explosion with the added effect of radiation pulse, fallout and dispersing toxic plutonium would be devastating. Even a near total fizzle, an Oklahoma City sized blast with the added contamination and associated terror of "OMG!! ATOMIC!1!" would cause panic beyond that seen on 9-11-01.
More sophisticated implosion devices are extremely challenging, but their use should not be completely dismissed. Such weapons, after all, require the sort of advanced, cutting edge technologies as were available in the late 1930's to mid 1940's. They would allow 4-10 times as many bombs to be made for any given amount of fissionable material, as well as much larger yields. Still, the technical skill, physics knowledge and manufacturing ability required are at once so diverse and specialized that they are vanishingly unlikely to be used by non-state actors. They additionally might, due to their sophistication, require a test, that, upon occurring in ISIS or Boko Haram territory, would most likely inspire a sudden intensity, clarity and unity in response from the western nations heretofore unseen. So the picture isn't completely grim.
1
It's been over 30 years, but I still remember hearing a Philly newscaster start a story: "The War on Drugs got a much needed shot in the arm today...."
Posted by: Mauser at Mon Jun 8 07:26:44 2015 (TJ7ih)
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The one that drives me crazy is reporters mixing up "silicon" and "silicone"...
This does not seem to meet the requirements of "News".
If a Galapagos Tortoise had won the Triple Crown now THAT would be news, if only because said victory would be indicative of serious issues with the horses and quite possibly fraud on behalf of the tortoise.
Of course such newsworthy information would likely be ignored in that case and the lede would be speculation as to whether the tortoise identified as a horse*...which would dominate the news cycle for a week.
I bring this up because, while the story might warrant a mention and could even be a top tier story on a slow news day, today is not one of hose days.
. . The shooting came from the Mexican side and all individuals fled and got away. The individuals on the U.S. side also got away into the state of Texas.
Can one of my readers explain what is offensive in this?
(Note: It is suggested that "Trash Collators" is a typo, but it is possible that they are referring to people who sort trash for recycling rather than those that collect it. Even if that was the case, I don't see how any of this this is racist.)
Talented People's WorkSuburban Banshee's most recent post is titled "Another Translated Book By Me!" Which indicates that she has done this before. Anyway, it seems that she has translated an academic lecture, by a Dominican Friar given in Spain in the 1500s. And I gather she did this for the hell of it.
1
Thanks for the tvtropes link, because the game's site doesn't actually tell you anything about it, just offers a demo download and a bunch of paypal links.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Thu Jun 4 18:20:22 2015 (fpXGN)
Back on TrackFate stay Night took a break from its superb pacing to drag a bit for two episodes during which a rather long fight took place, Rin was tied up with matters separating her from the group and Shiro, having come face to face with one result of some of the mistakes he's made, spent entirely too long beside himself with regret.
Well, those two episodes are over now, Rin is back and in this episode our heroes take a brief moment to assess their situation.
A lot of unexpected twists here, not the least of which is the discovery that the stakes have gotten MUCH higher than was previously apparent.
This series remains excellent. even the last two episodes were interesting and moved the plot, they just drug a tad. I like the fact that Rin, who had maybe three minutes of screen time in those two episodes and was in a rather inglorious situation, still managed to come off as a badass...
Tied up, on the pavement, with a villain's hands around her throat...
...she does give the fellow...One...Last...Chance.
Suffice it to say that someone chose poorly.
One of the things that is neat is that, while the show is full of surprises in its own right, even people who saw the original series are finding the canon expanded upon in perfectly logical, but completely unexpected ways.
This is a dark show, but it is really good thus far.
Hobby Space News of the commercial space industry A Babe In The Universe Rather Eclectic Cosmology Encyclopedia Astronautica Superb spacecraft resource The Unwanted Blog Scott Lowther blogs about forgotten aerospace projects and sells amazingly informative articles on the same. Also, there are cats. Transterrestrial Musings Commentary on Infinity...and beyond! Colony WorldsSpace colonization news! The Alternate Energy Blog It's a blog about alternate energy (DUH!) Next Big Future Brian Wang: Tracking our progress to the FUTURE. Nuclear Green Charles Barton, who seems to be either a cool curmudgeon, or a rational hippy, talks about energy policy and the terrible environmental consequences of not going nuclear Energy From Thorium Focuses on the merits of thorium cycle nuclear reactors WizBang Current events commentary...with a wiz and a bang The Gates of Vienna Tenaciously studying a very old war The Anchoress insightful blogging, presumably from the catacombs Murdoc Online"Howling Mad Murdoc" has a millblog...golly! EaglespeakMaritime security matters Commander Salamander Fullbore blackshoe blogging! Belmont Club Richard Fernandez blogs on current events BaldilocksUnderstated and interesting blog on current events The Dissident Frogman French bi-lingual current events blog The "Moderate" VoiceI don't think that word means what they think it does....but this lefty blog is a worthy read nonetheless. Meryl Yourish News, Jews and Meryls' Views Classical Values Eric Scheie blogs about the culture war and its incompatibility with our republic. Jerry Pournell: Chaos ManorOne of Science fictions greats blogs on futurism, current events, technology and wisdom A Distant Soil The website of Colleen Dorans' superb fantasy comic, includes a blog focused on the comic industry, creator issues and human rights. John C. Wright The Sci-Fi/ Fantasy writer muses on a wide range of topics. Now Read This! The founder of the UK Comics Creators Guild blogs on comics past and present. The Rambling Rebuilder Charity, relief work, roleplaying games Rats NestThe Art and rantings of Vince Riley Gorilla Daze Allan Harvey, UK based cartoonist and comics historian has a comicophillic blog! Pulpjunkie Tim Driscoll reviews old movies, silents and talkies, classics and clunkers. Suburban Banshee Just like a suburban Leprechaun....but taller, more dangerous and a certified genius. Satharn's Musings Through TimeThe Crazy Catlady of The Barony of Tir Ysgithr アニ・ノート(Ani-Nouto) Thoughtful, curmudgeonly, otakuism that pulls no punches and suffers no fools. Chizumatic Stephen Den Beste analyzes anime...with a microscope, a slide rule and a tricorder. Wonderduck Anime, Formula One Racing, Sad Girls in Snow...Duck Triumphalism Beta Waffle What will likely be the most thoroughly tested waffle evah! Zoopraxiscope Too In this thrilling sequel to Zoopraxiscope, Don, Middle American Man of Mystery, keeps tabs on anime, orchids, and absurdities. Mahou Meido MeganekkoUbu blogs on Anime, computer games and other non-vital interests Twentysided More geekery than you can shake a stick at Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas Sounds like Plaigarism...but isn't Ambient IronyAll Meenuvians Praise the lathe of the maker! Hail Pixy!!