Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

August 31, 2015

More On Grid Hardening and Related Issues

We've taken breaks from our usual fluf-blogging to post about electro magnetic pulse before, tentatively running the math on some worst case scenarios, but we don't pretend to be experts on the topic.

However, here is a panel of actual experts including James Woolsey and Henry Cooper (who some of you will remember from his work with HIGH FRONTIER) who, in 2013, held forth on the matter for a bit over an hour.

Amongst the things discussed is the possibility of multiple cascading Fukishimas. I was also surprised at the offhanded comment about the North Koreans being caught smuggling missiles into/ out of Cuba.

One other interesting bit of information we've turned up on the topic pertains to the more modest nukes and delivery systems that a group with ambition and cleverness could extemporize. In 1958 the US conducted a series of nuclear tests called Hardtack 1. This included a test to determine the effects of a anti aircraft missile warhead that was simulated by lofting a small fission device via a ballon. The yield of shot Yucca was only 1.5 -1.7 kilotons but according to this article, the detonation was just high enough to trigger the High Altitude EMP effect. The fact that most of the observation equipment was destroyed by power surges was chalked up to improper calibration until the later high altitude tests that had populated areas (Like Hawaii) in line of sight revealed that the problem was not with the test equipment. Note that the tropical location would result in far lesser effects than one in a middle latitude location like the continental United States or Europe or Australia....or Kasputin Yar.

So a nuke as small as 1.5 kilotons delivered via balloon could still cause considerable mayhem by tripping breakers and burning out transformers.

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Pique Should Not Be a Default State...for Anyone

Look.

I'm seeing some wailing and gnashing of teeth over one of the President's recent pronouncements. While I think that it is perfectly reasonable to be prepared to experience horror, bewilderment and dread any time he opens his mouth, it is still important to actually listen to what is said since there is always the possibility (however remote) that such reactions will be unwarranted.

For instance, it would seem to me, given the usual complaints from those complaining, that it would be more appropriate to cheer...or at least nod knowingly at the Presidents completely uncharacteristic decision to defer to state and local wishes with regard to federal land management decisions, and the decision itself seems perfectly reasonable.

How best to put it?

"Denali is not the hill to die on?"

...Well, yeah...That works.

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August 30, 2015

Well. We Have This To Look Forward to in 2016

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Thank You

I'm unable to comment on Suburban Banshee's site so I'll post this here.

THANK YOU THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

As the majority of our readers are happily unconcerned with such matters, we have opted to provide the following compensatory visual content as a professional courtesy.

RWBYStayKnights by Dishwasher1910

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August 29, 2015

August 27th 1859

The day the whales were saved!

Also, check out JC's whole blog, which is really neat.

It has been puttering along since February and I had not been checking it regularly. This was a dreadful mistake on my part as it is a really cool site.

It has technophilia, without any disemvoweling.

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Kaga

They named her Kaga...

Like Izumo, she's named after a prefecture that doesn't exist anymore, so yeah, they are naming them after the WW2 warships.. We think of Kaga mostly in context of Perl Harbor and the Darwin raid, (and Midway obviously) but like Izumo, the old Kaga was heavily involved in the unpleasantness in China...in particular she was the ship that provided air support during the 1932 Shanghai incident.

This means something.

more...

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1 The funny thing is, the South China See is tiny. Land based aircraft should be able to cover all of it.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sat Aug 29 20:47:46 2015 (RqRa5)

One time I convinced myself that "kaga" was a word that meant "palanquin", and thus the Kaga was effectively named "carrier".

But it turns out that "palanquin" is "kago", not "kaga". Real pity; it would have been a great story my way.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sat Aug 29 21:28:55 2015 (+rSRq)

3 Pete, there are psychological aspects to it. A major warship has a presence, a psychological influence, that intermittent air patrol doesn't have.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sat Aug 29 21:30:43 2015 (+rSRq)

4 Pete, consider the reaction in Russia if Germany named a division of brand-new, high-tech tanks the "Barbarossa Division".

Yeah, I'd expect there to be some soiled skivvies in Moscow. Probably much like there are in Beijing over the name of this ship.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sat Aug 29 22:04:36 2015 (jGQR+)

5 We think of Kaga mostly in context of Perl Harbor...

1. #!/usr/bin/perl
2. use strict;
3. use warnings;
4. my @attackplanes = ("B5N2", "D3A2")
5. my @carrers= ("Kaga", "Akagi", "Soryu", "Hiryu", "Shokaku", "Zuikaku")
6. use @carriers @attackplanes @perlharbor
7. print "A Day That Will Live In Infamy"

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sat Aug 29 22:15:23 2015 (jGQR+)

6 Well...I guess I won't be correcting that typo. Also:Wonderduck wins the thread.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Aug 30 01:18:41 2015 (ohzj1)

7 Wonderduck, what blighted moment led to you learning Perl?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Aug 30 03:36:19 2015 (PiXy!)

8 Pixy, the moment I saw the "perl harbor" typo. I know Perl much like somebody "knows" something by reading about it on the back of a cereal box.

Seriously, everything I know about PERL came from this website, in about five minutes of reading. I know the syntax is correct, because it's pretty much copied directly from that page, but beyond that? I think the end result of that snippet would be "A Day That Will Live In Infamy" as the "print" command is the only thing that actually does anything in the so-called "program."

I will spend much time for the right joke...

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sun Aug 30 04:29:19 2015 (jGQR+)

9 Thanks to a brief fad for Perl poetry, it's hard to write Perl that's so bad it doesn't do something. It just may not accomplish your original goal, which makes the joke even better...

My history with Perl began a few weeks before version 2.0 was released, and has yet to end. Too damn useful.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sun Aug 30 11:30:23 2015 (ZlYZd)

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It's Been A Long Week

....so here is something pleasant, at least more so than what is below the fold.

Submarine, bridge, cute girl, and cats by ajiyumi.

more...

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School Live Continues

In the latest episode of this season's surprisingly clever slice of life show, Yuki must catch and wash the dog. Hijinks ensue.

The girls discuss their plans (or lack thereof) for after graduation. Miki stops reading her horror books long enough to conclude that the school being equipped as a civil defense location is actually indicative of some sinister purpose. Yuuri organizes an expedition to sneak into the teachers lounge because SHE MUST KNOW. An attempt at a group photograph goes about as well as one would expect. Sakura Sensei practices her penmanship with heartbreaking results.

I am in genuine awe of this show and how it is able to elicit an actual emotional response from me.

I am eager to hear the thoughts of anyone else who is following this show. But PLEASE, use spoiler tags!

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1 Wow. The last few minutes of that reminded me of

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Sat Aug 29 04:57:50 2015 (ohzj1)

2 It looks like this is a single-cour season, so it won't catch up to the manga. I took a very quick look at the scanlations, and the good news is that . I didn't read more than a few pages; I'm generally spoiler-immune, but in this case I just don't want to know too much too soon.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sat Aug 29 11:17:00 2015 (ZlYZd)

3 Not clicking...I'm avoiding scantalation spoilers like the plague on this one.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 29 13:23:20 2015 (ohzj1)

Posted by: ReallyBored at Mon Aug 31 10:02:35 2015 (ulGxe)

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Tonight on GATE: After Sneaking a Thoughtful and Intelligent Show Past Standards and Practices for 2 Months, They're Found Out!

Now boarding at GATE 9 bound for Fan Service with stops in Akihabara, suspiciously opaque hot springs, America bashing, dead G.I.s, a cool old dude, otaku affirmation and normally strong female characters doing the paper doll pander.

Please direct your attention towards the EYES of the EGL at the front of the cabin as she adjusts your belt and attempts to convince you that even if she looks 13, her actual age of 961 means it won't really count as loli.

Well...

After 8 episodes of sublime storytelling and pacing, this heretofore excellent show surprises us in an entirely new way.

Ahem...

Mind you, it actually does move along a rather tendentious subplot and there is some character development so this is not a complete non-sequitur of an episode, which is, perhaps, unfortunate, as is it were, I could advise you to skip it....especially if yo've been watching this show with your kids. It just doesn't at all fit with the tone of the series thus far and that feeling rather increases as the episode progresses.

There is at least one bit that I hope is foreshadowing though...

I predict ARCHERY!

We also do find out offhandedly that Leili's magic does work in this world...which ought to be a big deal.

This series is now 8 stellar to 1 meh so I'm not by any means dropping it as of yet.

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August 27, 2015

One That Bears Watching

This is a wet one. Erika is just a tropical storm now but its massive rains have contributed to at least four deaths on Dominica. The NWS is still talking cat 1 or 2, but as Rand Simberg notes, the gulf stream is hotter right now than it was during Andrew...meaning that depending on wind shear, this beast could get worrisomely impressive.

Everyone south of Cape Charles would be well advised to keep an eye on this one, get their kits in order and keep their tanks topped off.

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August 26, 2015

First Flight of the Bugatti!

Via The Unwanted Blog, comes something truly kewel!

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Well, This Could Be Better

Monster Musume is faithfully following its comic book inspiration into imbecility and squalor, wasting what is admittedly a fairly interesting cast on prurient pandering to the dolorous, disaffected degenerate deviants that make up its target audience.Obviously this is a show I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in admitting to watching...

"Oh..umm...This?...Uhh...Thi...This is a...a cooking show."

This is not to say that the show is without potential. For one thing, a spinoff centered around the Mrs. Smith and her commando team of mythological monster-maiden myrmidons has a considerable likelihood of being quite entertaining.

UPDATE: In fact, as a friend recently pointed out, such a show would probably be the most enjoyable G.I. Joe sequel possible.

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August 25, 2015

Groovy!

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Don't Forget About Lunch UPDATE: Trigger Warning! (May Cause OCD Fits if Viewed Too Closely)

Art by Subaku

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People May Wonder

...why I care about a little commemorative rocket that I can never own and affects me in no way whatsoever.

This is why...

I canâ€™t be involved any longer. If it were just meâ€¦ but it isnâ€™t. I have others who need me to stay out of the fight, as much as I hate it. If I keep in the frontlines, I will become a casualty, and I have people who are dependent on me, helpless in the world if something becomes of my good name. And so I must turn away, tears in my eyes, and leave the field of battle. I am sickened, but my duty is clear.

I cannot bay. I have been bound into silence. I bow my head, and exitâ€¦

...Read the whole thing.

You see, it's not REALLY about the dinky little rocket.

more...

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August 24, 2015

8 Months to Go

Old Dominion University starts the week before Labor Day so, since I only have a week to go before school starts, I decided just now to check and see if any of my silly busses were online yet so I could order some of my books and also find out if any classes have homework due the first day of class.

What I discovered is that school starts tomorrow...

Umm...

That's good to know.

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August 23, 2015

Worldcon Was This Weekend

I did not go this year because I've been digging my way out of debt, and.....

"WAIT! You promised you'd put the politics under the fold!

What? No. This post is about World Con, so...

"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Oh...

Drat...

I hate what the world is becoming

more...

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1 It's amusing that Larry's tongue-in-cheek invocation of this Sarah McLachlan PSA, exhorting his readers to help end puppy-related sadness, got twisted around by people who wouldn't be caught dead reading so much as a paragraph of his blog.

I'm even more amused that the opposition ended up earning the label Puppy Kickers, abbreviated PK, which evokes their similarity to the Player Killers of online gaming, whose only fun is actively preventing others from enjoying the game.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 00:57:34 2015 (ZlYZd)

2 The primary observation, I think, is that many recent winners of the Hugo Award are just plain not very good.

I don't know if there was a novel I would have voted for this year. I liked Skin Game well enough, but it's just another solid entry in the Dresden Files, not Hugo material. (Or not Hugo-as-I'd-like-to-think-of-them material.)

Honestly, the last Best Novel I think really earned the title was 2011's Blackout / All Clear, which is / are outstanding (it's one story, but about 1200 pages long, so it was broken into two volumes). Before that, all the way back to 2004's Paladin of Souls.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Aug 24 01:38:11 2015 (PiXy!)

3 I've been going through some of the recent annual Nebula Award collections (which, tellingly, fall out of print fast and are not available as ebooks), and it's surprising how many of the stories can be converted from SF to F by deleting a few lines. In the 2006 collection (which I bought for an as-yet-unreprinted Vinge story), there was one that was 98% "kid growing up in Fifties US" and 2% "found a dead time traveler". (it lost to a story that was "kid growing up in Fifties US meets housekeeper who speaks in exaggerated Black dialect and teaches her voodoo")

Yeah, the difference between Hugo material and Hugo-as-I'd-like-to-think-of-them material is sad. I've still got Brad Templeton's CD containing the 1993 Hugo and Nebula nominees, and there's just no comparison. There are good years and bad years, but there have been an awful lot of bad years lately, and it isn't a coincidence that this is the year people decided that "nothing is good enough for an award". The in-group liked the bad years just fine.

Sadly, Templeton himself was a reflexive Puppy Kicker, so you can't just buff the rocket (not a euphemism) and call it a day; there may be nothing under the rust but more rust.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 11:35:23 2015 (ZlYZd)

4 Bluntly, it's a daft award anyway.

There's plenty of room for an Oscar-type award, where it's voted on by people who are in the industry and understood to be as such. (Nebula, basically.) There's room for a "fan favorite" where everyone gets to vote (Golden Globes basically?)

There's -room- for "favorite of people who attend a certain annual event" too, really. Cannes might be the proper parallel here. However, there's definitely a difference between "they loved it at Cannes", and "it won an Oscar", and "I thought it was pretty good"; these categories are not necessarily mutually overlapping.

Not necessary mutually exclusive either, of course, there's plenty of good stuff that wins a Hugo. But at the end of the day, it's become a fairly poor predictor of things which I might enjoy reading.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Mon Aug 24 13:13:45 2015 (qxzj1)

5 "There's -room- for "favorite of people who attend a certain annual event" too, really."
From what I've been reading, the lefties who have been dominating the Hugos have been insisting that they were not, in fact, this, but actually the Golden Globes equivalent.
Then when the Sad Puppies slate got on the ballot, they started spinning in anticipation of a possible loss and claiming it actually is just the the results of some random con, one of the bigger incoherencies in the "them right-wingers can't be allowed to win" movement.

Posted by: Rick C at Mon Aug 24 13:41:30 2015 (FvJAK)

About 30 years ago I fell in with a group of SMOFs and spent a few years embedded in fan culture, including attending several WorldCons.

You wouldn't believe how seriously they take the Hugo voting. It's like they're saving the world. My group sometimes would debate certain choices to try to decide which one they should vote for.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Aug 24 14:46:42 2015 (+rSRq)

7 The Nebulas are even more clannish than the Hugos, which became obvious to outsiders when it became the Women's Award last year, to the loud cheers of activists deceived into thinking that SF was "anti-woman" until Just Now (and again this year, with a gratuitous swipe at SP3's imaginary "misogyny").

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 17:02:52 2015 (ZlYZd)

8 To be fair, though, the Really-Old Guard seems to be against all this crap, even when they are leftist as the dawn is east. It's the Middle-Aged-to-Early-Old Guard that is doing the SJW crap.

I hate to say it, but I'm glad so many of First Fandom had died before they had to see this happen to what they made for us.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Mon Aug 24 20:10:10 2015 (ZJVQ5)

9 Makes sense; you've got the parents who created the wealth, the children who followed their example and expanded it, and the grandchildren who grew up spoiled and pissed it all away.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 21:43:23 2015 (ZlYZd)

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One Could Spend Years...

...researching the genre of video games known as fantasy RPGs.

Or one could endure this for this four minutes and ten seconds.

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A Non Sequiter Brought on By a Mysterious Banhammer

I've been banned by Facebook for some time, and while this seems to be an error that can be corrected, I've decided that having more than one blog is simply more than I can rationalize the time for. If I had a product I was marketing or a fan-base I was interacting with, then a second blog and/or Facebook page would, in all probability, pass a cost benefit analysis. However, to apply that much duplication and added effort to a hobby does not. Thus, for my part, I direct any questions about topics and format to the category tags.

I mention that, in part because, in addition to Facebook, I am banned from commenting at Wonderduck's place.

Now, I had assumed that this was a technical issue with the web service that we share, but I've recently discovered that I cannot opine on Subrban Banshee's site either.

I've ruled out a browser issue.

Thus, I can only suspect that they both found out about that time in '79 when I allegedly precipitated the destruction of a certain old manuscript during a violent altercation with a group of hipster filkers that, in turn, inadvertently resulted in the replacement of Marty McNeely by Svengoulie after I strolled into that Chinese Restaurant to try their Peking Duck.

Let me just say that I am denying here and now that any of that in the previous paragraph ever happened. With that in mind, I have just one more, completely unrelated thing to say....

more...

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August 22, 2015

Oh This Just Keeps Getting Better and Better

Tales of teh tech-weasel's telescreen tyranny.

It seems that Windows "10" will have the ability to shut down any programs it considers unauthorized or illegitimate.

Thus, it seems likely that game you got from DL Site that you stripped the DRM out of because it was incompatible with anything after XP is just toast.

But wait...

I am 45 years old. Not counting my old TI-99, I got my first real computer out of a dumpster in 1999. As it and its subsequent replacements have all been Macs, I've never learned code and the magical slabs of seeing are all black box technology to me.

So...Keeping in mind the Gell-Mann effect and the fact that I don't really understand the matter beyond the broadest basics, can anyone opine on the veracity/feasibility of this ?

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1 I've been following this, and the analysis seems to be that Microsoft needs to fire the lawyers writing their EULAs. Basically, Windows 10 provides integration with all of Microsoft's online services and with Xbox, but all the rules for everything you could possibly do with Windows 10 and any linked Microsoft products and services have been shoved into the one 12,000-word document.

In this case, the rules apply to Xbox Live - if you download a pirated game onto your Xbox, Microsoft can remove it and/or cancel your Xbox Live account. But that has always been the case with Xbox.

I'm still a bit leery of Windows 10 and waiting for at least the first update, but you need to remember that Microsoft are looking to upgrade about a billion business users to this new release, and they will get no traction at all if businesses are worried that Micosoft can reach into their computers.

But then, Amazon deleted unauthorised copies of, of all things, 1984 from users' Kindles, so I wouldn't be surprised if they pull a dumb stunt at some point, got their fingers burnt, and had to re-think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Aug 22 20:59:40 2015 (PiXy!)

2 Ah. I had missed that this was an X-Box thing...that puts a different spin on it. Thanks!
Still...
Hmmm...Your mention of the AMAZON kindle fiasco reminds me of the AMAZON RWBY kerfuffel, which as trivial as it was, struck me as much more worrisome in its implications.
I'm old, I don't get these newfangled gadjitz...so my view of this are not through the lens of someone who is tech savvy and it is probably being tainted by crumudgeonism.
But the ability to go in and rewrite libraries or break ones tools from afar if they have forbidden knowledge or associate with the wrong person...that's the stuff of evil sorcerers; a totalitarians wet dream...
Alas, such worries are for superstitious children of course...and crumudgeons who just don't get it.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 22 21:21:54 2015 (ohzj1)

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