Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

July 09, 2018

Heh...Well, This Works

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July 08, 2018

The Feng Shui of Superheroing

For most of this season, My Hero Academia has had amazing pacing. The stakes of the characters' actions have become steadily higher as the show has gone on and this superhero cartoon is one of the few shows that has really kept me on the edge of my seat.

This has been a really well done story in which our heroes witness what appears to be the denouement of an epic tale that has defined a previous generation of heroes.

The episode that wrapped up that arc (ep49) was just...EXCESLIOR!1!!!

Now, In episode 51 we are well into the "High-School Kids Decorate Their Dorm Rooms" arc.

This ought to be something of a let down but it works as a respite from the incredible tension of the first half of the season. Furthermore, these two episodes, which have been devoid of fights have had some serious character and plot development and have been eminently watchable.

In this sense the show reminds me of the old Claremont run on X-Men or some of the books like Young Justice where much of the important stuff was happening when 'nothing was happening'.

They've also looked at ethical issues that these kids are facing; namely the unnerving fact that there is no hard and fast Venn diagram comparing 'Law and Justice' or 'Legal and Right', which, as the late Steve Ditko might have said, is ultimately The Question.

I'm sure there will be some hemming and hawing about "FILLER ARC!" but the way they are doing these less action oriented episodes actually seems to me to be good storytelling. Furthermore, while this is definitely a Japanese Shounen type of show, it's clear that the creators really GET American superhero comics.

Besides, it looks like the down time will be of limited duration....

I'm an old fart and am enjoying the heck out of this show, but if you have kids they are the ones that should be watching it.

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One Room

What....did I just watch?

Logging in to Crunchyroll revealed some new shows so I randomly picked a show that was at Episode zero.

I perused One Room's blurb and frankly read too much into it.

You are the protagonist. A new project in virtual anime from SMIRAL Animation that also brought you the "Anitore" series and "Makuranodanshi." This time, the project is about 3 stories that develop in your (one) room.

From that straightforward discription I somehow thought this was going to be experimental story telling. While it kind of is, it's less My Dinner With Andre' than How I Met Moe'. It says right there in the blurb 'you are the protagonist'...and indeed Episode zero involves "You" (presumably a mute) answering the door to find Yui Hasanaka, a young girl who asks "You" to help her study for her entrance exams.

The episode then proceeds to be a montage of her being...disturbingly...Moe'. By the time the show's four minutes was up I was thinking that Yui may need therapy. There's a LOT of codependency there.

It then dawned on me that there may be more to this show, because I never even made it to the refrigerator when a glaring inconsistency emerged:

Yui is from the country and is completely bewildered by life in the most pleasant and resident-friendly big city in the world. She's in need of remedial tutoring for her college entrance exams. She's a helpless waif...out of her element.

And yet....

more...

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July 07, 2018

Prospecting Prospects

Issac Arthur's video this week is on the colonization of Ceres. This one is pretty neat. I had not realized that the gravity on Ceres was so low that spin habitats could be put on the surface and there would only be the equivalent to about a three degree list to port for the inhabitants.

The fact that sunlight is actually bright enough to grow plants and be marginal for solar power as far out as Jupiter is interesting as well.

I'm much more of the Dandridge Cole / Gerald O'Neal school of thought on space colonies. I'm skeptical of Mars settlement, especially when A Stanford Torus or O'Neal cylinder pretty much will have correct gravity. They can be anywhere, perhaps next to (or inside) mineral rich asteroids and potentially move if needed.

Art by Franz Blok

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:38 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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1 What the hell is that accent? He's got more W's in odd places than Tweety Bird. Totally throws me out of the narration.

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Jul 7 13:54:52 2018 (Ix1l6)

1. With Niven & Pournelle, I always wondered why, after spending millions to get out of a gravity well, you would want to go down another.

2. Barring a cultural change far off my radar (which really isn't far) there are not going to be off-world colonies except as playgrounds of the hyper-rich. The entire notion is predicated on Malthusian/Ehrlich (so: false and insane) grounds of population growth. The populations of those that have the IQ & culture to live in space is in decline. The population that's still growing? I wouldn't trust them to close the airlock doors.

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Sat Jul 7 15:56:55 2018 (ug1Mc)

What the hell is that accent?

Ohioan

He has a fairly epic speech impediment. Most of his videos mention this at the beginning and suggest one avails oneself of captioning. Note that in the last year he has improved dramatically, as the show is, it seems, good therapy for him.

He also used to have an Elmer Fudd pic at the beginning of each episode but I suspect there was a DMCA issue.

Note too that Mr. Arthur also did a couple of tours in Iraq.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Jul 7 16:06:56 2018 (3bBAK)

4 I'd like to see a serious discussion of a habitat design modeled on the roller bearing. One ring nested inside another, with the two kept apart by magnets and vacuum. The inner ring would spin to produce centripetal acceleration, while the outer ring would not spin and would be sufficiently robust to contain the inner ring.

I don't have the math or engineering know-how to calculate the stresses or dimensions needed, but I suspect that such a design could be made arbitrarily large without needing exotic materials. Just make the outer ring more robust. As it's not experiencing any centrifugal tension itself (by virtue of not spinning) it can be optimized to whatever thickness is necessary to constrain the inner ring.

Start mass producing such nested-ring habitats (diameter 300 miles, length, 100 miles), and every group on Earth which wanted its own world, away from *those* people, could buy one and build its own little Utopia.

We'd need a Launch Loop to make access to orbit cheap enough to make the Lunar mining colony economical before we could start building the Rings, but none of that would require technological breakthroughs, or any scientific advances.

Well, unless the nested-ring geometry doesn't work as I expect it to.

Posted by: jabrwok at Sun Jul 8 06:04:11 2018 (wKZS0)

5 The spin gravity puts a strain on the habitats such that the maximum size with steel is a cylinder five miles by 20...Now that does have a safety factor built in.
You're right about the bearings though. That is going to be an issue in these combined gravity habitats.
Regarding the rock; Even the old Stanford Torus used slag brought up from the moon to provide a nonrotating radiation shield. The O'Neal Cylinder designs did as well, but most illustrations omitted the rad shield for clarity in exactly the same way this one doesn't.

http://brickmuppet.mee.nu/images/fig1202-radiation-shielding.jpg

Building them in Asteroids as I.Arthur suggests kills a couple of birds with one stone...er asteroid. The materials are in-situ, and the shielding is already there.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Jul 8 07:49:21 2018 (Es+wK)

6 As I understand it, the strain induced by the spin is basically tension produced by centrifugal force. The geometry I'm visualizing has a spinning ring *inside* another, thicker, non-spinning ring, like the <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=roller+bearing&t=h_&iax=images&ia=images">roller bearings</a> in a skateboard or a fidget spinner. The outer ring would act like a railroad for the "train" of the inner ring, and could be made arbitrarily thick so that it could handle the angular momentum produced by the spinning inner ring.

If it would work, then the whole system could be scaled up to arbitrarily large diameters, with no need for scrith or other unobtania.

Unfortunately I'm not an engineer, so I can't prove that it would work.

Posted by: jabrwok at Sun Jul 8 11:26:38 2018 (wKZS0)

7 A containing outer shell doesn't cancel the outward force, it just applies an additional force in the opposite direction. So now your inner shell material is being subjected to not just the tension from the centripetal force, but is also facing friction heating, compression, and drag from the outer shell. Your design would create more problems than it solves, and would result in a smaller habitat, not a larger one. (Also not an engineer, but that's pretty basic physics...)

Posted by: David at Sun Jul 8 13:37:35 2018 (JMkaQ)

8 <i>A containing outer shell doesn't cancel the outward force, it just applies an additional force in the opposite direction.</i>

Yes, thereby preventing the inner ring from tearing itself apart.

<i>but is also facing friction heating, compression, and drag from the outer shell.</i>

There would be no friction or drag if the rings were held apart with magnetic fields and had only vacuum between them. The "compression" is a non-issue as keeping the inner ring compressed is the entire point of the configuration.

Posted by: jabrwok at Sun Jul 8 18:53:43 2018 (wKZS0)

9 There would be no physical friction. The magnetic fields on the other hand...
Did you know that the moon's gravity is slowing the earth's rotation? It's a quarter million miles away, roughly. The outer ring and magnets would be a lot closer. So you'd need a fair bit of energy to be input constantly to counter that.

Another, more critical point. The outer ring is there to keep the inner ring from flying apart. Which means that, through the magnetic forces, the inner ring is transferring its centrifugal force outwards to the outer ring.
What keeps the outer ring from breaking up?

Posted by: Ubu at Mon Jul 9 09:38:46 2018 (SlLGE)

10 What keeps the outer ring from breaking up?

Thickness. The outer ring could be as robust as necessary to contain the centrifugal force being generated by the inner ring. Given that the outer ring would not be spinning, it's own mass would put no strain on its tensile strength.
As for the possible resistance produced by the interaction of the magnetic bearings, well, that's a possible obstacle. But again, I'm not an engineer, so I can't calculate whether that would be a problem or not, nor how difficult it would be to overcome. Possibly some electromagnets mixed in with the permanent magnets would be enough to overcome the hypothetical resistance.

To be honest, I was hoping there would be an engineer reading this thread, or that someone hereabouts would know one, who could run the numbers and provide a definitive answer.

Posted by: jabrwok at Mon Jul 9 14:35:48 2018 (BlRin)

11 I'm no engineer, but the other 'non-trivial' problem to borrow a word from SDB, is that you'd have to make certain the counter-forces need to spin it back up (or in the first place) would have to be very exactly balanced, and monitored in real time. I'm not sure how you could do that in a way that wouldn't set up a negative reinforcement cycle that got further and further out of control. Let's not even touch on where you're going to get non-electromagnets big and powerful enough to balance your giga-ton monstrosity. The moon's got a surprisingly high amount of iron, but that's not all it takes. And adjusting the position of a two-part "torus station" would be...tricky.

This reminds me of the flywheel discussion on Chizumatic. Which I'd link, but it's dead now, and I don't know the mirrors.

Posted by: Ubu at Mon Jul 9 17:05:48 2018 (SlLGE)

12 Ubu, Chizumatic is still up; denbeste.nu is down. Was this the link you were looking for?

Some of USS Clueless is still mirrored at sdb.dotclue.org.

Posted by: Rick C at Mon Jul 9 19:22:21 2018 (ITnFO)

13 Someday, we should reconnect with Steven's brother and see about transferring the domain registration, or at least renewing it and pointing it at the current server. I decided not to pursue it at the time.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Jul 9 22:23:15 2018 (tgyIO)

14 you'd have to make certain the counter-forces need to spin it back up (or in the first place) would have to be very exactly balanced, and monitored in real time.
My thoughts on spinning up the inner ring were along the lines of having mass-drivers on the outside of the Rim Walls. Push reaction masses along those mass-drivers in one direction and the inner ring spins in the other. You could use a LOT of reaction masses, or just some very dense one, or both. This would give you the advantage of allowing for the launch of interstellar space probes (the reaction masses) while bringing the inner ring up to the desired rate of spin. Or you could just use charged particles and take a long time to get the desires spin rate.

I agree that the magnetic bearings are a possible stumbling block. I keep hoping I'll run into an engineer who can address that concern. But I don't think it's an impossible obstacle.

Posted by: jabrwok at Tue Jul 10 08:54:51 2018 (BlRin)

15 Yep, that's the one, at 20060102. I really miss his stuff.

I can practically hear SDB complaining about derailing the thread....

Posted by: Ubu at Tue Jul 10 11:51:48 2018 (SlLGE)

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Hey Ubu!

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July 06, 2018

An Absolutely Non-Relevant Post

Warning: The following is an uninformed rant about a 5 year old video game I've never played.

Feel free to skip it and go to the previous posts (some of which have zeppelins).

Pixy recently posted the old Overstrike trailer which is one of the Best. Trailers. Ever. This thing really looked fun...

In the post, Pixy mentioned that the game was a disappointment...which was news to me since I'd thought it had never come out. So I looked it up and it turns out that the game was released much later under the name Fuse and went in a completely different creative direction. Instead of a close nit team of surprisingly likable badass super-agents, the characters were re-imagined as misanthropic, brooding, psycho-murder machines in a dark, gritty, cynical crapsack world devoid of humor or mercy....

This is one of the worst cases of executive meddling I have ever seen. I have not been able to determine if Kathleen Kennedy was involved but I'm not quite ready to rule it out. According to the video, EA, the bigger company in the partnership intervened after they asked a bunch of 12 year olds what they thought of a game made for young adults and the 12 year olds thought it was too light hearted. Given that this wasn't even the games target demographic, this seems like an particularly odd decision.

I mean seriously...Look at first trailer and look at the iron age, emo, splatterpunk, murder fantasy that was actually made and explain to me how ANYBODY thought this was a good idea!

"I sense some wild, completely uninformed speculation is coming."

I do note that EA, inexplicably did a focus group of 12 year olds for a game that had an age rating of 16.

WHAT!?

Looking at the gorefest that was the actual game (in the video above) I asked myself, how on EARTH that got a 16 rating...I checked and Fuse is actually rated as "Inappropriate for Children".

Why did they need a focus group of 12 year olds?

I note that this sudden shift in tone from fun to sick happened in 2012, when Gamergate was happening and there was this big putsch from various corners to beat the drum that "gamers were dead". And that no one should cater to them. The first trailer looks quite fun...and it perfectly encapsulates everything that many in the PC crowd find toxic (fun, machismo as well as sexy and/or cute girls). Based on no information beyond the two videos above whatsoever, I suspect that the game was interfered with by people who hated the target audience and conciously or subconciously wanted to kill the franchise. Again, I don't know, but this looks like SUCH a dumpster fire of bad creative decisions that it approaches the new Star Wars reboot with regards to the sheer unbelievability of any good-faith explanation.

Of course that is a possibility. Robert Conquest suggested that a bureaucratic organization acts as if controlled by a cabal of its enemies. If this is the case though, this was some awards worthy acting.

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In Remembrance of the Glorious Flight of R-34

As noted in the previous post, today is R-34 day!

Sacred honor demands that we commemorate this technological milestone!

However, we don't have many Zeppelins any more.

Also, due to the internet and the rules thereof, R-34 means something entirely different now.

Note though, that unlike our Fourth of July post this means our commemoration will be (mostly) following the rules, rather than breaking them.

more...

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It's R-34 Day!

HMA R-34 was a British R-33 class airship completed just too late for the Great War, first flying in March of 1919. The class proved to be a huge improvement on previous British zeppelin designs. After a series of trials that included a patrol around the Baltic, R-34 was given a brief refit.

The ship's 3 inch gun as well as the depth charge/bomb racks were landed and additional petrol tanks installed in their stead. The crew was cut to 30 to save weight.. On July 2, 1919, the ship embarked Brigadier General Edward Maitland, an American naval observer (Zachary Landsdowne) a crew of 30 plus one stowaway (a William Ballantyne ) and his cat. The vessel then sailed into the Atlantic. Late on the first day, the crew discovered the stowaway (a rigger who had been one of those ordered off the ship as a weight consideration) as he was not discovered until they were well out to sea, he was given petrol pumping and head cleaning duty. The cat was not punished.

R-34 encountered a nasty storm on the fourth and faced heavy headwinds which pushed its fuel consumption much higher than had been anticipated. Nevertheless, despite running on fumes, the R-34 landed in Long Island on July 6th, 1919. It was the first East to West crossing of the Atlantic by an aircraft, and it happened 99 years ago today.

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July 05, 2018

OK. Now Pele is Just Screwing With Us

Behold, a lava tornado.

via

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Dispatch From The Department of "Duh!"

Sometimes, as I look at the news, I get the impression that we're forgetting things as a society...basic truths that everyone should know.

Clipped from Drudge

Wait...WHAT!?

May?

That this is news explains so much.

Have fun in the comments.

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July 04, 2018

Keeping the 4th of July Traditions Alive

Fireworks!

Steaks!

Hot Dogs!

Parades!

more...

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The Reason For The Season

With the current civic climate in the U.S. it is easy to become cynical and forget that there are a couple of notions that our country enshrines which are worth celebrating and frankly worth fighting for.

Freedom of speech allows us to learn, exchange ideas understand each other and effect change without violence. When we added the first set of amendments to the Constitution it was quickly decided that the first 10 would be an affirmation of rights and 2 procedural amendments were put to the side to make freedom of speech and worship the very first on the list.

So here is Free Speech Tan drawn by some fellow named ATOMIx.

Click Here For Supah Size

Now you may ask; "Why, during this celebration of Americana, are we posting some anime chick with Kanji Moon Runes on her shield?"

Well, in addition to being a feature in one of our oldest banners, this was once the 'mascot' of a free speech organization called Yes to Freedom. You see, Free Speech is not popular nowadays, and if one advocates for free speech across the board one inevitably defends the expression of opinions that may offend...and that defense can get one shut down and have ones website hijacked to sell male enhancement products and make my malware alert go off. So while we won't link to them, we'll mourn them and accept their 2-D refugee as our own. (Because that's what America does...'cause we're awesome)

In America, we still have this right. And that's damned well worth celebrating.

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It's Been 242 Years

Let us not muck it up now.

more...

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July 03, 2018

'A Jewel Thief Has No Right to His Jewels'

That is an argument I just heard on TV a few minutes ago.

A reasonable notion on its own, in the context it was said, it is troubling.

This involves politics so I'll discuss it further below the fold.

For those who are repelled by such things and heed that warning, here is something that is pleasant and completely, refreshingly unrelated...

... as long as one pays no mind to the lyrics.

more...

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Meawhile, Off the Coast of Antarctica

One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of 2-D Science Babes ponders Apple updates...

...and alerts your humble blogger to what turned out to be in Every. Single. Screencap.

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It's Important in These Trying Times to Maintain Some Perspective

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