Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world. There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres…
Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices. But then there’s this: It’s not immediately obvious why the owner…
It sure seems like the era of “superhero movies” being a license to print money is over. Granted the DCEU flicks have not had a great track record, but the latest outing, “Blue Beetle,” seems to be shaping up to be a *disaster.* The production budget was $104 million. The marketing was probably the same,…
A sad percentage of my cyanotypes fail… faded, blurry or spotty. Sometimes these failure are due to bad craftsmanship; sometimes to material deficiencies, and surprisingly often, environmental factors (humidity has wreaked havoc, see the “spots”). Mostly these get simply tossed, meaning a lot of material, time and effort are wasted. But it occurred to me…
A few days ago while roaming about, the radio in the car was tuned to NPR and I got to listen to some confusing ramble about modern fashion. Normally this would result in “lets change the channel to static to listen to what the cosmic background radiation has to say today,” but it was so…
Who destroyed Star Trek? Hmmm… I recently re-watched Star Trek: Enterprise, after perhaps a decade. I’d seen it twice before: when it originally aired, and then once I got all 4 seasons on cheap DVDs. And my memory of the show was: Season 1: Bah. Season 2: Bah. Season 3: Meh. Season 4: Woo!…
J. Robert Oppenheimer is justly famed for his role in developing the A-bomb. He is considered to be something of a martyr for what happened later… during the “Red Scare” he was stripped of his security clearance. But was it actually wrong to do so? Was his interest in the Communist Party some minor childish…
First, good news from the world of medicine: UK’s first womb transplant deemed ‘massive success’: ‘Over the moon’ One woman (40) donated her womb to her sister (34) who was born with a malformed womb. So both women can have kids. This is good news. The first uterus transplant was in 2013 in Sweden, so…
So, there’s this movie coming: It looks like your bog-standard Supernatural Entity Scary Horror Movie, with the twist being that the main characters are Indian immigrant and the Entity is something out of Indian folklore. OK, sure. We’ve all seen this before, with folk monsters from various ethnicities/nationalities/whatever pestering the appropriate people. Here’s my idea,…
A few years ago a lot of people were blown away to find out that a sizable fraction of the population has no inner monologue. Some people can’t “hear” themselves think or “hear” remembered music, movies, things loved ones said. Related, some people can’t envision things: they can’t see an apple in their minds eye,…
