Category Archives: Popular Culture
Well, That Sucks
“Star Trek” makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole.
Oh, well, back to the drawing board.
The First Weightless Wedding
Back in the early nineties, when I unsuccessfully tried to get a weightless experience business started, this was one of the markets for it. It took a lot longer than I hoped or expected back then, and I didn’t make it happen, but I’m glad that someone did. And I see that she used one of the designs that Misuzu had the contest for as a wedding dress.
Of course, as usual, almost everyone gets this wrong:
The idea of these flights seems to be that the plane makes 16 huge dips from 36,000 feet to 24,000 feet to simulate zero gravity.
The weightless effect doesn’t just occur on the descent — it occurs through the entire parabola, up and down. If it only happened on the way down, the weightless period would only be half the time that it actually is.
Remembering The MGB
Thoughts over here.
I never owned a B, because I learned my lesson from my first car, an MGA — don’t buy a convertible.
There are people with hair who can manage convertibles, but I am not one of them. My hair looks bad enough without going through a seventy MPH uncontrolled blower. Or even slower, for that matter.
So I bought a 1967 (pre-emissions, pre-uglybumpers) MGB-GT. It got me through high school. I gave girls rides home in it. It was my preferred car for dates over my dad’s company-car GM behemoths. I loved it in many ways.
But it never got me laid. Sometimes, a car just isn’t enough.
Goat Meat
It’s not what’s for dinner, generally, in the US, but it’s pretty popular in the rest of the world. I’ve only had it a couple times myself (in Ethiopian restaurants).
But an interesting space-related point is that goats are a lot better for space colonies than beef, being easier to manage, more efficient producers of meat from carbs, needing less room, having more protein (and good milk). Keith and Carolyn Henson raised them in Tucson (in town) in the seventies, along with rabbits. They wrote an early paper on space colony agriculture, presented at the first Princeton Conference, based on their own experiences.
When You’ve Lost Ted Rall, Roseanne Barr
…and Bill Maher, you’ve truly lost un-America:
Obama needs to start putting it on the line in fights against the banks, the energy companies and the healthcare industry. I never thought I’d say this, but he needs to be more like George W. Bush. Bush was all about, “You’re with us or against us.”
Obama’s more like, “You’re either with us, or you obviously need to see another picture of this adorable puppy!”
Can he win re-election without the leftist douchebag vote? The most annoying thing about Maher, of course, is that he slanders libertarians by calling himself one.
Impromptus
FAQ advice from Jay Nordlinger, on Che, what classical music to listen to, and how to be a journalist. A sample:
I wrote to a Latin America scholar — a superb one — and he said the following: “At one time, I was collecting stuff about Guevara to write a piece of my own, but the subject is so nauseating . . . as if I had to write an article explaining why the Nazis were bad.” Yet such articles are necessary: because the myth-making about Che is strong and mesmerizing. My scholar friend continued, “Are you aware of the fact that there are busts and statues of Che Guevara not just in Central Park but in Vienna and other European capitals?”
Yes, but those busts and statues can be taken down, mentally — with truthful accounts and assessments. With fantasy-puncturing. There is plenty available, for those who wish to see (to see beyond the T-shirt, that is).
My own advice: visit Che-Mart.
He also has an awesome set of classical recommendations, if you’ve never been into it that much.
David Burge’s Day Off
A photoessay from Iowahawk.
Unimpressed
Thoughts from Lileks on Letterman:
What’s amusing is how unamusing he is in the clip. How sour he seems. Compare him to his predecessors: Carson was all midwestern charm, with unreadable yet mannerly reserve; Steve Allen was almost as smart as he was certain you thought he must be, but he was cheerful; Parr was a nattering nutball covered with a rich creamy nougat of ego, but he was engaging. Letterman is empty; he’s inert; he stands for nothing except disdain for people foolish enough to stand for anything – aside from rote obesciance to all the things Decent People stand for, of course, all those shopworn assumptions passed around in the bubble.
This posture was fresh in ’80; it even had energy. But it paralyzes the heart after a while. You end up an SOB who shows up at the end of the night to reassure that nothing matters. I think he may have invented the posture of Nerd Cool, an aspect so familiar to anyone who reads message boards – the skill at deflating enthusiasm, puncturing passion with a hatpin lobbed from a safe distance. The instinctive unease with the wet messy energy of actual people.
Yes, reading too much into it. Really, it’s just a rote slam: If your mother is a loathed politician, and your older sister gets pregnant, famous old men can make jokes about you being knocked up by rich baseball players, and there’s nothing you can do. That’s the culture: a flat, dead-eyed, square-headed old man who’ll go back to the writers and ask for more Palin-daughter knocked-up jokes, because that one went over well. Other children he won’t touch, but not because he’s decent. It’s because he’s a coward.
I’ve never had any use for him, myself. But I’ve never been much into late-night “comedy,” period.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why aren’t feminists upset with Dave?
Because they’re leftists first, true feminists a distant second. And besides, Sarah Palin isn’t a real woman and of course, by extension, neither is her fourteen-year-old daughter. So they’re fair game.
[Mid-morning update]
Little Miss Atilla pulls no punches:
This is American Sharia, a**holes. The practitioners of Sharia in Muslim countries are at least consistent in their contempt for women and in their practice of gender apartheid: you, on the other hand, want sexual slavery for some women in this country; others, whose opinions you prefer, can live in relative peace and freedom. You will allow it.
If you are giving women and girls the “gift” of not being badgered for being female, and threatened with misogyny and sexual assault, they are not truly free—only living in a state of grace, contingent upon performing the right tricks, spouting leftist verbiage like seals at Sea World, balancing balls on their noses in the hopes of getting fish thrown into their mouths.
And any woman who doesn’t understand this fundamental truth about the misogynists living among them could be in for a rude awakening at any point, because that attitude will infect those who harbor it.
The leftist men in the sixties were notorious for their sexism and misogyny, considering women only useful for cooking and sex, while they wrote their manifestos. In fact, the feminist backlash in the seventies against “male chauvinist pigs” was a direct result of the experience of many of the women in the sixties with their “progressive” male cohorts. Some of them never grew up. Letterman is of that generation.
IEEE
This month’s issue of The Spectrum has a lot of spaceflight and Mars-related pieces, from Zubrin, Musk, Kim Stanley Robinson and others.