Silicon Valley Redneck

Hoo-hah!

Sometime last year, while I wasn't looking, Son Of Mission: Impossible finally came out on DVD!

And it hasn't sold out yet.

Not that I was totally impressed with the series back when it was on TV, before being sent off to the top-security vaults - it did have a tendency to cannibalize the original series, and make multiple episodes out of plot elements that were all packed into a single old-series episode (sorry, no specifics right now; this is a vague recollection from Back When) - but it was still pretty good, and vastly better than most of the drivel in the Vast Wasteland.

Anyway, the DVD set will be on its way shortly, so I'll be able to watch the series again, and perhaps be reminded of what was good, and what not-so-good, about it.

Oh, and if memory serves, I didn't even get to see the whole series when it was on TV.  Something about episodes being bumped to make way for feetball games and not re-shown at any time that I heard about, or just not being carried by the local station, or whatever.  I hadn't even realized, at the time, that there was a second season.

At last...

I'd long been wondering when Grant would get around to this one:

On the latest Mythbusters - the JATO-car "This time for sure!", which deviates ever further from the original yarn, while retaining the Impala - he's finally hooked up a computer-game steering wheel and pedals to the RC box, to allow driving the 1:1-scale RC car like a car.

There's still the matter of having a totally separate radio-command system for firing the rockets, but I'm guessing that's a COTS secure system made for HPR or possibly blasting.

Oh, and on the Science! front?  They keep bandying about a conversion factor for thrust to horsepower.  There's no such thing.  The units are non-equivalent.  Thrust is force (pounds, Newtons, dynes: mass times acceleration, e.g., kg*m/s^2); power is force times distance per unit time (horsepower, Watts, BTU/hour, e.g.: kg*m^2/s^3).  Yeah, you could assign a rocket a horsepower rating based on fuel consumption or (almost equivalently) heat output, but that ain't how horsepower ratings work (though if you used BTU/hour instead, it would make sense: treat the rocket as a heater).

And in the department of I could'a told you that: if you're going for maximum range with your rocket car, and you're not giving it fins like a Cadillac (nor RCS, nor engine gimballing, nor active aerodynamic control surfaces, nor any other way of keeping it pointed straight), best results will be obtained by timing Brennschluß for just before the car leaves the ramp.  Not a couple of seconds later.  If memory serves, they'd already seen the nose-comes-down-leaving-the-ramp effect (because Gravity, duh) in at least one earlier episode (possibly involving an old TV show about hazardous ducks or something), so it should be no surprise that the thrust vector, immediately post-ramp, would be Highly Suboptimal.

Clearly, for entertainment purposes only.

During my breaks from the battle with TurbotAx, I've been catching up on season 2 of Rocket City Rednecks.  (I'm surprised there was a season 2; it seems the very epitome of "don't show this on television" material.)

All good fun; imagine a sort of one-team version of Scrapheap Challenge, featuring the Barley Pickers, with Andy Barnes having a Ph.D. but behaving otherwise, plus a goodly dose of The Red Green Show.  And let the team play with guns and pyrotechnics.

But, don't take any of it in any way seriously.  The lofty justifications they give for their little projects are transparently absurd, for example.  And there was the business about blue lasers being the most powerful... surely Travis Taylor knows better'n that. (Yes, blue photons are more energetic, and in the area of readily-available visible laser diodes, the blue ones are the most powerful.  But!  There are some awesomely powerful infrared laser diodes... and the really powerful (and somewhat efficient) lasers have historically been way out there at 10600nm.

And the first cut at that drone, with the two propellers?  Surely no one expected that trick to work.  It doesn't even begin to make sense.

Then there's the amazing pizza bike.  Soon's Travis mentioned having an oven to keep the pizzas positively hot, a plan sprang into my head: drinks coolers alongside the rear wheel, saddlebag-style; warming oven above the rear wheel; cool compartments connected to warm compartment using thermoelectric modules, to pump heat from the drinks compartments where it isn't wanted to the pizza compartment where it is.  But did they do something sensible like that?  Of course not!  They went and put all the weight up high, and used a simple resistive heating element for warming, relying on passive insulation to keep the drinks cool.

So, yeah, fun show.  But don't get your science from it, nor think that their style of redneck engineering is anything close to optimal.

The things you notice when you're paying attention

Whilst waiting for my laundry to do its thing yesterday, I watched the Nova program "Rise of the Drones".

Not that I was paying that much attention, mind you, but:

Hobby guy points to GPS antenna, and says that what sends the signal to the satellites.  OK, so maybe a lot of hobby guys think that's how it works, but didn't they have some technical consultant to suggest it should be edited out?

Interesting way of lighting the faces of interviewees (more than one, but not all of them).  Not the standard light-from-below sinister effect, but more from the side... and still giving the sinister shadows.

Video clips (I noticed this in more than one place) from Predators at, what, 25K feet?  Video shows splodey.  Audio has simultaneous boom.  Uh... Predators got an audio feed, from way up there?  And, let's see, speed of sound, call it 1100 ft/sec, so, is that 25K feet above sea level?  Call it 20K feet AGL, so... shouldn't there be about an 18 second delay?  Or has someone been, like, adding sound to the video clip to make it seem right to the typical PBS-viewing* ignoramus?

This is just stuff I noticed on casual viewing and remember a day and a half later.

*Remember!  If you're watching PBS, you're still watching TV.

Ah, the vast wasteland

The latest Netflick Joy sent away for is a TV show called Defying Gravity.

Impressive visuals... but it takes a lot of turning-off-the-brain.

Ten years ago: deadly Martian sandstorm!  For Niven fans, the phrase "about as dangerous as an enraged caterpillar" springs inevitably to mind.

Current events: it seems that as a result of changing two Supreme Court justices, abortion has been absolutely outlawed, as have home pregnancy tests - as we all know, this follows automatically, with none of that pesky business about state-by-state legislation.  Curiously, though, women are still allowed to wear shoes and fly spaceships.

I guess we can allow the handwaving explanation of how the floor attracts the special clothing.

In space: aside from the apparent inconsistency of controls for the outer door of the airlock - is it just a touchscreen button, or is there a physical lever involved? - well, let's see what else annoyed me on the way past, during the Venus-suit event.

Suit, pressurized to 5 atm, has a slow leak.  Can we boost the pressure?  No, that might make it leak faster!  Wait, why would you want to boost the pressure anyway?  If the air for boosting the pressure is available, can't you use that to stabilize the pressure at, say 0.5 atm?

Donner is pulling on the safety line to retrieve Zoe.  He needs to speed up!  Pull faster!  Er... given the lack of friction, each tug should be faster than the one before.  Braking, however, is problematic; she'll come crashing back into the airlock at the speed of his last pull, which may be excessive.

As the pressure drops from 5 atm to 0.5 atm, Zoe gets incoherent.  It's nitrogen narcosis!  And the bends!  Now, let's get this straight... 5 atm is about equivalent to 170 feet of water, so, yes, if they were silly enough to pump up that suit with standard air, nitrogen narcosis while pressurized would be a serious problem.  And, as pressure came down, the bends would become a problem.  Both of which are excellent reasons that no competent space agency would use standard air for such a purpose.  Also, the symptoms of the bends are very different from those of nitrogen narcosis, and surely by the time she starts babbling she should be out of narcosis and into screaming in pain.

Oh, and why were they testing the suit with high pressure inside and vacuum outside anyway?  Why not go to 6 atm inside, and keep the airlock at 1 atm?  And is that really a good test anyway, when what you're worried about is high pressure on the outside leaking in?  All the seals and joints ought to have been designed for higher pressure on the outside, so reversing the situation seems likely to miss actual problems and cause gratuitous failures.

 

And then there's the whole business of the Mysterious Thing With Eldritch Powers.  Is Pod 4 a portal that opens onto Mars?  Is it a TARDIS that contains Mars?  Or is it just a sort of Room 101?  Or, perhaps, is the Thing the Venusian ambassador to Mars, hitching a ride home after millennia in the post-apocalyptic wasteland?

There were a bunch of other distractingly-wrong things, but I've already managed to forget most of them.  DVD #2 should be showing up in a couple of days....

At least it's not as bad as Le Morte d'Arthur.  That, I can't get more'n a couple of pages into without reaching for the history books to see just how wrong it's getting.

 

Update: I have now seen all there is of it.  Unlike Firefly, there's really no need for a second season... or a first, for that matter.

Silly annoying distraction: they don't even handwave over the subject of FTL communication, which they must have, or the conversations with Earth would have annoying coffee breaks in them.  (Besides which, what's with all the remote control?  Shades of old Soviet spam-in-a-can.  Except the astronauts have local controls for most stuff, only those can be overridden from Earth, and some critical routine functions seem to require calling on Mission Control to push the buttons.)

Then there's the whole system-wide Pokemon game...

A: Cut it into several pieces, and bury each on a different planet, moon, or asteroid.
Q: How would you imprison an immortal being of unspeakable evil?

Seriously, if you have no clue what they are, where they came from, why they are where they are, or what will happen if they're brought together... hey, kids!  Let's go trick-or-treating for large pieces of plutonium!

And then there's the utter dysfunctionality of, well, everyone, and the well-worn TV staple of "rewriting people's DNA", and the vast conspiracy that makes no sense whatsoever, and, ....

Apparently it was meant to become a 6-year soap opera, addressing (audience for soap operas) ⋃ (audience for science fiction), but somehow* ended up attracting only (audience for soap operas) ⋂ (audience for science fiction).

 

* Which could not, in any conceivable way, involve a brain-damaged concept and crappy writing.

Aw, c'mon...

Once again, the Mythbusters build team is just being goofy.

The clown-car-full-of-balloons thing?

The lab setup is completely non-analogous to the crash scenario.

And, as I watch this, they've discovered that neither easily-popped balloons nor extra-sturdy balloons have the desired effect, so now they're back in the lab trying to get the lowest possible peak accelerometer reading when they release a weighted plunger atop a cylinder of balloons.

Er, no.  Not unless you suddenly have the floor rise two feet.

In the setup they've got?  Lowest peak acceleration would be obtained with a solid cylinder of concrete.  The plunger wouldn't move at all, giving a peak reading of 1G exactly.

This would not work well if the floor suddenly rose two feet... or if, analogously, the whole system were moving rapidly and then came to a stop within two feet of travel.

What you're looking for is something intermediate, which will ease the deceleration such that the clown (a) doesn't just go right through and crash into the dashboard, but (b) also isn't so firmly restrained as to experience the full deceleration of the passenger compartment (which, admittedly, ought to be substantially less than that experienced by the front bumper).

Speaking of physics...

Scenario: your crash-test dummy is more or less upright on a surfboard that has a rocket attached to it.

Observation: when you fire the rocket, the board+rocket+dummy system does a back-flip.

Which of the following must be true?

1. The rocket is too powerful.
2. The thrust vector is below the center of mass.

Right... so, for your next test, you:

1. Use a cluster of little rockets with lower peak thrust.
2. Replace the dummy with a set of flat weights strapped directly to the board.

Right: both.  So of course it doesn't do a back-flip, but the test no longer bears any relation to the problem at hand.

And that's meant to be a science program....

Update: oh, this just gets better.  They go and call the rocket-surfer story "busted" on the basis that their one live test run didn't quite achieve the results claimed in the story.  Uh, guys?  Once again: just because you didn't do it in a week, and a single live test, doesn't mean someone else hasn't done it ever.

Totally unbiased news coverage

Had to wait a few minutes in a corporate lobby earlier.

Obligatory flatscreen teevee on the wall was showing CNN.

Lotsa soundbites from attendees, who - surprise! - all claimed things were So Much Better Now.  Close ups of the crowd, with the voiceover emphasizing Diversity of Melanin and Estrogen.

Much talking-head chatter.  All Democrat, all the time.  Except...

There was an interview with Ron Paul!  Maybe 10 seconds of teaser, 15 seconds of introduction, and then he got a dozen or so words in before they cut back to the talking heads.  Like, just as he was about to say something substantive.

 

The past's supermarionated future

So, while waiting for Iggle to munch through a test autoroute on Monday, I came across this post at The Lexicans, and watched the video.

And something jumped out at me near the end of that first segment, around the 9:09 mark.

That P.17D lifting platform thing.  The triangular platform with all the jet engines (70, or 44, or 56 of them, according to whose account one believes).  The one that would act as a sort of flying airfield, bringing VTOL capability to the overall system.

Another fine product of Anderson and Anderson, Aeronautical Engineers?

Except... that show came several years later.  So, getting it right way 'round: viewed against the background of the glory days of postwar British aviation, those wacky flying machines of the Andersonverse make a a weird kind of sense.

More teevee

Still under the weather, though I seem to be recuperating.  So, what with my brain being out of order, it's an occasion for more mindless entertainment.

The boss had mentioned Rocket City Rednecks, on account of he's been having business dealings with someone connected somehow with the show (that was a few weeks ago, and the details escape me).

It's kind of a fun show - sort of like of Red Green, if the denizens of Possum Lodge were Southerners and also were Piled Higher and Deeper.  And had a penchant for kludging laptop computers into their creations, and occasionally resorting to math.

And that counterweight-catapult gizmo with the balloons is kinda halfway to an idea that's been rattling around my head for a couple of years now, as an untried solution to a common Scrapheap Challenge problem: imparting controlled multi-G acceleration to flangable objects using block & tackle and a 16-ton weight.  Sometime when health and work schedule cooperate (i.e., not anytime in the next few weeks), I need to test the concept, and, if it works as it ought, make an instructional Youtube video or something.

Oh, and the "this stuff is dangerous" warning?  In the case of the moonshine rocket fuel, yeah: that kinda stuff can get you shot by the revenooers, can't it?

Anyway, as edumacashional teevee goes, it's not even up to the recent standards of Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges Mythbusters, but it is fun.