Silicon Valley Redneck

New, not-so-improved Mythbusters

Hmph.  Too much don't-try-this-at-home, let-the-experts-do-everything.

And: not enough math, and especially not enough understanding.

Consider: rock launched by lawnmower.  Compare to bullet fired from .357 Magnum.  Lab session with rocks and lawnmower: good; got to gather data.  Range time with .357: lame; good numbers for .357 muzzle velocity for various loads are readily available.

But then: having velocity numbers, do they figure in the masses of the projectiles and calculate momentum and energy?  They do not.  They blather on about energy, yes, but then insist on comparing energy using a ballistic pendulum... an instrument for measuring momentum, not energy.  Oh, and the term "force" also gets bandied about, meaninglessly.

C'mon, Splodey Channel: this is supposed to be educational, right?  Not just "look how fun this is, and don't any of you in the audience even think about having this much fun"?

If it's educational, can't we have some proper physics, with math and explanations?  And correct usage of the terms?

Additionally: if you fire a gun at a ballistic pendulum with the intention of measuring the momentum of the bullet, it may be appropriate to set it back far enough to be out of muzzle-blast range.  Too close, and it's not just the bullet pushing on the pendulum.  That setup looked awfully close.

Update: Wrong, wrong, wrong!  It looks like the bullet embedded itself in the ballistic pendulum, as it should, but the rock didn't.  If the projectile bounces off the target, it transfers extra momentum.  Also, for a proper comparison, the mass of the pendulum needs to be large compared to that of the projectile, which I'm not so sure was the case here.

Further: in the actual-lawnmower experiment, having a dense pile of rocks will give suboptimal results by overloading the mower.  Better to whack one rock at a time.

Truly, there is no new thing under the Klieg lights.

Feature film, coming Real Soon Now, We Promise: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.!

I've been using the old teevee show to occupy my useless time lately, since someone had a post on potential weaponization of toy airplanes, I mentioned that The Avengers had done that way back when, and someone reminded me that TMFU had also done it once.

Man!  That show has epically bad gun handling!  As in, muzzle discipline and trigger discipline are both less than zero.  And apparently no one on either side has ever had a lesson in basic prisoner-guarding.

The plots are seriously formulaic; the key to the crisis of the week is always some pretty young thing who needs seducing, and you can spot the plot twists a mile away.  (Yes, even in the episodes I never saw before, not just the ones I saw 25 years ago and forgot.)

Then there's the premise.  Let's see, now: Thrush has resources comparable to U.N.C.L.E., which apparently has the backing of many major governments.  U.N.C.L.E. and Thrush both have comprehensive files on each other's secret agents.  Somehow, though, they don't have {arrest | shoot}-on-sight lists, and there's a stable level of low-grade warfare between them.

And Ilya is apparently meant to be a Georgian with a Russian accent* who spent his childhood in Kyiv, except when he's a Gypsy or something.  And the bad guys keep calling him an American.

So the great blockbuster of any-year-now will be based on this totally lame (but entertainingly lame) show.  Think it'll preserve the charming lameness of the original, or just crank up the lameness and lose the charm?

P. S.: Napoleon shot first!

Further: What's the point of having a cool secret headquarters when your enemies know where it is?

And: I just watched "The Double Affair".  The premise requires that Thrush know more about a tippy-top-secret U.N.C.L.E. mission than just about anyone at U.N.C.L.E., which would point to security being seriously bass-ackwards.  And, within the secret mission itself, The August Affair, with all the security pageantry?  No part of that makes any sense whatsoever.  It's comprehensively and fractally nonsensical.

* Georgian is just like Russian, only you say "ялл"** a lot, right?  So the accent should be the same?

** Properly speaking, the я should have an acute accent over it, but I can't find the Unicode for that.

If Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming had a love-child...

Joy discovered Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix.

All rather entertaining, so long as one keeps one's mind firmly turned off.  Sort of a gritty, action-packed-with-extra-subplots take on the traditional English teatime mystery.

Start thinking, and, well:

Sometimes the culprit (or one of them, anyway) is instantly obvious based on dramatic convention and blatant clues.

Many plot devices make no sense at all.  That cornet-mute dart gun is absurd (as in: would not work, for multiple reasons), and, in any case, what happened to the dart?  And: given two lads whose only resemblance is the striped coats they both wear, how is it that one can impersonate the other in jail without anyone noticing that his hair isn't even the right color?

Then there are failures of elimination.  If a hefty murder victim's body is found strung up high above ground level, with no lifting equipment in evidence, and your prime suspects are a skinny dweeb and a little girl, there's something seriously wrong - and no one thinks to mention this.

And, reflecting on the social aspects: Phryne Fisher is the very epitome of a skybox socialist, a wealthy member of the aristocracy who user her wealth and power to indulge her every whim without risk of legal consequences, while conveniently espousing every political cause popular with Progressive scriptwriters of 85 years hence.

Oh, well.  At least she's in Melbourne, so there's enough excess population to have a person or two murdered in her presence* every week.  Miss Marple's murder a week would have wiped out her little village in no time.

* Morse's Law: There's always a 50:50 chance that the man who found the body did the deed.

How could they miss this one?

Seems there's a plan afoot for a sort of BBC Disneyland, in which visitors will be able to experience scenes from favorite shows, or some such.

There are various suggestions presented, and yet somehow The Rimmer Experience is not one of them!

As the science consultants flee in horror...

Yeah, the latest Doctor Who.  The one with all the trees.

Every attempt to inject sciencey content was completely wrong from beginning to end.

Monster CME is big enough to blow the whole planet away!  But, adding some oxygen to the atmosphere will make everything fine.  WTF?

Trees control the supply of oxygen, ergo, you can't set fire to one without its consent.  WTF?

There were several more, which have mercifully faded from my memory overnight.

Oh, and that CME was in remarkably tight focus when it arrived.  A tiny fraction of a degree off in either axis, a tiny fraction of a second off in arrival time, and it would have missed the planet completely.  Had to be carefully planned and guided.  Only the Ringworld meteor defense is so precise*.

 

Oh, yes.  There was a tyger.  It wasn't burning, though there was a certain amount of brightness involved.  Pity the brightness wasn't among the writers.

 

* Actually, it's nowhere near that precise, but I couldn't resist the temptation to rephrase my original sentence there.

Clearly a failure of imagination

A couple of days ago, I was skimming an article about an experiment intended to determine whether the Universe is merely a hologram, and tried to conjure up "What you mean, merely a hologram?" in, of course, Arnold J. Rimmer's voice.

Somehow, though, the voice I came up with was Sheldon Cooper.

So...

Apparently there hasn't been a Red Dwarf crossover episode of The Big Bang Theory, though Sheldon has a complete set of Red Dwarf on DVD.

This must not stand!

Try this on for size: a sort of reverse-Back To Reality.

We need Wil Wheaton, obviously.  In his Wesley-with-a-beard guise, he slips the regulars a dose of an experimental telepathy drug, causing a group hallucination*.  As they'd just (finally) binge-watched Sheldon's complete set of Red Dwarf, or at least some portion thereof**, they find themselves in an all-new episode....

Sheldon must be Rimmer; he's a perfect match.  This makes Leonard Lister.

Howard has to be the Cat, given how hard he tries.

This leaves Raj as Kryten.  Can you imagine Raj being Kryten?  The personality, the selective mutism: he'll do.

Penny must be Kochanski - the original version, not the parallel-universe one nor Rachael.  This fits perfectly with Leonard being Lister.

 

I'll leave the story-within-a-story to your imagination.  What, you think I'll do everything for you?

 

* Alternatively, they could be tired and slightly drunk, and under the influence of one of his infamous suggestions that such a drug exists.

** Actually, they should only have watched the first few seasons.  Mustn't get far enough along to meet New Kochanski, or it gets confusing.

Nitpicks-R-Us

So, a while back, Joy started watching The Big Bang Theory, and then got me watching some of it, and then we went back to Season 1 so I'd get the back-story, such as it is....

I'm sure if I'd kept up with modern physics I'd find quibble matter in the main-line banter, but I haven't, and even college physics has faded (apart from the stuff I actually use from time to time).  And it's not like I'd be doing the math in the compressed time of TV watching, anyway.

But!  Mr. Smarty-Pants Supergenius was trying to grow pathogen cultures in Petri dishes of Jell-O... when he thought he'd ben exposed to flu?  That's some pretty basic knowledge (or comprehension thereof) for him to be lacking!

Poorly-constructed tests

Yeah, raggin' on Mythbusters again.

Pheromones: basic structural problem.  You want to test the subtle effects of human pheromones, you don't hit the subject with a concentrated nose-full and ask for her immediate, conscious opinion.  You give her a low dose for several minutes, and monitor physiological responses (no, I don't know which ones, let alone how to measure them).

Aside from that... the "choose your favorite" is a poor mode of voting, especially with many options.  I suggest having a slider on each station, initially set to 0, which the subject can move anywhere in the -10 to +10 range.

Blondes: again, basic problem.  A proper blonde is going to be generally melanin-deficient, and will have pale skin and, probably, blue eyes.  Get too far from that and what you have is not a blonde but a woman who has inexplicably bleached her hair.  You can take a pale, blue-eyed woman, put her in a dark wig, and have a convincing effect; going the other way just screams fake!

Also, how many of the test subjects were actual gentlemen?

Wait, ISIS just got a tank?

I thought they got one back in April.

More lame science

On the latest Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges:

1. Ping-pong ball slows down as it approaches the closed end of the (mostly-) evacuated barrel. Duh.  Even without blow-by, there's some air ahead of the ball, which will be compressed.  The packing tape holds it in.  I'd assumed that the evacuated-barrel ping-pong-ball accelerator would have the end closed by some little disc held in place by vacuum (OK, by outside atmospheric pressure), so oncoming pressure buildup would blow it off.

2. I'd also kinda assumed that the logical step after the pressure gun was just to evacuate the barrel of the same old pressure gun.  Did they try that and not show it, or...?

3. In the final encounter of supersonic ping-pong-ball vs. porcine appendage, the high-speed footage made it look remarkably like the air stream was doing most of the damage.  This would be consistent with my suspicion at the beginning: yeah, a supersonic ping-pong ball would be dangerous, but whatever's keeping it supersonic is probably more so.  And, if you're in an environment where a ping-pong ball can continue moving at 1100 MPH for a nontrivial distance, you've got bigger worries than ping-pong balls.

4. If reinforcing materials were allowed for the cannonballs, why not for the tube?  Why not make the cannon out of Pykrete?

A warped barrel is a fool's frustration

With regard to a DIY Krummlauf, Pinky asks: "How illegal is this?"

Wrong question, dude.  You're in California.  The question is: "A wacky cartoon gun having been shown on TV, how long until there's a new law against it?"

And then... Vera needs oxygen around her?  Naw.  Results as expected.  But they left out a possibility: depending how the gun is lubricated, what various parts are made of, and how long it's left in vacuum, it might just seize up.

I keep having these really great...

...bad ideas.

The latest: add Style! to your home security system with a quiet little quadcopter, trailing wires hooked up to a stun gun, and announcing:

Welcome. You are unauthorized. Your death will now be implemented.

 On the not-so-bad-idea front: huge wrought-iron(-looking, from a distance) chandelier with many little LED "candles": just the thing for efficiently lighting a mad scientist's laboratory, without having to employ an Igor to change the light bulbs (or to light the candles).  Probably have the LEDs pointing up, and a little mirror above each to direct the light generally downward.

Testing all cases but the most likely one

The latest Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges tests the "two workmen carrying huge pane of glass across the street when a car crashes through it" scenario.

They tested it with three types of glass.  This is unnecessary; if two actual workmen were crossing an actual street carrying a huge pane of actual glass in the black & white era, it would be a plate-glass window for a store, no?  (If two actors were doing it, it'd be some kind of Hollywood gimmick glass, meant to shatter harmlessly.)

Well, they did test with plate glass.  But what else can we surmise about those two actual workers?

Right.  They'd be wearing pants.

Try wrapping your bleeders in denim, guys.

Speaking of which

Been wasting bits of evenings watching few-years-ago episodes of Doctor Who.

I really don't like the recent Master.  Bring back Roger Delgado!  Even if it involves necromancy, or CGI!  Or, hey: The Curse of Fatal Death had a perfectly serviceable Master.

My dislike for the new edition reaches its peak in The End of Time - the one with James Bond playing Darth Rassilon.  Er, wait... where did Sith Time Lords come from all of a sudden?  Leaping around, shooting lightning from their hands, and all that?

Oh, well: having Sith running around gave Wilfred a chance to play Luke Skywalker.

Next up: the Doctor meets Amy Pond and her cousin Duck.

OK, so now I've seen...

...Two and a Half Doctors, or whatever.  Short Night, and Long Day, of the Doctor.  Words to that effect.

And now there's another un-numbered Doctor, this one between the Eighth and Ninth.  This in addition to the second First, who apparently existed in parallel to the canonical First.

And that superweapon whose operating system attained consciousness?  I was expecting Rose to say, "False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore, I shall refuse to perceive you."

Anyway, now we know how Gallifrey ended up wrapped up in its little time bubble, whence Rassilon expects the Master to retrieve it... or was that a different time bubble?  This is all so confusing!  With the Universe having been rebooted at least once, and clearly not being the one We the Viewers inhabit, it's hard to keep the story lines straight.

Um.  And those leftover Daleks, not destroyed in the Time War.  Did they survive the War Doctor's destruction of Gallifrey, or did they survive the Great Circular Firing Squad after Gallifrey wasn't destroyed after all?

Afterthought: Is it just my imagination, or was Clara wearing a wedding ring?  If she was, when will she tell her tin dog husband about her little hobby?

And furthermore: there's yet another Doctor, the Alternate-Universe Fourth, who lived to retire instead of regenerating.  (Maybe that's a better universe.  I never was a big fan of the Fifth Doctor, nor many of his successors for that matter.)

Wait, haven't I seen this movie before?

Seems there's an epidemic of counterfeit drugs worldwide, including the U.S.

Very elaborate counterfeits, in some cases.

'Course, ya gotta be wary of the statistics, given that "counterfeit drugs" covers everything from "the factory ran off an extra batch of the product for distribution outside authorized channels" to "random floor sweepings packed in capsules."

Anyway, this springs immediately to mind.  And this.

Random thoughts regarding hyperdrives

In my awake-but-not-working time, I've gotten up to The Gripping Hand, which inspires the question: if the Crazy Eddie Drive takes a ship from one Alderson point to another, can't the return trip be made pretty much immediately?  So, why did the Moties never send a probe ship with a clockwork timer to jump, take some hasty pictures, then jump back?  Seems like that would be a way to get at least some information about the destination from which no (Motie) ship had ever returned.

This resembles a thought I had, years ago, when watching some episode or other of Babylon 5: a Narn scout ship pops into an unfamiliar system, is approached by awesome spacecraft of unknown origin, and is destroyed while the pilot waits helplessly for the jump engines to recharge.  Um.  So, why doesn't anyone make wartime scout ships with two sets of jump engines, or at least two sets of whatever it is that needs time to recharge?  Seems like that would greatly improve the odds of getting information back from hostile destinations.

Then there's the business of having specific jump points, at locations determined somehow by the local shape of space.  Many writers have used this.  Somehow, the jump points are always at moderately inconvenient locations.  Wouldn't it be totally boring if jump points only happened in places where space was really, really flat?  Like, at the point where the two nearest stars' gravitational attraction cancelled out?  OK, so maybe there's a reason no one writes stories around that assumption.

And I still think that the Nothing that's outside the windows when using a Niven-esque hyperdrive should appear as a perfect mirror, not a mysterious Blind Spot, but maybe I'm not understanding how the drive works.  (If it creates a little private universe, the boundary should be a mirror, as there's no outside for radiation to escape to.  This also implies a need to drop back into normal space every so often, to cool off.)

Also: If FTL travel happens through wormholes, Alderson points, or whatever - you engage the special drive at Special Point A, and soon appear at Special Point B, possibly having to do some esoteric navigation in between - why would merchant ships routinely carry their own jump drives (and, if applicable, specialist wormhole pilots)?  Wouldn't it make sense to set up a ferry service for each often-travelled pair, with a giant jump-drive-equipped carrier making regularly-scheduled jumps?  Price the service just below the cost of lugging a jump drive around, and sit back and collect the tolls.  This is obvious enough that it ought to happen just about anywhere there's a lot of traffic.

So: the future of the Doctor?

Ted Kissell is all bothered that the Twelfth Doctor is, predictably enough, male.  And white.  And British.

Hey, it's the nature of the character.  He always regenerates British for the same reason the aliens always invade London (or Cardiff, or just possibly New York City).

You want a female Doctor, wait for the Thirteenth, already played by Joanna Lumley.

There are other interesting possibilities, of course.  Given that the Doctor is currently on borrowed regenerations (since being poisoned by Malady Swamp or whatever her name is this week)...

He could regenerate as an AI, in which case he could be played by Matt Frewer, or Norman Lovett, or (if you insist on a female) Hattie Hayridge.

He could completely fail to regenerate, leaving a void to be filled by his daughter or granddaughter.

Or, given that the universe has been entirely rebooted, all bets (in particular, those related to pre-reboot history) are off.

And what's to keep him from regenerating as a sort of talking kangaroo, or a Jatravartid, or something?

Coyness fail

Really, the network censorship of Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges Mythbusters gets awfully lame.

Take, e.g, the latest episode to hit the Internets.  They're trying to dissolve a pig in a bathtub, and the bathtub too.  Having determined that hydrofluoric acid doesn't do the trick As Seen On Television (duh!), they switch to sulfuric acid plus a mystery ingredient....

Lessee, mystery ingredient.  Increases the etchitivity of sulfuric acid.  An oxidizer, no?  And it's a clear liquid that comes in plastic jugs at 30% concentration.  Hydrogen peroxide?  Yup.  (The closing Hyne-hint about lots of oxygen and hydrogen seems consistent with this.)

And, mixed exothermically in situ with the pig, it gives dramatic results, as one might expect.  But when it fails to eat through the cast-iron tub, do they toss in a jug of HF to attack the porcelain?  Of course not: no imagination (or maybe that would have created a little too much of a disposal problem afterward).

And was there some remark about the process for making mercury fulminate (alternative name: fulminate of mercury, not fulminated mercury) being classified?  Uh, guys: it's been in the open literature since forever.

Side note: my reference books on such matters are inaccessible at the moment, but I recall that one of the older primary explosives (which might have been mercury fulminate) gets unreasonably sensitive at larger crystal sizes.  So, maybe tweaking the process to get larger crystals would result in a more impact-sensitive product.

"It's a joke name, sir."

Presumably everyone's heard by now about a (Bay Area!) TV station and the NTSB being pranked regarding the names of the flight crew of that Asiana Airlines plane that landed short a few days ago.

This is even worse than the U.S. Secretary of State looking at a button marked "PEREGRUZKA" and not noticing that it doesn't look anything like Russian writing.

Seriously: how could anyone think that list passed the giggle test?