It Has Always Been So

I was watching the silent science fiction epic "Woman in the Moon" (Frau im Mond) from 1929.  I'd heard of and watched "Metropolis", also by Fritz Lang, but never this.  This is by far the better of the two, even if the effects and such are grander in the latter.  This one is more realistic, with no demonic man-eating machines and evil shaky-bitch robotic psychopaths set against a Wellsian Eloi vs Morlock class-warfare-nonsense backdrop.  Instead, we have a normal society launching a rocket to the moon.

In the opening credits, my jaw dropped when I saw the name of one of the film's technical consultants, Hermann Oberth.

And indeed, the film clearly benefits.  The completed multi-stage rocket is rolled out from a massive hangar on a rolling gantry platform (using rail instead of treads), and the launch plot revolves in part around the issues of escape velocity and the rocket's acceleration effects on those aboard.

The state of lunar science at the time included Hansen's notion from the 1850s that there might be atmosphere on the far side of the moon in a great depression in the surface.  This, plus the idea that they were going there to find gold, are the silliest points to modern viewers, along with the divining rods being used to locate water in the form of muddy lunar soil.

But if we focus on the rocket, we see something all too familiar in the form of unrealistic special effects.  Both the launch from the peculiar water bath on Earth and the launch from the moon's surface show the rocket suddenly zipping away at a constant, abnormally-high velocity.  After all the talk of acceleration and the long, luxurious scenes of the rocket being rolled into place like a space shuttle, the warp-speed departure was jarring.

Reminds me of more than a few sci-fi scenes where the FX work, supposedly done a certain way for for audience benefit, just doesn't work for smart audiences.

QotD 2015-0326 - Tubes

From a post on Heir to the Jedi at SDN:

"Ch 15 pg 165 wrote:

Though the Empire strictly controlled the interstellar HoloNet, the Kupohans had a local system infonet set up almost of necessity to exchange weather information and help ships land safely.

The existence of planetary internets. No word on if they're a series of tubes or not."

Thanks for the giggle, Balrog.

Inside Baseball, Pt. II: New Site SitRep

So here is where I am now for those wondering.

All existing pages have been automagically converted to AsciiDoc and Markdown formats so the content is fairly readily usable whichever way I need to go.  A few pages that are probably coming over unchanged have seen a little cleanup work done (the magic doesn't make them ready to just drop in, sadly).

Referencing the Inside Baseball post, I am currently building up the system by which I will publish the site.

The battle plan revolves around Pelican, a static site generator that accepts Markdown by design, and formerly AsciiDoc too (albeit now only via plugin).  It won't work server-side unless you have a webhost that allows full Python execution, however, which would mean a virtual private server or Amazon S3 mumbo-jumbo with its buckets of unique jargon which I loathe.  Both cost a little bit, and options can be found where server security is maintained automatically, but as a professional cheapskate and someone who didn't want to run a whole server for this (even a virtual one) I really didn't want to go that route.  I could just use my desktop, but I've been trying to get away from leaving it running.

Enter the Pi.  I acquired a Raspberry Pi some time ago for experimentation, and Pelican will execute on it happily.  However, I don't want to develop content on it.  The goal is thus to write elsewhere and leave the Pi as a headless Pelican execution server.  With Dropbox integration (a pain in the ass on the ARM-based Pi but doable, I am told), I can write pages anywhere.

So, creating a page or post will look like this:

1.  Make notes or pages saved in .txt format within my directory of choice.  I can even leave them in the content directory that Pelican will later see, because it will ignore them.
2.  Once complete, rename to the appropriate extension.
3.  Dropbox will upload to their servers, and the Pi will download the new version based on a regular cron job.
4.  Either another regular cron job or a file-change watchdog (haven't gotten there yet) will execute Pelican, rebuilding the static output of the site.  (I most likely will want to do the latter.)
5.  This static output will automatically be uploaded to my existing webhost.
6.  Profit.  And cake. (But both of those are a lie.  I have neither ads nor frosting.)
7. Regularly back up the Dropbox folder.

Compared to the old 2002 era workflow, this has the advantage of allowing me to write from anywhere more readily and easily.  All I need is a connection and a text editor (or even a browser through which I can log in to Dropbox) so I can make changes on the go.  Even sans connectivity, if I make a change on a device of mine that can sync a Dropbox folder (e.g. a laptop) it'll hit as soon as I get back to civilization.  I can even schedule when a page drops!

Pictures are a bit of a question, since I rather like my old sorting, but I can still link to old pics as-is.

But, the plan relies on two external objects (Dropbox and the Pi).  However, even if one or both break, or if I do, the site is still there for as long as the hosting bill is paid up or as long as The Wayback Machine works, because it is static.

And, I don't see Dropbox going away (there are alternatives even if they break their API a la Twitter), and provided I can find an RPi B for sale I can go ahead and get backup hardware now.  (Good idea ... I should write that down.  Oh, wait ... does this qualify?)

One more option worth noting is that in the current plan, Blogger could go away in favor of keeping it all in-house.  But then the only good way to do comments would be Disqus, at which point I might as well have it for pages, too.  But that can be decided on further down the road.

The main hurdle will probably be getting my site to look just right.  Jinja templates are a whole new animal for me, and I am not looking forward to that part of the Pelican build.

More to come ...

Color Perception

So a picture of a dress freaked out the nettubes Thursday.  My favorite response:

Anyone who disagrees, I'm at 37th and Madison, come fight me. #TheDress pic.twitter.com/8dwglnP672
— Krister Johnson (@KristerJohnson) February 27, 2015

That anyone saw white and gold is very strange to me and somewhat disturbing, though polls indicate at least 2/3rds of people see white and old instead of reality.  Even when other pictures of the dress were posted, including from the manufacturer, some have refused to concede, claiming conspiracy.  (Meanwhile, one blue-black camp member replied to the proof of blue-black with "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!", much to my nerdy pleasure.)

Of course we have probably all seen assorted optical illusions, some of which deal with color perception like the orange/brown shadowed object on a chessboard that is actually the same color (courtesy of Wikipedia):

And I presume you're all aware of the blind spot a few degrees outboard of your center of vision that is normally not perceived.

The brain engages in many such 'post-production' camera-correction efforts.  What makes this one strange is that it is such a stark contrast with no obvious solution like the orange/brown thing, and has to do with perception in such a basic way.

See, I have long used color as an example when discussing perception and objective reality.  Despite eye contruction variations and visual cortex differences, generally we can all expect that we can all agree that light of such and such nanometer wavelength is red.  That is to say, even if the output of your eye and brain, piped into mine, looked green or yellow or ultraviolet, we both know that everyone knows it as red and all agree on that.

It is distressing to learn that this example is not necessarily correct at such a scale.  It disturbs people because it is a basic issue of perception.  It's one thing to show the same facts to a commie bastard and a Constitutionalist American and have them disagree on the correct conclusion, but we would commonly expect them to at least concur on the basic color of an item.  I know sane and truthful people who inexplicably (to me) saw it as white and gold.

Of course, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy to have been firmly in the blue-black camp since the first moment.  Apparently, this suggests I have superior color discernment, in addition to my being able to pick up on spatial orientation cues that others miss.

I am led to wonder if perhaps there haven't been a few Vs. Debate events where folks are similarly color-blind, or at least color-illusory.  I thought of the last objection on this page, the old "band of brightness" debate, and some others where folks seemed to me to be actively refusing to see the obvious.  Perhaps they were, or perhaps they really are blind, by comparison.

Either way, I don't feel bad about responding to their flames with equal fire.  If you're blind or daft, don't flame ... in the debate of the blind, the one-eyed nerd is king.

That Which is Diburnium

(Another materials post, this time from TOS, and in which we get to reference entirely too much knowledge of the casting of the 1960's Batman tales.)

In "That Which Survives"[TOS3] the Enterprise encounters a peculiar, unnamed world.  Described as hollow later in the episode (and full of replicas of one of the actresses to play Catwoman in the 60's), we are told the Catwoman planet reads as only thousands of years old, is approximately the size of Earth's moon, yet has a mass and atmosphere comparable to Earth's.

SPOCK: I suggest no supernatural explanation, Captain. I merely point out that the facts do not fit any known categories of planets.
KIRK: Let's take the facts one by one. That should explain something.
SPOCK: Undoubtedly. The age of this planet would seem to be only a few thousand years. It would be impossible for vegetation to evolve in so short a period.
KIRK: Its size is approximately that of Earth's moon.
SPOCK: But its mass and atmosphere are similar to Earth.
KIRK: That would be difficult to explain.
SPOCK: It would be impossible, Captain. An atmosphere could not evolve in so short a period of time.
KIRK: And yet it has.
SPOCK: Evidently. But the inconsistencies are so compounded as to present a seemingly impossible phenomenon.
KIRK: But a fascinating one, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: Precisely, Captain. 

The basic substance the world is made of is later identified as a diburnium-osmium alloy which couldn't have happened naturally (and indeed the world was an outpost of the Kalandans, led by Losira, that died out thousands of years prior).   The material looks like pink rock on the rocky world and even exists just under a thin layer of topsoil, where there is any soil.  However, when Kirk tries to dig a grave for an unfortunate crewman using his phaser, he discovers to his surprise that it doesn't work.  With thanks as always to Chakoteya.Net:

SULU: That's the same red rock.
KIRK: My phaser didn't cut through it.
MCCOY: Whatever it is, it has a mighty high melting point.
KIRK: Eight thousand degrees centigrade. It looks like igneous rock, but infinitely denser.  

In other words, Kirk seemed to believe the alloy had a melting point of 8000 degrees, presumably because it would be somewhat superior to what is phaser would be expected to generate.   And further, while it looked like simple igneous rock (which has an average density of around 3000 kg/m^3), Kirk believed it was "infinitely" more dense ... an exaggeration, naturally, but not the sort of thing one would say in lieu of 'just a wee bit'.

(Kirk does use the term that way, after all.  In "Errand of Mercy" he compares a possible fate to living under Klingon occupation and says they'd be infinitely better off.  In "Whom Gods Destroy" Kirk claims to Garth, who is trying to get a passphrase from Kirk, that there are an infinite number of countermoves to a particular move in 3-D chess, a game with X pieces and Y possible squares to inhabit.)

Note also Kirk's surprise at not cutting through the 'rock'.  He clearly expected his brief shot to either cut the grave or at least get it good and started, not merely pock-mark the surface (and in a rectangle, no less!).  But instead, the lieutenant is buried beneath some other gray rocks scattered about the surface.

While the Catwoman planet is identified as being hollow, we are not told any details of the depth of the alloy layer.  However, we can get some estimates for the planet as a whole.  After all, if it is approximately the size of the moon then it is around 3500km in diameter, or around a quarter that of Earth.  But the real story is in volume.  The moon's volume is about 2.1958×10¹⁰ km³ ... a mere two percent of the volume of the Earth.

This means that for the planet to have the same mass as Earth, it must be about fifty times more dense than the average density of Earth.  Earth's total density is about 5,500 kg/m^3, meaning the Catwoman planet density should be somewhere in the range of 275,000 kg/m^3!

Um, yeah.  That's a lot.  Like, crazypants a lot. That's 275 times denser than water, and almost 100 times denser than the igneous rock average from earlier (making Kirk's "infinitely" close enough).  It's also 35 times denser than steel, and almost twice the density at the core of the sun!

Suffice it to say, you won't see an element of that density anywhere on the periodic table, or a material like that on modern Earth outside of a collider.  And the scary thing is that it is alloyed with osmium, one of the densest elements known at a 'mere' 22,500 kg/m^3, twice the density of lead.  If the ratio of diburnium and osmium was 50/50 by volume, diburnium would be almost twice as dense as our 275,000 kg/m^3 figure!  And that doesn't even touch on the hollowness.

(Also note that osmium's melting point is about 3000 degrees, rather less than 8000.  Indeed, the highest known melting points top out around 4200 degrees, which is the melting point of tantalum hafnium carbide.   In other words, Kirk thinks his phaser ought to be able to melt (or worse) a grave-sized amount of anything we know of today.)

It seems little wonder, then, that Spock marveled at the material used by the Kelvans in "By Any Other Name":

SPOCK: Fascinating material. Similar to diburnium, but considerably more dense. I doubt even phaser fire could disturb its molecular structure. 

SCOTT: This is it. Now all we have to do
SPOCK: Whatever it is we must do, it is impossible.
SCOTT: Why?
SPOCK: This material surrounding the projector is the same as I discovered on the planet. Readings indicate it is impervious to any of our weapons. We cannot penetrate the casing to get to the machine. 

If the material is considerably more dense than 275,000kg/m^3 (or even higher depending on the osmium content on the Catwoman planet), then it is no wonder the phasers couldn't begin to touch it!  If it was a cool million kilograms per cubic meter, it would only be 1000 times less dense than a white dwarf!

There is, however, one problem with the information we are provided.

The Moon has one-sixth of Earth's gravity ... 16% or so ... despite only having 1.2% of its mass.  The reason the gravity is so high is that the radius is so small.  At Earth's radius ... that is to say, if you could make a massless surface to stand on at a distance from the core equal to the distance of Earth's surface to Earth's core ... the gravity would be 1.2% of Earth's, or around 1/83rd instead of 1/6th.

Catwoman's planet, meanwhile, is said to have Earth's mass and the moon's size.  That means the surface gravity should be over 13g.  (And lest one be tempted to think that things will be different because the world may be hollow, as I have seen some commenters online succumb to, bear in mind the shell theorem.)

One easy solution would be to have the world be in a tidal lock with a nearby massive but dim sun, perhaps something like a brown dwarf, but unfortunately this won't work . . . the planet has at least a partial day-night cycle of greater and lesser studio lighting and sky color.  We might then suppose instead a massive, dense moon in a geosynchronous orbit ... this works rather better, inasmuch as it keeps the light levels as high as they were observed in the supposedly night-time scenes, though of course there is no mention of a moon nor is it spotted in Enterprise orbit scenes.  However, the moon would have to be even more interesting than the planet itself to have enough gravity at a distance to subtract up to 12g.

In any case, the presence of an Earth-normal atmosphere as Spock also mentioned does constrain us.  Higher gravity equals a higher atmospheric density, but if the atmosphere is Earth-like then the gravity should be, as well.  We can fudge a little here and assume he simply meant the atmosphere was the same at the surface, meaning it was several times thinner under normal gravitational circumstances, but then we're still faced with the gravity problem of Kirk and company running around effortlessly while weighing something like 2000 pounds, a feat Shatner wouldn't perform again until Generations.

Even fudging the numbers a bit ... 1.33 Moon radii and 0.66 Earth masses, for instance ... we still come out just shy of 5g.  And to match the visuals I'd want no more than 1.5g on the highest end.  Even pretending the densest part of the planet is on the opposing surface (thus faking 2 Moon radii out of it, despite whatever odd atmospheric effects this might cause), we still only get down to 2.2g.

The gravity problem is significant, and we are constrained to the idea that whatever causes the beamdown site to have 1g should be a permanent phenomenon.  After all, when the Enterprise was thought lost, Kirk's concerns were food and water, not the notion of having something happen that would subject them to 13+ times Earth's gravity at some point.

It seems to me the best solution is to add a little extra complexity to the stellar dwarf idea, such as the dwarf itself having a dim side that allows for the brighter/darker cycle.   This has one delightful side benefit . . . it also would mean that we could say the Catwoman Planet orbited the Riddler Star . . . here referring to the fact that the guy who played the Riddler in the 60's also played one of the last two folks from Cheron from "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", a world where the people's skin was white on one side and black on the other.

The benefits here are tremendous from an explanatory perspective.   For instance, Spock specifically noted a mass and atmosphere similar to Earth's.   Earlier we tried to fudge this last point, but if we don't fudge it then we ought to have a planet with an atmosphere several times denser than ours at the surface.  But if a significant area of the planet shows much less gravity due to the presence of a nearby star to which it is tidally locked, then a large part of the atmosphere would be subject to Earth-ocean-tidal-esque forces and perhaps not seem so dense.  The only possible glitch I see is that I have no idea what this would do insofar as wind patterns.

Should you find the Riddler Star idea distasteful, bear in mind that most alternatives are unpleasant, either from Occam's perspective or in other ways.  We could suppose all sorts of off-the-wall ideas, such as a localized or near-surface 'natural' anti-grav effect (one would think that would have been worth a mention), or one projected from the ship (a temporary condition, one would think, after the ship's abrupt departure, and an incredible can of worms to open ... not to mention the fact that the tremor felt at beamdown would've had an obvious cause, rather than being a mystery).  There could've been an also-beamed-down gravity modifier (same notation), or a conveniently invisible bio-augmentation-handwavium apparatus worn by the crew (which would presumably be a doodad that could run out of gas, making it another of Kirk's concerns ... see also "Melora"[DS9]).  Another idea is of a subspace field of some kind, with Spock having reported the unadjusted mass . . . but the planet is specified to not even have a magnetic field, so one would think a high-energy subspace field would have been worth a note.

The only other alternative I can see is to simply dismiss the statements of Spock, Kirk, Sulu (who identified the planet's composition), and others, treating them all as dim-witted fools who didn't know what the devil they were talking about.

I'm generally no fan of this analysis method.   It may be the standard approach by Star Wars tech inflationists, but that doesn't mean it's any good, and indeed the opposite is indicated.   Their approach is to disregard Trek character statements at the first sign of an excuse to do so, so that they may then insert their own claptrap unimpeded.  After all, they became SW tech inflationists in order to twist the fusion and steel of Star Wars canon into something that would "make it a better comparison to Trek", so it only follows that they would be Trek deflationists at the same expense of canon.

Literally, you'd have to have Spock getting the mass wrong, Kirk getting the reason his phaser had an issue wrong, Sulu being wrong about the planet, and even McCoy and D'Amato saying some dumb things in there.   And, of course, they'd all be working from balky sensor equipment on ship or in hand.  That just doesn't mesh.  If the entire planet's gravity was 1g, then the mass of the world would be 7.5% Earth's mass, makng the density fairly close to osmium.  So Kirk's line about "infinitely denser" would actually only reflect a difference of six or seven times, and Spock, who spends the entire episode badgering people about precision, would be off by 92.5%.

In other words, you have to throw out all sense of any reliability in Trek, making the entire Trek tech analysis field a pointless enterprise (even moreso than just because we should all go outside and soak in some sunshine).

That's a bad idea anyway, but also for another reason . . . the things you'd be tossing out are all consistent with each other.   Kirk's analysis, Spock's report, and so on all point toward the same sort of densities and physical properties.   Only the observed gravity at the beamdown site suggests anything different.

And the place obviously has a sun of some sort, so it becomes the most likely explanatory culprit.

Now, if only we had some solid data on tetraburnium ...

Voyager is the New Tactical

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2013/06/24/surefire-2211-wristlight/

Surefire's come out with a tactical light that instead of being mounted on the weapon, head, or just being handheld, is worn on the wrist.

And I'm all like "wait, so Neelix is tacti-cool now?"

No.  No he is not, but only because Neelix cannot be anything with the word "cool" in it.

QotD 2015-0114 - Rebel Scum

You know, considering how SDN types try to paint StarfleetJedi as a hive of Trekkie scum and villainy, there's an awful lot of protest of Gizmodo's recent pro-Trek stance at SFJ.  Here is but one example ... I have seen this thought expressed before but never as well:

"Star Trek's series typically present the crème de la crème of the Federation, disciplined rocket scientists aboard state of the art military vessels. Star Wars generally has us following back world civilians, guerrillas, politicians, warrior monks and front line troopers. It's more like taking a story set on a 1960's, or even a 1980's nuclear submarine, where the environment is cutting edge, and advanced technology and weaponry is commonly referred to. Then we compare it to a story following a modern day soldier in his barracks, where nobody talks about advanced technology, we never see any nuclear weapons in use, and it would be easy to miss the implications of the smart phone in his pocket, or the satellite positioning and other electronics in his "crude" gasoline powered vehicle. Without previous knowledge of these environments, an observer of such "fictional" environments could easily conclude that the former scenario represented a far more technologically advanced society and military."

- Darth Spock at StarfeetJedi - http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6701&p=51640#p51640

My response:

This is an interesting point, DS, except we have also seen TCW, which is basically like NCIS or something inasmuch as having a well-funded more-or-less military group of jetsetting specialists with all manner of fancy toys at their disposal, with the bonus that they are also leaders of a war effort.

In that sense, by your argument, Star Wars has it better than Trek, some would argue.