perfidy

I never would have thunk it, but the other day, someone successfully flew an ornithopter. Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, has been pursuing this dream since the early seventies. Encouraged by the success of a remote controlled model ornithopter in the nineties, he started gunning for the big time, a manned, self-powered ornithopter. And on July 8th, it flew for 14 seconds. Which, lest you giggle, is two full seconds longer than the Wright brother's first flight. People have been trying to get this one since Leonardo, and now we have it.

We're once step closer to the world of Frank Herbert's Dune. Now all we need are sandworms and sardaukar.

Traveling to the moon is so last century. Mars is small dusty ball with little of interest. The rest of the Solar System is either very, very hot or very, very cold. Where is an enterprising space traveler to set his sights? The stars, of course. Interstellar travel is widely considered to be impossible, or at the very least prohibitively difficult. That hasn't stopped a group of scientists, engineers and dreamers from forming the Tau Zero Foundation, whose purpose is to lay the groundwork for practical starflight.

I'm all for that. The group is in its infancy, as yet. Yet having someone out there, pushing for the development of the technologies that could get us out of this rural backwater and into the big cities of the galaxy, is a good thing. Unless, of course, Greg Benford and Charles Pellegrino and not Carl Sagan are right about how dangerous the rest of the galaxy might be. And that really is the big thing. I am not saying that we shouldn't head out into the big galaxy - we should. Earth is the cradle of mankind, and we can't stay in the cradle forever. And if Earth is the cradle, the Solar System is the nursery. We don't know, yet, whether the universe outside the nursery is a barren desert, a civilised utopia, or a particularly savage part of the Bronx after sundown. Given the fecundity of life on earth, and the size of the galaxy, I think the barren desert is unlikely. There will be life, somewhere. Probably manywheres. If some of that life is sentient, the chances of a enlightened utopia is vanishingly small. Perhaps we, or some other race, might unify and be nice. All of them? At the same time? It only takes one to ruin the party, and someone is going to be nasty. When the outcome of an interstellar war could be species extinction, how many races will take a chance on being nice?

I don't think we will draw much attention to ourselves expanding into the solar system. Whatever technology we end up using to travel starward, we will likely need the resources of the solar system to accomplish the journey - massive solar power stations harvesting the energy of the sun to create antimatter, or perhaps something even more odd. When we head out, though - that's different. We will not only draw attention to ourselves, we will have proved that we have the capability of wreaking havoc on anyone in our neighborhood. A relativistic spaceship is indistinguishable from a relativistic bomber.

We're not there yet. But technology isn't just increasing. It isn't even accelerating. The rate of acceleration is increasing. We might be there quicker than even the most optimistic appraisals allow for, even not counting the singularity. It seems funny to talk of interstellar travel when we can barely get into orbit, but we went from not even being able to fly to walking on the moon in 66 years. Once we're in space, the expansion could be quite quick indeed.

Since this project began, I have been looking forward to this moment. The Phallic Symbol State, Florida, is perhaps my least favorite state. So it pleases me no end to present to you, the gentle reader, a couple suggestions for new and improved mottoes for the soi disant Sunshine State:

• God's Waiting Room
• More Lizards than People
• Hey you kids, get off of my state!
• Now With 25% More Cubans!
• Ask Us About Our Grandkids
• You're dying to get here
• Senior citizen discounts available
• More than just a great place to die
• Half a Million Cubans Can't Be Wrong
• The Gunshine State
• Come, enjoy the humidity
• We're America's Penis
• So close, you can smell Fidel
• The state with a hint of Ben Gay
• Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... and we'll send 'em back to you free of charge!
• America's Dangling Chad
• We make the US look like it's pissing on Cuba
• Where the 3 R's are for Rednecks, Retirees and Raft Arrivals
• The snow capital of the US
• Come See Your Grandparents Before They Die
• Yes, that is a cabbage on our flag
• Come Retire With Us
• Bugs as big as your head
• We hate Jimmy Buffet
• At least we're not New Jersey
• Nascar, lizards, and drunk sorority chicks. What's not to love?
• But it's a wet heat. Oh, wait a minute...
• More than just old people waiting for hurricanes
• Proud home of Janet Reno and Stepin Fetchit
• Everyone Hates Us

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• America's Wang
• 3 in 5 episodes of COPS filmed right here!
• A swimming pool with every home; a meth lab in every Motel 6
• Mosquitos outnumber oxygen atoms 2:1
• Sea-cows? Hardly - manatee milk is vile
• Now with drive-through hip replacement
• The 'it's like breathing through a wet towel' state

A while back, I linked to a speculative piece by author Dan Simmons. Simmons is, in my opinion, one of the best writers going. He effortlessly flits from grand scope sf to hardboiled detective novel to horror, leaving his distinctive mark on each. He's the real deal. In April, he imagined a time traveler from the future returning from a hindred years hence to inform the narrator of what nastiness awaits us, in the form of the century war, the 21st century's long war between the West and Islam.

He has posted a clueless-plus length expansion on the ideas he touched fictionally, thanks to the response (mostly negative, and nonsensical) that he recieved for the first one. It is very much worth reading. If you for some reason failed to read the fiction, that's here, and the essay can be found here. It'll be a while, but I'll wait. Read them. We'll discuss tomorrow.

If you are at all like EDog, even a little, you have wondered what it would be like to have super powers. To fight crime in a unitard and a cape, wielding vasty powers of mind and body, defeating eevill with a "pow" and a "biff." Wouldn't we all like that? Well, take this test to see the approximate form your superpowers would manifest in, did you but have superpowers, and weren't a whiny little runt reading a blog on your 'puter.

As it turns out, the Buckethead is just what he expected. Batman:

Your results: You are Batman

You are dark, love gadgets and have vowed to help the innocent not suffer the pain you have endured.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

[wik] hattip to Pixy Misa.

[alsø wik] Phil insists that he's not Spidey, but Mr. Furious.

Ministry crony and recent comment grouch Phil has changed the name of his blog. Again.

Ministry Crony and recent comment grouch Phil has a fascinating post discussing opening shots in movies. He, and the people whose idea he stole, are really on to someting here, as this is truly a crucial aspect of film making. A good opening guides expectations as well as setting the stage for what follows. One of my personal favorite openings is the beginning of Raising Arizona. (The Coen brothers are genii at this - the openings of Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are excellent as well.) Raising Arizona's opening is long, but brilliant. Characters that have no role in the rest of the movie nevertheless set the stage for the drama that follows. Like the growling floor-mopping con. And the cellmate who discusses the fine art of making crawdads. And the transgendered inmate in the group therapy session. The narration, by Nicholas Cage (in his last good role) as H. I. McDonough, sets a marvelous tone to the whole movie - elevated language, redolant of the Bible and Shakespeare, combined with lower class speech. This is mirrored by the use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy recast as mountain yodeling. All in all, a near perfect opener.

However, the good opening does not guarantee a good movie. I once saw a Steven Seagall movie - the first, I think, though I can't remember exactly. This was before the dumpy martial arts hero became ever present, and certainly before he became the darling of the straight-to-video set. Anyways, the opening of this movie was tight - it had a convincing sense of verisimilitude: real-seeming CIA types in a jungle locale, violence, intrigue. My friend Jon turned to me and said, "This is going to be good." Immediately thereafter, Seagall appeared onscreen and the movie promptly went utterly to shit. The tightly edited and focused opening morphed into sloppy and garish action shots. The plot hinted at turned muddy and incoherent. The actors in the opening sequence didn't appear again. It seemed as if the filmmakers had found this awesome short movie, or an opening to a movie that was never finished, and grafted it onto their shlockfest abomination.

Anyway, go read Phil's bit, and follow the links.

True story:

The next town over from me is widely considered an enclave of the wealthy. And it largely is. It's where alot of doctors, lawyers, and other well-paid professionals dwell, in addition to your business owners, small financiers, and assorted white collar folk. We're not talking, you know, robber baron wealth; there are no cottages- in the Newport sense of the word- anywhere near here. But the homes are modern, big, carefully landscaped, and seem to be raising a brood of young Audis or BMWs in their driveways.

And up until fairly recently, gray squirrels were seen regularly gamboling about the sweeping, manicured lawns in this town. Chittering and chattering, munching the occasional nut alertly, but without a sense of impending doom, clearly due to the absence of predatory creatures hereabouts. But I have noticed that they are being displaced. The numbers are not being depleted by cats, dogs, or commuters.

They are being displaced. By black squirrels.

Seriously.

Where the black squirrels go, the gray squirrels go away. We're not talking flying squirrels here, but squirrel flight. I can't help but wonder whether the black squirrels have moved on up to this fantastic, quaint town, but the grays feel the squirrely equivalent of "there goes the neighborhood".

Nobody thinks much of the Diamond State, but nevertheless, enterprising individuals have managed to come up with a plethora of divergent state mottoes:

• We make flat, boring and small cool!
• We Really Do Like the Chemicals in our Water
• The Corporate Haven state
• At least we're not New Jersey
• You'll need a map to find us
• The First State, But So Not Much Since Then
• Bet you forgot about us!
• The best .032% of America
• So close to Washington you can smell it
• See Maryland
• You know, the place you send your credit card payments
• The Weakfish State
• Come for the flat and uninteresting scenery, stay for the tax shelters
• Going to Delaware (scroll down to the "namesakes" section)

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• It's good to be first
• Unless it was the first state you got a handjob in, it's not really first
• First in self-storage facilities per capita in the lower 48
• West of Portugal, east of everywhere else
• Maryland's own Rhode Island
• The Delaware of Delaware
• Delaware: America's Clit

I meant to post this days ago, but the annual grueling Independence Day trek to Ohio and preparations therefor intervened. I was shocked, shocked to discover that Michael Barone of US News and World Report very nearly stole our thunder. In the beginning of his RealClearPolitics piece on the NYT's treasonous article, he is just one word away from trademark infringement:

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.

While its no longer as timely as it might have been if I had posted this last week, its still a good article. Go ahead, read it. You know you want to.