Category: Cool Stuff

Recent events or stuff that has registered on my patented COOL-o-meter.

Cool Retro Space Travel Posters

Came across this cool article sharing an artist’s series of “vintage”-styled travel poster artwork for real and imagined Space destinations. Many are based on reality (the ice-covered oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons), are strongly suspected to be real (the cryo-volcanos of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons), or just the stuff of fantasy (a Venus like that imagined before probes visited it and saw beneath it’s ever-present clouds).

Check out this web page for the artwork:

Vintage Style Travel Posters Imagine Travel to Distant Planets and Moons

“Stool Pigeon” and Mass Extinction

While exploring the origin of the term “stool pigeon”, I happened on this interesting (if sad) article on far more than the the etymology of the saying. It is tied to the history of a massive, largely man-made mass extinction event.

“But while this term might evoke images of someone perched on a stool in a police interrogation room and being made to “sing” like a bird, the actual origins of this term are significantly more horrific, and tied to the greatest manmade extinction event in modern history.”

Check out this interesting article for all the details:

The Horrifying Origin of the Term “Stool Pigeon”

 

Link: Aristotle on Friendship

Cool article that caught my eye recently on friendship. Interesting how such relationships haven’t changed all that much over thousands of years.

Three lessons from Aristotle on friendship
A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy writes about Aristotle’s timeless advice on how to nurture and keep friendships.

 

Sol Region Sight-Seeing Tour #2 – Pollux

2nd in a series of posts inspired by Elite Dangerous, a space video-game that I’ve been playing; full of images, cool astronomy & science facts, and associated sci-fi & pop culture trivia.

Sol Region Sight-Seeing Tour – Stop #2:
Pollux / β Geminorum

Summary:

Pollux to Sun Comparison

Pollux is 34 lightyears from Sol, and the closest giant star to our sun. Pollux is 18 ly from Stop 1 on our tour, it’s “twin” Castor. Pollux is the 18th brightest star as seen from Earth (including the Sun) and the brightest star in constellation Gemini. Pollux is an orange-hued “evolved giant” star in a special spectral class, called Class KO-III. Earlier in its life it would have been a Class A (hot white or blue/white dwarf star), but Pollux has exhausted the hydrogen in its core, and expanded and cooled as a result. As such the star has moved off the line of main sequence or “adult” stars and entered it’s old age “giant” phase, and is estimated to be about 724 million years old. It is about two times the mass, and almost NINE times the radius of our Sun.
Continue reading Sol Region Sight-Seeing Tour #2 – Pollux

Sol Region Sight-Seeing Tour #1 – Castor

So what is this “Tour” you speak of?

The Tour? Why that’s a geeky idea I had to dig up all the fact and fiction about the stars around and including our Sun, known as Sol in science and science fiction. Ostensibly, as a bit of a learning experience while I go about the playing a video-game.

You see, I’ve been playing a “space flight simulator” video game I really love called Elite Dangerous that has excited my long interest in Astronomy.  The game is set in the future where humanity has moved out to begin to settle and explore our galaxy. As such the game includes a 1 to 1 online mock-up of our Milky Way Galaxy with as much as we know to be true added to it, and fairly realistic algorithms for what we don’t know, and a lot of fictional future-history and lore added to give it all some drama, and all kinds of different ways to “play” depending on your interests. From exploration, pvp & pve combat, mining, commodity trading, power play politics, passenger liner business, bounty hunting, and much more.

I wanted to explore some of the famous stars we know in our real night skies.

Continue reading Sol Region Sight-Seeing Tour #1 – Castor

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is pretty great. It provides lists of newly created words and ideas that appeared in science fiction with examples of when asked by whom they were first used, and others who used and helped popularize the words.

This dictionary and its creation and some of the many interesting things it has helped reveal about the history of the genre and our language’s evolution are discussed in detail in this great Wired Magazine post too!

https://www.wired.com/story/historical-dictionary-of-science-fiction/

Language is a Virus: Sentence Structure Reveals Brain’s Secrets

Credit: Miguel Navarro Getty Images

I’ve been analyzing the way I write and speak a lot recently for some reason. One of the reasons is stumbling on an article about a group that has developed an AI that can read the way we communicate in writing  to statistically predict whether the subject will develop Alzheimer’s, all with surprising accuracy.

Then there is this computer program which was published in the Harvard Business Review which analyzes the use of pronouns and sentence structural elements (detached from the main content words of the sentence,) as a statistically significant indicator of things like the writer’s or speaker’s honesty, personality, social standing, and current psychology. Continue reading Language is a Virus: Sentence Structure Reveals Brain’s Secrets

Nuclear Rockets – SciFi Made Reality

I’d like to see more tech like this developed, tested, and put into regular use. It’s not, say, an Epstein Drive from The Expanse; but as a certain character from a geeky science fiction western would say, “This is the way.”

Am I concerned about the nuclear power source? I lived and worked on a nuclear powered submarine for years that has continued to safely plow the seas carying new generations of sailors for decades; so the answer to that question would be a, “No.”

CNN: Nuclear Powered Rocket Could Get People To Mars Faster

Avasarala The Expanse Seasons 1-4 Supercut

I wish I could find this somewhere else than on Twitter, but the actress who plays the character in The Expanse posted this supercut from the first 4 seasons of The Expanse of some of Avasarala’s best lines and potty mouth moments. I’m glad the show left broadcast tv so that her character could be fully realized just as shocking as it was in the books. If anything her grandmotherly looks and no shit taken out-spoken personality comes out even better in the tv series where the visual and audio juxtaposition is more effective than printed word and imagination.

TENET: Updated with Review 1/25

(Initially posted 8/24/20) I only heard about this upcoming flick awhile back. A new trailer just came out, and needless to say I want to see it, preferably in a movie theater now that Covid nonsense allows, and not a year later on DVD.

Read Recent Review →