The Thingy

I don’t know what else to call it.

So the story goes, this object – well, six of them supposedly – were found buried under a USAF base.

Maybe it was some secret device that didn’t work out.

Here are the two pictures of it supplied:

 

This is one of them dug up, showing its huge size.

It also has some stubby cylinders coming out of odd places.

The comb- like protrusions are also mysterious.

This picture seems to show one of these objects in a frame suitable to move it – and it actually does not seem to be solid as the frame would need to be much stronger if it were.

 

. . . . . . or am I wrong on that count?

This thingy puzzled me because it does not seem to have a logical purpose.

Regardless of that, I made a rough simulation of it in Blender to see how it went together.

Next up is two pics of my Blender model minus the comb bits as they don’t seem to have any function other than maybe strengthening. 

 

It looks like two double saddle shapes connected by four supports.

The model shows the supports in blue for clarity.

At first it did not look symmetrical: It seemed untidy . . . . . .. but then when carefully observed, the two large diameter semicircles seem to centre up. I made some axial cylinders to show that in the second image of my re- creation.

There are two basic possibilities for the structure of the object:

1. A solid metal casting – but then why make it so huge and on top of that, what are the large tubular fittings on it? Unless . . . . it was cast and not ever finished, and those are the risers, the tubes in the mould where the molten metal flows into the mould.

That could suggest it was something like the mounting for a big satellite dish . . . . . except that it does not make sense as to why it would be buried and not simply melted down to reuse the metal.

And this has other problems: where the axes should be is not solid, and you would need solid fixings for the axles if it was made for that, with bearing seats too.

Yes, it might just be two cast saddles but then why cast two at once? These things are huge and casting one alone would be a very big job. Two at once would double your problems and increase the chance of failure.

2. A hollow object – this looks more likely to me – perhaps a cooling chamber with coils or other tubing inside that needed to be cooled, which would explain the large tube fittings – for the coolant pipes. Still mysterious and weird. A superconducting double coil of some sort?

It seems to have two main axes but not a third.

It may actually not be as centred as my model either – but it is hard to tell.

This is very strange. Even if it was radioactive you still would not bury it under an Airforce base.

If it does not have a use, why bury it? Does it have strange effects on people? Even more reason not to bury it under anything you want to use . . . . well, that’s what I thought. I guess under an Airforce base it should not get dug up any time soon . . . . . . . except when it does. Weird.

If I imagine it is some sort of Lorentz/MHD device then the three red axes could be tubes and the coils would then create . . . . . ummmm. Two pairs of them have flat coils passing them in parallel axes but the third pair (left- right in the picture) are at 90 degrees to each other.

Well, there it is.

According to some, it was some sort of helium-3 device . . . . . . . but I have serious doubts about helium-3 being anything useful at all.

Have you heard tales of “mining helium-3 on the moon”?

All of the talk of using it in fusion reactors is so far nothing but talk: nobody has ever managed to get nuclear fusion power to work in the sense of generating as much power as it consumes or more - and that is despite billions of dollars and many attempts. 

Will He-3 make a difference here? I suspect not since I think the whole idea of bottled fusion on Earth is not going to work: our science is just not good enough and we are somehow missing a big part of what makes solar fusion happen – but that’s just my opinion, and I don’t need funding for my research.

So this idea is . . . . . go to the moon, mine it for Helium-3, then bring the helium3 back to earth and then use it to generate fusion power in a reactor that may or may not work.

Just the idea of mining the moon alone is going to be sooo expensive in terms of energy and money (assuming of course that it can be mined there), the helium-3 that we got from this operation would be worth a lot more than gold per gram . . . . . . and it’s helium so a gram is going to be in a gas bottle . . . . and then you want to try it in a fusion reactor that has yet to be proven as viable for power generation on Earth . . .

Yeah right.

SO YOU WANNA BE A 3D ARTIST?

 

First, I am not and have never been a paid 3D artist or animator. I do it because I like it.

I have done Architecture and designed things all of my life and even made some of my designs in the real world. I still do this today.

I think I was almost born a 3D artist. I have used Blender, the free 3D computer design and animation program since version 2.4 - I think it was in the nineties – before that I fooled around with more primitive software since there was nothing better at the time.  Before that I learned to design with very sharp pencils, pens and rulers and compasses. Yup. I go back that far.

Now we are up to Blender version 4.4. It is mind-bogglingly complex. 

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When I was younger I looked into doing animation and design as a job but there were serious things to consider:

First, unless you lived in California there are not a whole lot of employers.

Then you needed to have the tech savvy to run the computers that the work is done on.

Then there were the working conditions: you are contracted by a company and the real hours start at about sixty a week and go up from there. No, that is not an exaggeration.

CGI companies are the whipping boy of the Studios and that means that if the Director needs reshoots, you and your company do them pretty much for free as part of the contract. ASAP.

You won’t be using Blender for any of this, of course: it’s 3DSMAX, Maya, Houdini, Shake and various other full-priced software packages being used in these companies.

You will probably need to learn these programs before any company will let you in the door and for that you need to go to one of the approved training courses - or if you are very lucky, get training in- house. Six months training in an expensive US University or College: not cheap. Maybe you could learn all that yourself but there is still the cost of all those programs too, although some of them have free "student" versions.

All this to get a job that will most likely entail pumping out VFX clips as fast as possible because everyone has deadlines to meet - you won’t be making any masterworks here.

More likely you will be making advertisements for food products you would not eat or gadgets you can’t afford on your pay rate. Oh - and of course, you are living in LA or somewhere near it in California so the rents are going to be astronomical. Get used to eating Instant Noodles my friend.

Can’t say I was enamoured of the idea.

All that was before (a) The Coof ruined a lot of things and (b) the fires torched large ares of the hills – oh, and of course, (c) the current Cali government seems to be trying to kill off a lot of Californians in various ways – well, that’s how it looks from way over here.

Most of that is probably gone now anyway: Big Movie Companies will probably call on teams of workers from places like India, Vietnam or Indonesia to do the same work they once paid locals for at a tenth of the cost or less. That’s international economics. You know where the Simpsons animation is done, right? 

Will AI take away jobs in the CGI and FX business? You can bet on it - to some degree, but really they still need people to run the software, no “AI” software is going to be smart enough to do much on its own for a very long time if ever. It’s just the latest buzzword being used to push up corporate share prices and threaten workers to not ask for more money “or we will replace you with AI”.

Go ahead, big corporations who think you have billions to burn: throw them at more server farms and power plants, but you are more likely to get a nuclear fusion plant to work than you are to get any kind of true AI consciousness in software: there is a kind of technological hubris at work here. (No, I don’t think nuclear fusion will ever work either. Look at the history of this if you doubt me.)

To imagine that consciousness is just an algorithm that you can run on a sufficiently complex computer system is greatly underestimating the situation. It amazes me every time I see some would-be expert trying to tell us all that AI is just around the corner and that it will be smarter than us, and that consciousness is just a bit of sofware running on a "wet computer".  

But hey, the shareholders will believe it, right? Give us more money to make sure the AI monster will be controlled by US, not the evil foreigners.  You can trust us.

 

Hollywood is mostly dead. But don’t take my word for it, look for yourself.

So is most of the big “NEWS” media. They sold their asses to the wrong side and now the new boss will clean house and they are gone. Lie all you like - if nobody is watching you, the advertising money will dry up real fast.

The streaming services are eating each other trying to stay alive. Thanks to Woke DEIsease they are still pouring money down the drain wondering why people are not watching them.  

Smaller independent news people and channels are now more popular and respected than the big old dynosaurs of Teevee Nooz.

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Okay, so you want to tell stories onscreen and you would like to do it on the net. GREAT!

Get a decent PC with a good video card, learn Blender and Unreal Engine and Metahuman and a host of other bits and pieces (ALL FREE!) and MAKE YOUR OWN STUDIO.

Get online with other crazies like yourself and get a team together, make a GOOD movie or series (or even a game?) and sell it online. This is what the internet is great for.

You will have a lot more fun, easier working hours and you can keep your day job until it starts paying off well enough. If it ever does. Sure, you will fail - Learn from your mistakes, just get back up and try again. And again. And again.

If you want to see an example of how it can be done have a search for DYNAMO DREAM. 

Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A

This started off as one man’s work and is still growing .

I am sure there are others too that I have not seen yet.

Put your own work out there, do the hard work - you never know what could come of it.

Mowing with electricity

I'll bet you hate mowing lawns - but you can't avoid it. Want to live in a block of flats? no, me neither. Too many down sides for me, so mowing is the only other option.

For the last few years I have been mowing the lawn with a cable trailing behind the mower.  Yes, I can already hear the guffaws from the back.  

Well let me just provide some history. 

When I was a boy I got the job of mowing the lawn while dad watched sport on teevee and drank beer.

I used a gas powered mower that was at best "unreliable". Sometimes it just would not start and my shoulder got sore pulling that bleeping handle. It made a racket and it stank. 

When I needed a new one much later on I got electric. No noise, no complex problems with fuel, carbys and starting - just hit the switch and it goes. A great day for me.  Okay, so you need to get long cables and a safety junction box to join them and spend a certain amount of time just moving the cables all over the place - but it was much better than the previous situation. 

It always worked.

Well now I have got rid of the cable. I have been riding a battery bike for two years now so a battery mower seemed a great idea.  

No, Lithium batteries do NOT catch fire unless you do stupid things with them like use the wrong charger. Every mophone on the planet has Lithium batteries but they don't catch fire either.   Hey, stupid people can set a gasoline mower on fire too.  :D

No, I am not a "fan" of electric vehicles: at best they are suited to short city trips but for anything longer distance or carrying heavy loads I strongly suggest petrol or diesel fuel - the energy density of these fuels make any and every battery look silly. They also take a very short time to "recharge" unlike battery vehicles.

Hybrids are a good idea since a lot of braking energy can be recycled and an electric motor has more torque and efficiency than a basic combustion engine but that makes everything more complex too and more parts means more parts to fail.

I bought a battery mower and assembled it out of the box following the instructions and took it on its first mow and it looked great. 

Bigger mowing circle thus more mown in each swath, a metal frame and 36 volt power - pretty good I thought. I folded the handle and put it away for use next day .  . . .

 . . . .  but there was a small catch. The switch cable that runs from the body to the switch box on the handle got stretched when I folded the handle and when I got it back out it just didn't go. 

This was a new mower so I took it back and got a refund, then bought a replacement. 

 

This time I carefully assemble it so the cable goes OVER the crossbar and not under as shown in the assembly instructions.  All good. I did call the support line and told the makers of this problem and I suspect that this is not the fist time it has happenned . . but what do I know? I'm just one end user. 

The cable running over the bar, the right way to do it

 

So yes, I am happy with it and think it is a good deal but make sure that you don't make the same mistake I did. I have a fairly big lawn so I also got two more batteries (it uses two 18V batteries at a time) so I can always have two on charge if the lawn turns out to be that big of a job.  It's quiet, even more so that the cable one, and it has a wide range of height adjustment. It also has a catcher but I didn't show it here.

 

An Engineer's Joke

 I saw this bike recently at the racks outside the mall. 

What is wrong with this picture? No, it has nothing to do with the helmet.

A New Moon Landing : “Just a few years away”

I am amazed at the mountain of hype around space travel while the actual thing just seems to be a big series of non-events.

What we get is an endless series of grand looking plans with CGI pictures that are always Just a few years away. 

I have been waiting for any humans to land on the moon (again?)  since 1969.
I won’t argue here that they didn’t do it then, you should decide that for yourself.
But here’s a hint. Look at the footage. Where is the crater underneath the lander where the rocket motor blew away the loose material during landing? I mentioned that at the time but was told to shut up. Nobody likes a smart kid spoiling their illusions.
No, don’t say there was no dust on the moon around the lander because we can all see the footprints very clearly in the footage right from the bottom of the ladder.
But enough, plenty of other people have made books and vids on this subject.

Doesn’t it seem odd that no crewed mission has even gone around the moon in the 50 years since then  if the technology and budget are really there? Shouldn’t it be cheaper and easier now with all of our technical advances since the 70’s?

Oh- and just as an aside, has anyone seen the results of the NASA Long Duration Exposure Facility (I think they changed the exact name ) where they orbited a batch of samples on the surface of a satellite to see what materials would best survive outer space over time? I’m curious what the results were, what actually lasted the distance.  The Rebel Space Alliance needs the information :D

Supposedly the Chinese will be landing on the moon soon – well, I wish them all the best.
Maybe they will broadcast live video on global networks. It could make the US a bit embarrassed: maybe then they will get off of their asses and do something real in space exploration again. You know, just the usual movie type stuff, like land on Mars in a G-Drive ship in ten days or something  - but I’m not holding my breath, it looks like the people who have the G-Drive technology are not letting us have it for another century or two. or three or four. Yeah, that sounds about right. By that time they hope to completely control the population and we won’t be human any more as a result. No more Rebel Space Alliance by then anyway.
But I digress.

Right now we have the Boeing Starliner Capsule at the ISS and its return to Earth with two astronauts is getting put off again due to technical problems. (Why does everything have to be called “Star- something”?)  The ISS is going to be “de-orbited” soon too btw.
I have seen footage reputedly from the ISS that seems to show strings holding up astronauts that weren’t quite edited out. You can probably find that bit yourself too.  
I just can’t figure out why they would do that. The ISS is up there, you can see with the naked eye when it goes past.
Why fake footage from inside it? I don’t get it.
My trust in NASA has only decreased with time.

SpaceX is not much better but they really do put on a show. Right now they are still unable to put a lander on the moon because apparently Starship needs to be refuelled once it reaches orbit, and nobody has even tried that yet.
Except that doesn’t quite make sense to me either.
Starship was intended to carry 100 tons payload into orbit but so far has only reached 50 tons capacity according to SpaceX.
 
Could we make a passable moon lander mission with 50 tons from orbit?  

Well . . . . .
According to Wikipedia the weight of the Apollo CSM (command and Service modules) and LEM (lander) totalled 45.4 tons fully fuelled.
If those figures are correct, Starship could already carry a new version of the Moon mission with improved equipment and superior technology into orbit, deploy it and then return to Earth for a landing. 

 Moon Mission good to go, right now. 

Yes, we will need to modify the launch vehicle to allow the orbiter/Lander combo to exit it but that’s not such a big deal is it?
What’s wrong with this picture? 

Ooooooooooh, so the numbers aren’t *quite* right and we really need 100 tons of payload to do the moon landing, well fine, just wait for the next version of Starship.
Whoops! How did that happen? We’re back in that “Just around the corner” thing again.
 
Oh - and remember that NASA has decided that nobody can go to the landing sites of the previous missions because “they have historic significance.” Even if Elon or (snigger) Jeff Bezos wanted to land on the moon they can’t check out what is really in the ocean of storms or the other Apollo landing sites because NASA says NO.

Other companies have lander designs on offer that look pretty damn good and there is also the Dream Chaser shuttle but somehow NASA doesn’t seem to want them to get launched either . . . .

It’s almost as if they don’t want anyone going out there.  

A bad CGI version of the LEM

ELECTRIC POWER

For generating Base Load Power (that’s power that does not stop just because the wind does not blow or the sun doesn’t shine) we have several options:

 

1. Coal – has been working well for decades and they even have exhaust filters on the stacks that make a byproduct used to make bricks . . . except that everyone is supposed to say it is dirty and produces CO2 which is EVIL!!!!! You can guess my opinion of that idea.

 

2. Hydro – works well but needs a river to dam and that alone can change the local conditions. Here in the dry continent of OZ we don’t have much chance of putting more dams in as there aren’t any rivers worth damming now.

 

3. Nuclear Fission – suddenly our opposition leader is pushing this. WTF? Never mind the cost of building the plants you also have hidden costs of mining, refining and disposing of the radioactive waste after use. Better find a big hole. Then of course there is the small matter of Plutonium. Pretty much all of the fission reactors in the world produce plutonium which can be used to make nuclear weapons. Why the hell do we want to increase the potential for nukes anywhere, let alone here?

 

4. Nuclear Fusion – This is the uncatchable piece of the sun in a bottle. I say Uncatchable because so far despite truly astronomical amounts of money going into multiple projects we still don’t have a single fusion reactor that generates more power than it consumes.

Take a look at the news from companies working on this and they always say something like “ten years away”. I have been waiting since the seventies for this. 

I think it is all based on fundamentally flawed physics ideas and it will never work the way they are trying.

5. Geothermal – This has always been a quiet but promising idea in my opinion: what you do is drill down a ways just like they do in the oil industry (proven technology) and you will find that underground 2-4 Km down is HOT. Heat we can use. Then you create an array of pipes underground that you then pump water into one end and hey presto, very hot water comes out the other end. This then used to generate electricity in well know ways. There is now a Canadian based company called EAVOR that are building these plants in Europe after their test site in Canada proved that it all works as advertised. I have no connection or financial interest in this company, my only question is “why has it taken so long to get to operational?

No dangerous expensive materials, no waste water, no gaseous fumes at all and all of the tech is pretty much off the shelf. Why is this not getting more airtime?

 

The underground portion of an Eavor system (credit: Eavor)

 

AI Artbots: Nobody Home

 

1. They are NOT Artificial Intelligence. They are Large Language Models – they have NO intelligence and cannot reason or think. What they do is learn patterns of numbers and repeat those patterns.

The reason they are being called “Artificial Intelligence” is marketing: the spruikers are trying to drum up investor cash to keep their new companies funded until they come up with something that actually makes money.

2. Artbots will not replace human artists. Well, not in the near future. You still need someone to tell the artbot what to “draw” and apply quality checks to what it does.

Yes you can get the artbot to draw nice images that could be photos but they can’t be anything really “original”.Whatever that is.

3. Artbots can’t make content with consistent characters and sets. Yet. Maybe in future. 

If you want a one-shot image of something, fine – but if you want to make a full movie of a character’s adventures the best you can get is that the Artbot will do it all in one go: Reshoots with the same scenes and actors are going to be a problem. This is mainly a problem of the nature of Artbots: it’s all about processing power and memory. In theory if you had enough computing power to devote to this task you could churn out movies directly from a terminal just by typing in commands – but I doubt that they would be very good.

Big computing power costs big money and time on big systems and that means big studios will be the only ones trying that. Maybe the big studios will try to do this but then they won’t be “studios” any more, just server farms. Big ones.

Even if you got the scenes to all be consistent and the actors to be consistent you still need a script.

See below.

4. Artbots can’t write. Well to be exact they don’t write. They can absorb a library of books by human authors and assemble something from, say, five or six of them into a script but once again There is nobody home: you will need a human writer and/or director to read the script and check it to see if it even makes sense let alone makes a good story.

If we are talking movie making it needs to be interesting enough to get people to watch it which is another thing again.

If you want a whole lot of sequels it is going to work just fine but if you want something new, with a new style and new ideas . . . .  forget it. 

Sounds like Hollywood already, right?

So there it is: I predict that big studios will pour zillions into “AI” movie machines and probably tell us all that it will bring “A new age of movies” or something like that, and no doubt there is will be some successes – but in the end they will still be derived from previous movies and media and not really anything original . . . . and you will still be able to see hints of the artifical nature of them in places.

Small Independent movie makers will pop up doing their best to provide real live action works that don’t go big on special effects and have real actors who you can see in other media and people will always connect with that because we need real identities to identify with in stories.

People want real people in their stories. Unreal people can still be attractive but they don’t have a real existence so they don’t have opinions or families or get in car accidents or have cousins or do dumb things that tell us they are real fallible humans.

As stated above, AI is a sales pitch, not a real thing.

Getting robot electronic brains and hardware to work well enough to replace humans in menial tasks (General Purpose AI) is a big, big, BIG challenge and our hardware and software is still not up to it.

Nowhere near it.

Robots that operate in pre-prepared situations and do limited operations such as the robots on a production line are plentiful and cheap because they are very simple.

General Artificial Intelligence is not near and when it is eventually reached (if ever) it will be running on huge server systems because the requirement is so huge that nothing on a desktop will have enough processing power and memory to do it. 

Don't believe the hype.