We'll be back to serious blogging in 2025, but for now I'm taking it easy. See you on the other side.
Today's dose of retro-future comes from George Griffith's Olga Romanoff, an 1894 sequel to his 1893 novel The Angel of the Revolution (see last Friday's post). That's a world-destroying comet in the background of the last illustration. Griffith liked a big finish.
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893) is a science fiction novel by the English writer George Griffith. It was his first published novel and remains his most famous work.Griffith was hugely successful in his day but is now all but forgotten. I only came across him because he popped up as a featured article on Wikipedia. The modern consensus seems to be he just wasn't that good of a writer. Certainly nothing I saw made me want to read more than a few lines. I did, however, enjoy the illustrations.
Angel came out seven years after Verne's Robur the Conqueror, which was itself beaten to the punch by Frank Reade Jr., and His Queen Clipper of the Clouds. All of these were in the helicopter family though dirigibles were also a popular option. I'm sure an actual expert could come up with numerous other examples. The genre even inspired an early UFO mania in the 1890s.
A Tale of the Coming Terror
BY
GEORGE GRIFFITH
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRED. T. JANE
FIFTH EDITION
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Another YouTube recommendation.
Scott made an astounding number of entertaining and informative little videos. He recently announced he was taking a break, but with more than 700 already in the can, those new to the channel won't run out any time soon.
"Why sci-fi alien planets all look the same"
"This giant model stopped a terrible plan"
(Students of Post-War hubris will want to read more about the Reber Plan.)
"The UK's last aerial ropeway uses no power, moves 300 tonnes a day, and will be gone by 2036."
"I thought the Schmid Peoplemover was impossible"
Still taking it easy for holidays and posting more cool videos.
Created by Theo Jansen. You'll want to watch this in full screen.
We'll get back to the serious stuff Monday, I promise.
My favorite Katie Marovitch sketch.
... you have not had a cool Christmas.
The Untouchables got a lot of criticism during its original run for its depictions of violence. Can't imagine why.
[December 1, 2016]
Tom Hanks, creepy CGI Santa Clauses, and the theological canary in the coal mine
I've been making the point for a while now that the evangelical movement
that I grew up with in the Bible Belt is radically different from the
evangelical movement of today. I was aware that something was changing
for a while, but the nature and the extent of the change crystallized
for me when I read this 2004 article from Slate:
Next Stop, Bethlehem?
By David Sarno
The Polar Express is the tale of a boy's dreamlike train ride to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. Like all stories worth knowing, it's rich enough in image and feeling to accommodate many interpretations. Chris Van Allsburg, the author of the book, calls his story a celebration of childhood wonder and imagination. William Broyles Jr., one of the screenwriters of this year's film version, calls it a kind of Odyssey in which a hero undertakes a mythic, perilous journey of self-discovery. And Paul Lauer, who is a key player in the film's marketing apparatus, sees The Polar Express as a parable for the importance of faith in Jesus Christ.
Lauer's firm, Motive Entertainment, is best known for coordinating the faith-based marketing of The Passion of the Christ. Motive helped spread early word of mouth about the filmby holding screenings for church groups and talking the movie up to religious leaders. When The Passion took in a stunning $370 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, Lauer and his cohorts got a lot of the credit. Earlier this year, Motive was hired by Warner Bros. to promote The Polar Express to Christians. But wait, is The Polar Express an evangelical film?
You'd certainly think so, considering the expansive campaign of preview screenings, radio promotion, DVDs, and online resources that Lauer unfurled in the Christian media this fall. This Polar Express downloads page includes endorsements from pastors and links to church and parenting resources hosted by the Christian media outlet HomeWord. There are suggestions for faith-building activities and a family Bible-study guide that notes, for example, the Boy's Christ-like struggle to get the Girl a train ticket. "The Boy risked it all to recover the ticket," the guide observes. "Jesus gave His all to save us from the penalty of our sins."
HomeWord Radio, which claims to reach more than a million Christian parents daily, broadcast three shows promoting the film. At one point, the show's host wondered excitedly if the movie "might turn out to be one of the more effective witnessing tools in modern times." Motive also produced a promotional package that was syndicated to over 100 radio stations in which Christian recording artists like Amy Grant, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Avalon talked about the movie as they exited preview screenings.
…
Some audience members—and a few Christian film critics—would argue that Santa Claus isn't necessarily a stand-in for Jesus Christ. Last month, Lauer told the Mobile Register that he sees The Polar Express as a parable, "not a movie about belief in God." But when Lauer speaks to a Christian audience, he tells a different story. Lauer told HomeWord Radio that when he asked Robert Zemeckis about all the biblical parallels he was seeing in the film, the director "winked and said, 'Nothing in a movie this big ends up in the script by accident.' " (Zemeckis was traveling and wasn't available for comment.)
* Being a bit loose with the definition of the term.
[Updated with cooler and longer video clip including Tonka truck as spare tire.]
As mentioned before, I always celebrate Christmas with a Toys-for-Tots haul, looking for nice toys that will stand up to lots of hard play. Metal Tonka trucks were an excellent option and I usually cleared out the store's stock.
The trucks were originally marketed as being nearly indestructible.
This year through, as I was loading my purchases into my car, I noticed that the trucks (which had been rebranded "Steel Classics") were now almost entirely made of plastic other than the bed.
I also noticed this claim on the box: MADE WITH METAL
This called to mind a passage from Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise.
“Hum!” said Parker. “Pretty extensive injuries for a fall of that kind.”
“So I thought, before I saw the staircase. To proceed. On the day after this occurrence, the sister of deceased sends to Mr. Pym a fragment of a half-finished letter which she has found on her brother's desk. It warns him that there is something of a fishy nature going on in the office. The letter is dated about ten days previous to the death, and appears to have been laid aside as though the writer wanted to think over the wording a bit more carefully. Very good. Now, Mr. Pym is a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money—”
“How about truth in advertising?”
“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words 'with' and 'from.' Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or, not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say 'Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,' then it's got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made 'from pears,' without the 'only,' the betting is that it is probably made chiefly of pears; but if you say, 'made with pears,' you generally mean that you use a peck of pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you—such are the niceties of our English tongue.”
“Make a note, Mary, next time you go shopping, and buy nothing that is not 'from, only.' Proceed, Peter—and let us have a little less of your English tongue.”
And as far as I can tell, none have apologized since then.
I will have to tell him that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear to be in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, most audacious, and most dangerous exploration mission in all of human history. That they don’t have the money to do it. That 200,000 people didn’t actually apply. That, with all the good faith one can muster, I wouldn’t classify it exactly as a scam—but that it seems to be, at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work.I started to excerpt a few paragraphs of Keep's article but you really need to read the whole thing to grasp just how unlikely it is for this enterprise to go beyond the asking for money stage. Every single aspect collapses under scrutiny, from the unrealistic funding model to the wildly optimistic cost estimates to the nonexistent specs and contracts to the unresolved technical issues.
Could you leave everyone you love for the chance to settle on Mars? Sonia Van Meter describes herself as an "aspiring Martian" - she hopes to be one of the first humans on the planet in 10 years' time. But it would mean never seeing her husband again.There is one quick cover-your-ass 'if' buried deep in the piece ("The mission, if it goes ahead, will be dangerous, some say suicidal."), but even in that single brief sentence, the possibility of it not happening is just an aside. There is no real effort to put this in a realistic context. Instead, we're given figures like that 35-to-one chance; it's almost certainly false but it makes for a good story.
"I don't think you can apply for something like this and not be the tiniest bit insane," says Sonia Van Meter. "But this is the next great adventure, and I'm going to do absolutely anything I can to be a part of this."
The 35-year-old political consultant from Austin, Texas, is one of 705 people in the running to form a 20- to 40-strong human colony on Mars - a group whittled down from 200,000 who sent applications to Dutch not-for-profit organisation Mars One last year.
"I thought: 'Shoot, this sounds like fun!'" she says. "I didn't think there was the slightest chance that I would be selected, I just wanted to be a part of it."
For her husband Jason Stanford, her application - and the fact that she now appears to have a 35-to-one chance of leaving forever - evoked mixed emotions.
"Like any good red-blooded American male, at first I thought this was all about me. I thought: you're leaving me," he says.
Over time he changed his mind. "The more she talked about it, the more I realised she was doing this for the right reasons - she was doing this to show humanity what we can all do if we work together," he says.
From CNN:
Now an Austrian company wants to extend this opportunity for deep-dive delights to the world of superyachts, by building customized private submersibles that can descend 250 meters (820 feet) beneath the ocean surface and remain submerged for up to four weeks.
Migaloo has revealed its ambitious plans for what it claims will be the “world’s one and only private submersible superyacht,” offering “a not-yet-existing alternative to large privately owned surface vessels.”
This submarine, named M5, would measure 165.8 meters in length and 23 meters across at its widest point, with a range of around 15,000 kilometers and a speed of up to 20 knots when surfaced (or 12 knots when underwater). However, says Migaloo, “The wished dimensions of the submarine-yacht hybrid, the exterior styling and the interior design are up to the owners’ preferences.”
So, like any billionaires’ superyacht worth its salt, the default design includes a helipad, a swimming pool and spa, a gym, art gallery cinema, party area with DJ booth, along with plenty of spaces to lounge or dine. Optional extras include a hot air balloon and underwater shark-feeding station.
It's also a practical place to keep your valuables in case of pirates, solar flares, pole shifts.
Also suitable for Ice Station Zebra cosplay.
CNN had lots of competition on this story.
It took me at most ten minutes on LinkedIn to establish that this company claiming it could design and build the civilian equivalent of an Ohio class submarine was a transparent fraud. This company doesn't have the resources to design a functioning toy sub for your bathtub.
Amber DaSilva of Jalopnik had the same thought, pointing out that CEO Christian Gumpold was the only listed employee. DaSilva also went the extra mile and dug up more than anyone needed to know about the company.
Migaloo’s website dates back to 2013, according to WHOIS records, but the oldest version archived is from 2015. Back then, the company was offering “submersible superyachts” in cooperation with a company called Starkad Technologies OÜ, which provided “technical development.” Starkad does show up in Estonian business records, but the company’s 2023 annual report shows just one employee — and an annual operating budget of just under $2,700. The company’s official contact email is a Hotmail account.
...
Rather than creating actual submarines for the world’s richest few, Migaloo appears to create pictures of submarines for magazines read by those richest few (and, of course, NFTs.) It’s unclear what the company would even do if a Bezos or a Musk called them up with $2 billion in hand — it’s unlikely a single person in Estonia could actually assemble anything the company proffers.
The standard comeback is what's the harm? Some guy creates some silly images borrowed from a post-war issue of Galaxy magazine and we all have fun pretending. The trouble is our weakness for hoary sci-fi fantasies, our willingness to accept laughable pitches for obvious snake oil has created large fortunes for con artists, diverted resources from promising tech and real solutions, and distorted our sense of the future.
And the CGI really isn't that good.
*OK, maybe this is more embarrassing.
Part of my daily routine is to check the weather in my neighborhood and various nearby destinations (between its size and, more to the point, topography, LA has an extraordinary range of conditions. It's the only place I've ever lived in where people call each other up and ask other residents of the same city how's the weather where you are?).
Last Saturday, I checked Google and saw the forecast for a week from that day was a 75% chance of rain. That would have been very good news – – it's been dry in Southern California this winter – – perhaps too good to be true. I checked a couple of competing sites and saw no indications of rain in the next seven days anywhere in the vicinity. A couple of hours later I checked back in and Google was now in line with all the other forecasts with 5% or less predicted.
As of Thursday, Google is down to 0% for Saturday while the Weather Channel has 18%.
We've talked a lot about what it means for a continuously updated prediction such as election outcomes, navigation app travel time estimates, and weather forecasts to be accurate. It's a complicated question without an objectively true answer. There are many valid metrics, none of which gives us the definitive answer
Obviously, accuracy is the main objective, but there are other indicators of model quality we can and should keep an eye on. Barring big new data (a major shift in the polls, a recently reported accident on your route), we don't expect to see huge swings between updates, and if there are a number of competing models largely running off the same data, we expect a certain amount of consistency. If we have a prediction that is inaccurate, displays sudden swings, and makes forecasts wildly divergent from its competitors, that raises some questions.
One of the oft-noted problems with the Drake Equation was the many ways it assumed that alien worlds would look, not just like Earth, but mid-twentieth century earth including our proclivity for constantly pumping out radio signals...
and would continue to look that way between 1000 and 100,000,000 years.
It appears that Earth at least will fall a little short of that range.
“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence [Seti] is changing,” he said. “We have relied in the past almost exclusively on radio telescopes to detect broadcasts from alien civilisations just as our radio and TV transmissions could reveal our presence to them. However, to date, we have heard absolutely nothing.”
Nor should we be surprised, [Oxford University astrophysicist Prof Chris] Lintott argues. “Humanity has already passed its peak radio wave output because we are increasingly using narrow beam communications and fibre-optic cables, rather than beaming out TV and radio signals into the general environment.”
Humanity could become radio-quiet in about 50 years as a result – and that will probably be true for civilisations on other worlds, he added. “They will have gone radio silent after a while, like us. So Seti radio telescopes will need to be augmented with other ways of seeking aliens. We are going to have to be more creative about what we’re searching for in the data and find unusual things that reveal they are the handiwork of aliens.”
Nor is Lintott the first to make this observation.
Regarding the first point, in a 2006 Sky & Telescope article, Seth Shostak wrote, "Moreover, radio leakage from a planet is only likely to get weaker as a civilization advances and its communications technology gets better. Earth itself is increasingly switching from broadcasts to leakage-free cables and fiber optics, and from primitive but obvious carrier-wave broadcasts to subtler, hard-to-recognize spread-spectrum transmissions."
