What about the biology of space battles?

reavers

An interesting discussion of the physics of space battles brings up a lot of good points — those science-fantasy movies with spaceships flitting about ignore a lot of basic physics. Star Wars was basically WWI biplanes whirling around at speeds under 60kph, which is kind of ridiculous. But fun.

This article points out that that’s not how things would play out if ever there were a real space battle. The ships would have to obey physics and orbital mechanics, and there would be a priority on speed and acceleration and rapid maneuvers; also, explosions are kind of useless in a vacuum. So he talks about using big gyroscopes to whip mostly spherical ships around, and they’d be zooming about in complex spirals to take advantage of gravity wells.

But then he talks about crews.

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He’s being silenced…SILENCED! He shouted.

Milo Yiannopoulos is still upset that Twitter removed the little blue verification check mark from his profile. I don’t even get what that is for, how to apply for one, or why anyone would bother, but it’s very, very important to Milo, and he’s been complaining bitterly about it for the past month now. It is an attack on his free speech, don’t you know, and we all know how important it is to these wankers to be able to shriek in public.

Just so you know how important this is, Milo crashed a White House press conference to confront the press secretary. My verification check was taken away for making fun of the wrong group of people, he whined. This is a whole new level of obsession over petty trivia.

I’m speechless.

I think I’ll walk down to the coffeeshop for my morning pick-me-up, and they better not be out of bran muffins today — a man my age needs his fiber. But if they are, I’m just going to turn around and go to the airport, get a flight to Beijing, and demand that President Xi Jinping do something about it! So I might be distracted for a few days.

FYI: I made it to the coffeeshop, and they had ONE bran muffin left. It was so close. Jinping can count himself lucky tomorrow, that by such a narrow margin he has avoided an international incident as an outraged American stormed his office and demanded that he deal with the muffin shortfall.

The compassion of Christ

The Handbook of the Mount Saint Charles Academy, a Christian school, starts well.

Mount Saint Charles Academy admits students of any race, color, national origin or ethnic background to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or ethnic background in the administration of educational policies, loan programs, and athletic or other school administered programs.

Notice anything missing? Nothing about sexual orientation, and nothing about transgender…oh, wait. They do have a statement on that last one.

Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students. Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.

What special accommodations do you need to make for transgender students? Do they have special plumbing? It seems to me that transgender students are able to use the facilities they already have for men and women in the school, so this is a very strange restriction.

You know, if you lack something you need to support a set of your students, the right answer is to fix your facilities; the easy answer is to kick out those students. But that’s also the wrong answer.

Especially when your handbook babbles about the compassion of Christ.

A charming piece

This sounds very pleasant, and it was clearly a tremendous amount of work. But I have a couple of questions. Can it only play this one musical piece? And if it lacks the versatility of most musical instruments, can you really call it an “instrument”? Would a musician call a music box an instrument?

I’m not belittling the effort put into it, I’m just wondering how it is classified.

Correcting errors is now anti-religious bigotry?

That paper that cited the Creator for designing the hand has been retracted. The authors say it was a translation error — that they assumed that “Creator” was synonymous with “nature” in English, and apparently, they weren’t aware of the potential for willful misinterpretation of the word “design” in the creationist community. I can sort of accept that, except, of course, that they managed to write an entire complex technical paper on the physiology and anatomy of the hand in fluent English. I wouldn’t have expected a retraction, though, but only a revision of an unfortunate mistake.

Except now it has become a different story: Science Journal Publishes Creationist Paper, Science Community Flips Out. Wait, who’s flipping out? It wasn’t a creationist paper, but an ordinary technical paper that leapt to an inappropriate conclusion. I think it was entirely reasonable for scientists to be irritated by some sloppy editing that would be abused by creationist propagandists. But no — this is now the tale of deranged atheist scientists getting unwarrantedly upset about a casual mention of a god in a science paper.

Even more amusingly, I am now the villain.

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Missives from never-never land

Over on Violent Metaphors, Colin reported on his adventures on the Conspira Sea cruise, a cruise ship full of people absolutely convinced that vast shadowy evil empires were out to personally get them. Now Jezebel reports on the same cruise. It’s all very entertaining. It sounds like the Jezebel reporter, Anna Merlan, got a more hostile reaction from the cruise participants than did Colin.

I’ll be plunging in again to something just as weird, but not quite as paranoid, this spring. I’ll be attending the Paradigm Symposium in mid-May, right there in Minneapolis, and will post a few summaries here. I don’t expect a hostile reception (well, not too hostile, anyway). These aren’t generally conspiracy theorists. Rather than believing in malignant shadow forces, they generally believe in exotic, other-worldly influences on the ancient past and fleeting encounters with strange entities today.

Needless to say, they’re both equally wrong.