Subject: Oh, c'mon.
Author:
Posted on: 2017-05-13 22:17:00 UTC
We're gonna talk about taking a whole planetary system and setting the orbital interactions to music and we're not gonna talk about this?
"Everything has to be fandom related these days" indeed. :P
Welcome back to the Friday Forum. It seemed to work last week, so let's try it again.
Please remember that, when it comes to the state of the world, not everyone will agree with you. You're free to state, discuss, and defend your viewpoint (provided it does not violate the Constitution), but please don't use that fact to attack others.
Fandom News
(Link)
Ah, do you remember the golden age? When you could have a film about Nazis that featured a stand in for the kookiest Republican presidential candidate, and it was taken for granted that she'd be fighting against them? Aye, them were the days.
I'm talking, of course, about the frankly hilarious 2012 movie Iron Sky. The first official teaser trailer for the sequel (Iron Sky: The Coming Race) dropped this week; it has Adolf Hitler riding a T. rex, and if we can trust the 2015 pre-teaser, features both the Hollow Earth and a race of reptile people living there. Fake!Sarah Palin is one of them, so I guess she was on Hitler's side all along after all? Alas, my golden era is already tainted...!
(I expect a full critique of Blondie the T. rex's anatomy. Come on, paleogeeks, I know you're out there.)
Silly News
(Link)
You all, I'm sure, remember the astonishing discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 star system, a small red star with seven earth-sized worlds around it. It has its own website, featuring this gorgeous NASA travel poster that accurately shows the fact that, y'know, this place has seven planets inside the orbit of Mercury, they're going to show up in each other's skies the size of our moon.
The issue with this system is that, with so much mass so close together, most models show the planets colliding and destroying each other within half a million years - which, obviously, hasn't happened. Luckily, astronomers are clever types, and a paper pre-printed this week suggests a way for them to be, y'know, still there: a "resonant chain", where the orbits of all seven worlds are gravitationally linked so they counter-balance each other. It's quite funky - but not entirely silly, and this section is called 'Silly News'.
The silliness comes with how this has been announced to the world. The image above links to the video in which the orbits of the planets have been transformed into music - a piano note for each complete orbit, a drumbeat for each time a planet passes its neighbours. It's a gloriously ridiculous way to showcase an astrophysical hypothesis; I love it.
Serious News
(America & France)
This week, FBI Director James Comey was fired by Twitter Personality & President Trump. Comey is simultaneously the man who decided to publically announce that he was once again investigating Hillary Clinton mere days before the election (prompting widespread belief, given how close the votes turned out, that he pretty much chose the next president all by himself), and the man who was still investigating Russian involvement in swinging that same election at the time he was fired. He wasn't - quite - investigating Trump himself, but "firing the man who's checking whether your administration is influenced by a foreign power" ain't looking good.
It's made worse by Trump's letter, which includes this delightful paragraph:
While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.
... which comes off an awful lot like 'you thought saying what I wanted to hear made you safe; you were wrong'.
Personally, I've never believed the way Comey handled the email reopening was innocent; he knew full well what he was doing. But firing the man who is investigating whether you were elected on false pretences was never going to look good.
Meanwhile, in Europe, France has utterly disrespected the spirit of the times by not electing its far-right candidate as President. Weirdos. They did still join in the whole 'overturn the establishment' thing, though, voting in a President from a party/movement that only formed last year.
Do we still have any French Boarders around? It'd be interesting to hear an inside view on why the traditional parties didn't do well in the first round - and why the far-right didn't end up winning after all.
Not News
My town has a WWII memorial (we don't have a WWI one, because the town didn't exist at the time), and some of the names on it are... well:
I can't make up my mind whether this is "Savage" Ivy Muriel, the brutal cricketer whose last match against Australia is the subject of both legend and three separate police reports, or "Savage Ivy", the famous masked wrestler and/or vigilante who spends her days as Muriel the children's librarian.
What kind of cruel parents name their kid "Ernest Stammers"? I mean, there's no way he's coming out of that with his psyche intact.
Finally, the untold story that takes place after the Narnia you know and love. This gritty sequel explores Peter Pevensie's conscription in 1944, his first blooding on D-Day, his meteoric rise through the ranks of the British Army - and his tragic, noble death on the Somme (because, like, there's two World Wars? Who can be bothered to remember that? Hey, one of those writers was at the Somme, wasn't he, Rowling or Tolkein or something like that. Who was the one who wrote Narnia? Let's make it him, and Peter can tell him all the stories while he's dying. Man, we're brilliant.)
... I will give prizes to anyone who writes an encounter between High King Peter, Ernest St-st-st-stammers, and either of the Muriels in the battlefields of Europe.
hS
We're gonna talk about taking a whole planetary system and setting the orbital interactions to music and we're not gonna talk about this?
"Everything has to be fandom related these days" indeed. :P
The election here... was a nightmare.
The left had the problem of Hollande's bilan, Macron's candidature, and pretty obvious dissension. When Hamon won the primaries elections, it didn't really netted him the support from the left, his irect opponent (the bad looser) Valls deciding to trow hs lot with Macron from a distance, while the far-left Mélenchon tabled on this to get the fourth place for the first turn (and was an incredibly bad loser too). I thought about voting for Hamon, but after seeing polls only giving him 10%, I switched for Macron.
At the right, Fillion won the first primaries elections from the right ever, clean and fair and square and all (I'd have preferred Juppé), but right after that, revelations about the way he paid his wife for doing pretty much nothing with public moneys and other skeletons just jumped from the closet (real problems, but convenient timing). He was still third, but lost, and now the right isn't looking good either.
So, with the two traditional parties not looking good, the far right cow had this big opportunity, against a 'new' candidate who managed to place himself at the center. After that, between a bad campaign, a bad TV debate with Macron, her own legal matters and chosing another candidate as Prime Minister to steal more votes, she lost without getting her minimal objective of 40%, and her party isn't lookin good either, good news.
The bad news is, she lost, Macron didn't exactly win. He still has the legislatives to win, with a rather rookie formation, and he will announce who his Prime Ministerr would be Sunay or Monay, and this guy will officially be the one leading this battle, an I can tell you that will be a vicious one.
As for Trump news... I rejoin the idea this guy had a fairly conspicuous timing during the election. A pityAnd of course Trump is ungrateful and never heard about the Watergate and Nixon. You cannot listen the radio without hearing about boomakers telling his odds to finish his term are dropping.
To the Fandom News:
That would never be allowed today! Everything has to be extremely political, and of course you aren't allowed to speak at a normal voice level because that's unacceptable! No! You must use the CAPS LOCK OF RAGE AND EXCLAMATION POINTS TO SHOW THE WORLD HOW WRONG THEY ARE!!11!!!!42!(/sarcasm. Typed yelling: not just for fanfic anymore. Argh.)
Anyway, about the movie... Holy crud! Riding a T-rex?! Sorry guys, but honestly, if I were to see that, I would do an immediate face-heel turn out of awe. Farpin' yes! (Ahh, why'd they have to ruin it by making another politician the villain?)
Well, that just about made my day, especially since it reminds me of Wolfenstein 3D, which involves Hitler in a flipping mechsuit. Good old Wolfenstein, those developers at iD Software were such goofballs.
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To the Silly News:
That is cool! My science class has us do "current event" reports every Friday, so I need to do something about that system. The music, as well... I need to watch that sometime soon.
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To the Serious News:
No comment, as usual.
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To the Not News:
This is just like so many name generators... Have all y'all ever been to Seventh Sanctum? The generators combined with the commenting feature is just great, since you get to see what silly stuff other people have received and how they've interpreted them. Great site, great site. As for the names, I'm guessing that the "first last" formatting of the first and last names are "Ivy Muriel Savage" and "Peter King"? That makes it seem less crazy, as Savage and King are both normal last names, and in fact last names of famous people (Adam Savage of Mythbusters and Stephen King.)
Yes, somebody needs to write that story! It'd be a weird crossover, but I guess the reasons for writing it here, as well as the fact that most of us are likely to do it decently, are forgivable.
-Twistey
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Afterword:
...It's kind of funny that I said "Farpin' yes!" at the T-rex thing, considering that my friend sent me this article a while ago... I'm just gonna leave this here...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/04/how-a-fart-killed-10-000-people
... And everyone else should:
The Tenth Wars have got underway! At least, the filming has; given the turnaround for the Ninth Wars, I think we can expect it sometime this autumn. Can the green-striped monster of the West Midlands defend its crown? Will the disc of doom from Reading shred more of its opposition? Might the rocket-powered house robot launcher from Birmingham Abergele have a new target this series? Will Foxic do anything?
All will be revealed, along with the new-look arena and a full cast of fighting machines from all over the country and beyond, because this. Is. ROBOT WARS!
I'm a little excited. Can you tell? =]
1/ What is Foxic (as of the last season) supposed to do? It's got... sort of serrations on its back? But no moving parts? Our best guess was that they want to slip under other robots and carry them around, but, uh... that doesn't actually work?
2/ What would you design as an anti-Carbide robot? From what we've seen in the last two seasons, fellow spinners can't damage either its weapon or its armour; it doesn't care one bit about getting flipped; and... uh... have any of the other weapon designs done anything ever?
My best bet would be an axe - it's flat enough that a good blow would hit something delicate - but I've not seen an axe that actually seems worthwhile. They don't hit hard enough to do any damage.
Hmm... so how to increase the force behind an axe? Maybe a heavy flywheel that you spin up inside the robot, then have the axe snap onto it? If you make your axe lighter than the flywheel, it should keep the momentum.
Of course, the problem with that is that you get exactly one shot, which isn't worth much. ^_^ Plus, hitting either a bot or the floor would probably send you flying. Not the best plan in the world.
hS
1: Foxic is an electric lifter - the head and arm lift up. However, Craig forgot to put a bolt in the arm (on account of being too busy helping Sabretooth return from the dead) so when he drove it over the floor flipper, it couldn't self-right. Craig is... not a lucky man.
2: You know what? I'd design Foxic. It's an excellent spinner killer, and I have this on fairly good authority. Craig is partly based in North Carolina and he attends RoboGames fairly regularly. The old Foxic fought Last Rites (insanely destructive horizontal bar spinner and current BB champion Tombstone with the serial numbers filed off) to a complete standstill, so it should be able to hold up against Carbide's considerably lighter blade. Tactically? Do what you do against any spinner and rush them before they can get up tae speed now, boys a head of steam. The jolts will damage the weapon armature (this is particularly true for horizontal bars and flywheels, less so for verts and drums) and transmit shock through the machine. We saw in the Eighth Wars that Carbide's bar broke down on Terrorhurtz's Hardox wedge, because that's what works well against horizontal spinners. It's... less good against vertical spinners, as we saw against Aftershock and Sabretooth, but it still works.
Me personally, though? I think I'd go for long lifting forks and a shock-mounted, heavily armoured wedge. The wedge can absorb the impacts, but the forks are the primary component; if they're low to the ground, they can sneak under the blade and lift Carbide up, controlling the fight that way. Bung in some powerful drive motors and you're laughing. =]
With the Scutters...
And featuring one of my favourite episodes, The Inquisitor:
=]
Gotta make everything fandom related these days. :P
I also bring an offering of local news from my corner of the world. My boss and I actually went and shot some video for a church in this tiny little town of approximately 3000 people, and not long after, well... this happened.
The TL;DR is that the (openly gay) organist admitted to spray-painting a swaistika, "Heil Trump" and "fag church" on the walls of the church back in November.
"I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag . . . I of course realize now, this was NOT the way to go about inspiring activism."
Yeah, maybe not.
I get it, I really do. One time, when I was a stupid kid, one of my stupid kid friends convinced me to throw rocks at seagulls so that we could catch one, take it home, nurse it back to health, and have it as a pet. This was a terrible idea, and I'm pretty sure I knew it at the time, but I did it anyway because she was my best friend, I worshiped her, and I guess I was feeling extra-gullible that day. Thank goodness, we sucked at throwing rocks and didn't actually hit anything.
But, as it turns out, doing a bad thing in order to do a good thing is never smart, and I expect will almost always fail miserably.
~Neshomeh
Shockingly, a white police officer shot and killed another young black guy last Saturday, in this case a fifteen-year-old kid in the passenger seat of a car leaving a party. Only, in this case, the officer has actually been fired from his job and has been charged with murder. We'll have to see if it sticks, but in the meantime, kudos to the police chief in Balch Springs and to the Dallas County judge who signed the warrant. We can't keep letting people get away with this crap.
The TRAPPIST-1 video is awesome. ^_^ It seems like the notes aren't quite tuned to each other, at least not to my ear, but I guess they picked up the frequencies they used from the planets themselves?
~Neshomeh
Never fear, your friendly neighbourhood acoustician is here!
You're correct, some of the notes are "out of tune".
This might be because they're putting actual data in and it isn't perfectly in whole number ratios (but close enough that the system is still stable). But even if it was, some notes would still sound out of tune according to our modern tuning system. This whole issue is what acoustics and musical theory calls "temperament", and basically relates to how in tune you want/need music to be for different intervals or for playing in different keys.
The resonances that the planets are locked into are based on the harmonic series, where everything is in whole number ratios to a fundamental tone (in this case, half the frequency of the furthermost planet). The higher notes in a harmonic series are slightly "out of tune".
Basically, musical intervals sound 'consonant' to our ears if the frequency ratio is in whole number ratios, and if the numbers in a ratio are small. So an octave (e.g. C-C) is a frequency ratio of 2:1, and a fifth (e.g. C-G) is a frequency ratio of 3:2.
By adding in extra ratios, you can fill in the other notes of the scale, e.g.
C = 1/1
D = 9/8
E = 5/4
F = 4/3
G = 3/2
A = 5/3
B = 15/8
C = 2/1
The issue with using this tuning is that the intervals between the individual notes are not constant (if you divide the ratios together, e.g. D/C, you end up with tones and semitones, as expected, but there are actually two different 'sizes' of tone). So some intervals and some notes may be nicely in tune, but other notes or intervals sound out of tune.
This is all fine if you only ever play major scale music in one key, but if you tune a keyboard to C major in the above tuning scheme (which is called just intonation) and then play in a different key, the intervals will now start off on a different note. Say we tried to play music in D major on that keyboard: the fifth D-A would have a ratio of 1.481, while the fifth C-G would have a ratio of 1.5 (3:2).
In short, using tuning based on whole numbers of frequencies means that only some intervals sound consonant to our ears, and that some ratios (especially if the whole numbers in the ratio are large) will sound "out of tune", and this gets worse for more complex intervals, or where you go over multiple octaves (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_comma for more detail).
This is also why modern pianos use "equal temperament" tuning - every semitone is equally spaced so that pianos can play in every key the same way, but it means that some intervals are very slightly out of tune. It's a compromise between being perfectly in tune in one key and the ability to play in any key. Singers and chamber musicians (e.g. string quartets) tend to use the "just intonation" tuning if left to their own devices without a piano.
Elcalion, harmonious
I thought American police had that constitutional 'right to bear and indiscriminately use arms' thing going on? [/sarcasm/sarcasm/sarcasm]
Seriously, I've been horrified by the state of America's police (at least the parts that make the news) for a while now; I hope this is the start of a trend towards fixing that. (And, obviously, if the officer charged is innocent, I hope the trial recognises that and they find who did do it.)
TRAPPIST-1 - I did see a comment somewhere that "they could at least have used an in-tune piano". I had to listen to it at work with the sound down low, so I'm not sure how they picked the notes they used.
hS
There's camera footage of the whole thing, apparently, which is how they know the car was driving away from the officer, not reversing "aggressively" toward him, when he fired. There doesn't seem to be any question that he done it. IMO, there's no excuse for shooting at a bunch of teens fleeing a busted party, however drunk and rowdy it might have been.
Turns out I was right. System Sounds replied to a comment about the (lack of) tuning with the following:
The notes are slightly out of tune because we used the actual measured orbital frequencies (the resonances have been slightly detuned over the last few billion years, mainly due to tidal forces). You can download the midi file at system-sounds.com in which the notes are quantized to be in tune. We wanted to remain true to the actual system and have as little human input as possible. Thanks for watching!
So that's cool. They also have an example of a system that doesn't have any planets in resonance, the Kepler 90 system, on this page. It's quite a difference! (Herr Wozzeck, this should be right up your alley.)
~Neshomeh
It's geeky and sort of adorable, which basically sums up the human race as a whole. :D
