New Testingstan

They just seemed terribly paced and/or contrived. You get the same problem in Star Wars. Sure, the 'shroud of the dark side' does shit to people's brains. But it's not obvious and its not a satisfying explanation after the fact.

SW wasn't too bad with it, mainly because they didn't spend 20 minutes showing us the "shroud of the Dark Side" in slow-mo.

The best part of The Hobbit is the dwarves, no question about that.


And for once it was a movie where the 3D was more than just a gimmick but really served a purpose, as far as immersing yourself into the movie's universe go. Especially the whole extended fight scene in the goblin kingdom.

RogueIce wrote:I watched them once in TTT and RotK and after that pretty much hit the scene skip button to get back to whatever Aragon and Company are doing, which is way more interesting.

I felt the same way about the books, to be honest. The stuff with Rohan, the Ents, Minas Tirith, the Paths of the Dead, etc, were way more interesting to me than following Frodo and Sam.

RogueIce wrote:So I finally saw The Hobbit and I have to say that scenes with Sméagol still bore the shit out of me. It hasn't gotten any better since TTT.

The Lord of the Rings, book, series may have had excellent world building and technically very well written, but I found it horrifically boring.

so war space ship design. we often envision regular ships in space or big penis shaped rockets or other similarly solid structures. even like star trek ships are solid

but it seems to me there'd be advantages in making them more empty like. you know it actually resembles a castle

imagine a thin shell held quite a ways outside the rest of the thing. this is meant to bust up certain kinds of projectiles early and maybe even act as a kind of visual block as to what's going on inside. if half of what's back there is empty space, you just increased the enemy's miss percent since they aren't sure exactly where to shoot at your mass

and I mean like really thin, aluminum foil kind of thing. enemy laser fire might vaporize kinda large sections of it quickly but it could mess up missiles by making their terminal guidance job harder


now inside you have structures held together by like cables or something that house certain useful bits. these can be individually armored and randomly configured so each ship has different hit odds and still survive shit that does get through


speaking of distance you might have laser countermeasures in the form of smoke grenades. you toss them out quite a ways ahead of the ship and the goal is to de-focus enemy laser fire so by the time it hits you, it is spread more evenly across your armor



I don't actually know if any of this would work but I don't think I've seen it elsewhere and I betcha we could use the space available in space more interestingly than the traditional ship design

you know I've just taken it for granted that you'd know if you hit the enemy spacecraft, but that isn't necessarily the case. this thin shield thing could reflect flashes away from your spotter, or temporarily blind the shooter from the bit of the laser that gets reflected by the shield before it vaporizes; it'd look like a flash even if it didn't hit any meaty parts inside

and speaking of reflection we have dun dun dun STEALTH IN SPAAACE. we might see you blocking stars behind but maybe not if you aren't looking so carefully cuz the heat signature is reflected in a different direction. even a spotter at a different angle might not get an exact fix on you due to uncertainty in the shield angle so the reflection might be a little off. combined with uncertain hit detection and things can get interesting.

subspace sonar can be countered by anechoic tiles lining the exterior of the space ship

So, spaceships looking like giant spiky balloons ?

SPACEBALLS !

So, question for any of the more academic types that hang out here.

Can you recommend any decent psychology or sociology papers on nature vs. nurture? I'm working on a research paper for my English class that is 38 percent of my grade, and my thesis is that one of the characters in the play I'm doing it on acts the way she does because of the way that A: Society treated women in general in the late 1800s, and B: The specific manner in which her husband treats her like a child, as opposed to her having "inherited" some form of moral corruption genetically as one of the characters implies in the play.

Basically just some research paper or another that refutes the idea that being deceitful is inherited genetically.

i don't know anything about deceitfulness specifically, but there's a lot of work on the heritability of personality disorders that might be useful, though the best 'refutations' you see will still end up at 'this seems indeterminate'

but there is a ton of articles on developmental factors in personality disorders (that aren't about refuting heritability per se) that could much more easily be used to prove 'yeah, society right fucked her up'

Well the behaviors i'm talking about aren't actual personality disorders. Basically, the women in the play forges a promissory note and is bad with money, and her husband says that she will somehow transfer this "moral disease" to her children, and that she is bad with money because she inherited it from her father.

My english professor said something about this actually being the prevailing medical logic of the day, that "moral corruption or disease" could be transferred from parent to child not because the child was in a bad environment or their parents taught them the wrong lessons, but simply because their parents had done something bad it would "stain" the child or some such bullshit.

My argument is that the above idea is bullshit. The character isn't bad with money because her father was bad with money and she somehow inherited this genetically. She's bad with money because:

A: upper-class ladies in the late 1800s weren't expected to handle finances, that was the man's job. She never learned good spending habits because no one ever taught them to her during her upbringing. The only thing they taught her was how to look pretty and catch a man.

And

B: her domineering idiot of a husband treats her like a goddamn child throughout the whole play, and probably their whole marriage. He uses childish pet names for her in a manner that is quite frankly disturbing. He chides her for being a "spendthrift" and then hands her money to go buy herself something. He doesn't treat her like a human being so it's a small goddamn wonder that she doesn't know what she's doing.

The play i'm working with is Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House" BTW.

That seems like a very weird interpretation, because all I've read about the play is that people believe it was built around various examples of society being at fault, which is why it was such a controversial work for its time. If the author was trying to promote conservative morality, why would such a scandalous play that repudiates contemporary gender norms have been made? Why would the alternative ending that falls in line with those mores have been so fought by the author?

Especially since this is a literature class, I'd say it might be better to go from that sort of standpoint, too. I mean, maybe use modern science as a backup, but I can't see how it being known to be bullshit now could be a reason for the author to have felt that way over a century ago.

adr wrote:so war space ship design. we often envision regular ships in space or big penis shaped rockets or other similarly solid structures. even like star trek ships are solid

but it seems to me there'd be advantages in making them more empty like. you know it actually resembles a castle

imagine a thin shell held quite a ways outside the rest of the thing. this is meant to bust up certain kinds of projectiles early and maybe even act as a kind of visual block as to what's going on inside. if half of what's back there is empty space, you just increased the enemy's miss percent since they aren't sure exactly where to shoot at your mass

and I mean like really thin, aluminum foil kind of thing. enemy laser fire might vaporize kinda large sections of it quickly but it could mess up missiles by making their terminal guidance job harder


now inside you have structures held together by like cables or something that house certain useful bits. these can be individually armored and randomly configured so each ship has different hit odds and still survive shit that does get through


speaking of distance you might have laser countermeasures in the form of smoke grenades. you toss them out quite a ways ahead of the ship and the goal is to de-focus enemy laser fire so by the time it hits you, it is spread more evenly across your armor



I don't actually know if any of this would work but I don't think I've seen it elsewhere and I betcha we could use the space available in space more interestingly than the traditional ship design

Compensating for acceleration is the bitch that bites that idea, unless handwavy non Newtonian g comp is in the mix. Whack a golf ball. Off it goes! Whack a water balloon. Splat! That's the dilemma and why human spaceships have been prettydamn solid cylinders.

Count Chocula wrote:Compensating for acceleration is the bitch that bites that idea, unless handwavy non Newtonian g comp is in the mix.

High acceleration is something I avoid anyway... but the basic idea is similar to space habitat mirrors which survive the rotation which is like 1g (more I think). There's a simple support frame to keep the shape.

I think it would be kind of neat if you could make them like a rigid hull airship. A light weight fabric (or metal) over a light frame and then pressurized.

Ok, I just want a space zepplin

Have you heard of the Bigelow space station? It is being made of inflatable modules, not actually a new concept, but what's really cool is that Bigelow's thing is supposed to become operational in a few more years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_space_habitat

They are promising more living space for the same mass as well as better impact and radiation protection than traditional metal designs. Looks pretty good.

I haven't. Its pretty interesting though.

They haven't even finished the design, any talk of it going up 'in a few years' is nonsense. The only thing they've actually got plans to launch soon-ish is BEAM, an inflatable broom closet for the ISS. Nothing's likely to get authorised until BEAM's shown the design can actually work, which'll take a good couple of years after launch at least.

Might just be optimistic media/investor hype, or maybe talking about BEAM, I'm not sure, but Bigelow say they hope to start leasing station space to clients in 2015.

Whether they manage to do it or not though, I'm sure we'll be seeing some exciting developments in private space flight in the coming decade. They have their test modules in orbit, and we recently saw a successful launch from SpaceX too, so I'm looking forward to see what's coming.

Am I the only one put ill-at-ease by the lyrics of the following song ? :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc56moy0poA

more like the moonlight blight am I right

(watching sailor moon)

adr wrote:more like the moonlight blight am I right

(watching sailor moon)

Was that intended as an answer to my previous post ? Because if that is the case I am afraid I do not get its meaning.