It was opening night in Littleton, and I got my brother and my sister-in-law to come along for the fun. There was a good crowd at the Jax Jr. The movie is pretty good. On a scale of 1 to 10, where the original Star Wars is a 10, and the Jar-Jar Binks movie is a 1, John Carter is a solid 6, maybe a 7.
I've been waiting for this movie ever since I read the book as a boy. A Princess of Mars was Edgar Rice Burroughs first published novel, coming out as a magazine serial in 1911. Burroughs went on to write a lot more Martian stories. He didn't invent Tarzan until later. I always thought Burroughs Mars stories were cooler than his Tarzan stories, although I read most of the Tarzan books too.
Tarzan, requiring less special effects, made it into the movies early on, and had a long and successful run, both movies and TV. There was an effort to do a Princess of Mars movie in the 1930's (animated) but it didn't pan out. If it had, it would have been the first feature length animated film, instead of Snow White.
Anyhow, John Carter, the movie, is better than the Tarzan movies out there. So call it a success. Forbes magazine thinks John Carter will make a bundle of money and lead to profitable sequels. The movie is "live action" in that the hero and heroine are real actors, photographed in costume. The background is full of CGI Martians, exotic riding animals, ferocious monsters, fantastic aircraft, Martian cities, and marvelous terrain features such as the River Iss.
The movie takes substantial liberties with Burrough's original text, but that is nothing new. Movies never follow the book very closely. True believer fans will whine about this, but it doesn't bother me much. Had I been directing it there are a lot of things I would have done differently, but I wasn't directing, and so things are as they are.
If you are a Burroughs fan, this is a must see. It's a good action adventure story, lots of action, lots of strange places and creatures, it moves fast enough that you don't notice the two hour length.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Things come to you overnight
Thinking about railguns last night. It suddenly became clear that I had made a mistake. I computed muzzle energy of the conventional cannon as M * V . That's not right. M*V is momentum. Kinetic energy is 1/2 MV**2. So doing it right, the conventional cannon has a muzzle energy of 7,801,736 foot pounds. Which compares more favorable with the railgun at 23,603,200 foot pounds.
Onward to phasers.
Onward to phasers.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Go Mitt, Go
So Mitt comes out of Super Tuesday with a lotta delegates, and six wins, but his rivals, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul, gathered enough votes to keep their campaigns alive. Why cannot Romney win enough votes to crush the opposition?
'Cause Mitt is looking to the general election, a bunch of independent voters, who ain't as conservative as a lot of Republicans. Speaking from hands on experience as a local organizer, the Republican party has a lot of VERY conservative voters, much more conservative than the independents. If Mitt were to go far enough to the right to make the really hard core Republicans happy enough to vote for him, he would drive off the just-as-important independents in he general election.
So Mitt tries to keep the focus on jobs and the economy. Let us hope that enough Republicans can vote for a winner in the general election.
'Cause Mitt is looking to the general election, a bunch of independent voters, who ain't as conservative as a lot of Republicans. Speaking from hands on experience as a local organizer, the Republican party has a lot of VERY conservative voters, much more conservative than the independents. If Mitt were to go far enough to the right to make the really hard core Republicans happy enough to vote for him, he would drive off the just-as-important independents in he general election.
So Mitt tries to keep the focus on jobs and the economy. Let us hope that enough Republicans can vote for a winner in the general election.
Railguns
The US Navy is working on railguns, electromagnetic launchers capable of fantastic muzzle velocity. Conventional guns are limited by the speed of sound. The projectile is pushed up the barrel by combustion gas. That combustion gas only expands at the speed of sound. Grant that the speed of sound in white hot gas at enormous pressure is much higher than the speed of sound in air, but muzzle velocity in conventional guns is still limited to about 4000 ft/sec.
Railguns have no such limit and can achieve much much higher muzzle velocities. The Navy project is working on 32 Megajoule rail guns. To put that into real numbers, 32 Megajoule is 23.6 Mega foot/pounds. For comparison, the conventional 5 inch cannon has a muzzle energy of 0.185 Mega foot/pounds. The rail gun has 127 times the muzzle energy of the conventional cannon. This translates into amazing range, like 100 miles.
To power the railgun, the Navy is talking about a battery bank. That ought to be quite something. An ordinary car battery (still the best there is for this kind of application) holds only 4560 joules. Each 32 Megajoule shot would totally flatten 7017 car batteries. The Aviation Week article talked about a battery bank good for 20 shots. That's a LOT of car batteries.
Another science fiction project gets funding.
Railguns have no such limit and can achieve much much higher muzzle velocities. The Navy project is working on 32 Megajoule rail guns. To put that into real numbers, 32 Megajoule is 23.6 Mega foot/pounds. For comparison, the conventional 5 inch cannon has a muzzle energy of 0.185 Mega foot/pounds. The rail gun has 127 times the muzzle energy of the conventional cannon. This translates into amazing range, like 100 miles.
To power the railgun, the Navy is talking about a battery bank. That ought to be quite something. An ordinary car battery (still the best there is for this kind of application) holds only 4560 joules. Each 32 Megajoule shot would totally flatten 7017 car batteries. The Aviation Week article talked about a battery bank good for 20 shots. That's a LOT of car batteries.
Another science fiction project gets funding.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
And what is Near Money?
Consider the US treasury bond, the T-bill. Uncle prints them and sells them to investors. The investors give Uncle cash money for the bond. Do the investors feel any poorer after exchanging cash for a T-bill? Not really. T-bills are the safest investment on the planet, and there is an active market for them, which means the investor can convert his T-bill into back into cash with merely a phone call to his broker. It makes no matter to the investor whether his fortune is in cash or in T-bills in so far is behavior is concerned. The investor can convert all his money into T-bills and still feel wealthy enough to buy new cars, new houses, yachts, whatever. In short, T-bills are nearly the same as money. Near-money is what Paul Samuelson called them.
Note here. Uncle gains spending money, which will be spent, the investor doesn't really give up any money. Issuing new US treasury bonds is nearly the same as printing new money.
And, it has the same inflationary effect as printing new money.
The Obama administration is spending way more money than the IRS is collecting in taxes. It finances this by issuing US Treasury bonds, i.e. printing new money. Forty percent of the federal budget is financed by selling T-bills. The US budget is unimaginably huge. Forty percent of unimaginable is still huge.
Hold onto your wallets tax payers.
Note here. Uncle gains spending money, which will be spent, the investor doesn't really give up any money. Issuing new US treasury bonds is nearly the same as printing new money.
And, it has the same inflationary effect as printing new money.
The Obama administration is spending way more money than the IRS is collecting in taxes. It finances this by issuing US Treasury bonds, i.e. printing new money. Forty percent of the federal budget is financed by selling T-bills. The US budget is unimaginably huge. Forty percent of unimaginable is still huge.
Hold onto your wallets tax payers.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
What is money, really?
Well, it used to precious metals, stamped into a uniform size, with a date and a portrait and milled edges to prevent "clipping" (filing off gold or silver around the edge of the coin, keeping the filings, and passing the coin off as full weight). And having money gets us out of the barter business, an obvious goodness.
Then we invented paper money. It took a while for paper money to become pure paper. I can still remember "silver certificates" which promised to pay $1 in silver coin upon demand. The "Federal Reserve Notes" looked about the same, but made no promises to redeem the bills in coin.
Once we moved on to a pure paper money, some wonderful things become possible. We can print as much paper money as we like. If you are the treasurer of the United States, and you need to meet payroll, printing money is a wonderful thing. You have no idea how surly people get when they don't get paid on time.
The not so wonderful part of printing money is inflation. Print dollar bills by the carload, and pretty soon everybody has dollars, and storekeepers ask for more dollars for their goods. Customers grumble, but they have the dollars and they want or need the goods. So prices go up. I can remember a time when gasoline was 4 gallons to the dollar. After half a century of dollar printing, it's the other way round, 4 dollars to the gallon.
Inflation is tough on savers. We all want to save money, for the house, for the college education, for retirement. But if the money we put away last year is worth less this year, we know we have been robbed. (Actually we have been taxed, but that doesn't make us feel any better about it.)
Borrowers love inflation. Borrow the money today and pay it back with tomorrow's cheaper dollars. Such a deal.
US monetary policy has been a hot political issue since Alexander Hamilton's time. The savers and the lenders want "sound money" (i.e. no printing of new money) and the borrowers want the opposite. Ron Paul's push for a pure gold currency is the modern form. Over all of US history, the savers and lenders have had the votes, just barely, to limit the printing, mostly. Only existential emergencies, the Great Depression and the two World Wars, pressed the US government into heavy duty money printing.
Today we are faced with Great Depression 2.0. And the democrats want to print carloads of money, supposedly to cure Great Depression 2.0 but also having carloads of dollars to hand out to friends and supporters improves their chances of re election.
Unless the voters get wise and figure out that all that printing, causes inflation, which steals their savings.
Then we invented paper money. It took a while for paper money to become pure paper. I can still remember "silver certificates" which promised to pay $1 in silver coin upon demand. The "Federal Reserve Notes" looked about the same, but made no promises to redeem the bills in coin.
Once we moved on to a pure paper money, some wonderful things become possible. We can print as much paper money as we like. If you are the treasurer of the United States, and you need to meet payroll, printing money is a wonderful thing. You have no idea how surly people get when they don't get paid on time.
The not so wonderful part of printing money is inflation. Print dollar bills by the carload, and pretty soon everybody has dollars, and storekeepers ask for more dollars for their goods. Customers grumble, but they have the dollars and they want or need the goods. So prices go up. I can remember a time when gasoline was 4 gallons to the dollar. After half a century of dollar printing, it's the other way round, 4 dollars to the gallon.
Inflation is tough on savers. We all want to save money, for the house, for the college education, for retirement. But if the money we put away last year is worth less this year, we know we have been robbed. (Actually we have been taxed, but that doesn't make us feel any better about it.)
Borrowers love inflation. Borrow the money today and pay it back with tomorrow's cheaper dollars. Such a deal.
US monetary policy has been a hot political issue since Alexander Hamilton's time. The savers and the lenders want "sound money" (i.e. no printing of new money) and the borrowers want the opposite. Ron Paul's push for a pure gold currency is the modern form. Over all of US history, the savers and lenders have had the votes, just barely, to limit the printing, mostly. Only existential emergencies, the Great Depression and the two World Wars, pressed the US government into heavy duty money printing.
Today we are faced with Great Depression 2.0. And the democrats want to print carloads of money, supposedly to cure Great Depression 2.0 but also having carloads of dollars to hand out to friends and supporters improves their chances of re election.
Unless the voters get wise and figure out that all that printing, causes inflation, which steals their savings.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)