Firefly and the Bourne Identity

 The TV Show Firefly had (at least) three important threads that were left unresolved when the show was prematurely cancelled.  The movie, Serenity, tried to wind all these together.  I think it did a disservice to the backstory, although I do appreciate that they did it.

 The first is, what was the alliance trying to do to River and why do they want her back so much?

The second: What's the story behind Reverend Book?

The third: what's the story with the Reavers?

I think the big story behind the first two is that the alliance was trying to create a group of Super-Agents, with special talents and training, that can go into any situation either overtly or clandestinely, to bring about whatever outcome the Alliance leadership wants.  Reverend Book, I speculate, was a first draft of this, created and deployed during the war.  After the war ended,  he decided he wanted no part of this going forward, and the deal they worked out was that Book was to do something "out of the world for a time" and after that time--5 years almost certainly--he'd be allowed to live freely but be required to keep the secrets.

"The Operative", who we met in the movie, was the next generation of this.  He'd undergone physical and mental training.  I suspect we'd have met someone like him had the series been continued.

River was intended to be of the following generation.  Children who are ultra-smart and physically capable on their own, but would be given chemical and surgical enhancements along with the training to make them even more powerful.  But the people doing the training had not reckoned with a determined, competent, wealthy and loyal older brother, who was capable of breaking her out.  And once she was out, it took her a while to recover, perhaps requiring the assistance of the brother, but she was able to use her skills in new ways.  We saw this a little here and there, but I'm sure the plans for the second included River doing some amazing stuff.

 Note the similarity here with the back story behind "The Bourne Supremacy".  The hero there has been chemically enhanced and physically and mentally trained to be a superior agent.  In that case, it was mainly about extrajudicial killings, but I suspect that was a lot of what the alliance uses these Operatives for.  He himself explained that the mass slaughter he and his agents committed in the movie is well within his remit. 

The movie exerted strange pressures on the story.  Whedon surely wanted to get as much of this back story out, and he also wanted to bring those unfamiliar with Firefly along, so he worked out a way to integrate the River/Operative story with the Reaver story.   It works, but barely.  There was easily enough story there to fill two more seasons and not kill Book and Washburne.  

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I've been watching the "Malfoid" Harry Potter fan fiction/AI videos.  The technical ability shown by some of these are incredible, but the authors range from childish to fairly good, but definitely not professional.  What could a talented writing and production team, like that which put together Firefly in the first place, do with these tools?  The original actors have all aged 25 years, and one of them has died.  There's no way they could play the same characters, aged only a few months.  Using the same sorts of video tools as the Malfoid folks have been, much could be done about a real second season.  The real actors could contribute voices and timing.  Apparently a great deal of the charisma of the original show was because the actors themselves got along exceptionally well and genuinely liked being with each other...and those relationships generated nuance that can not be written in.

Missouri to Columbia River Canal

 People who have never been there have suggested making a canal from the Missouri River to the Snake or Columbia River, which would, they think, make transcontinental ship traffic possible.  Here's one:

Here are some facts:  The Missouri River is only navigable up to Sioux City, Iowa, which is right where South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska  come together--in other words, less than half way across.  The part upstream of St Louis needs periodic dredging. 

The  Snake River is navigable up to Lewiston, Idaho, where it splits into several tributaries, all of which are way too small for anything much bigger than a ski boat.  And there are lots of waterfalls.  The connection on the map appears to be the Clark Fork river, which runs through some mighty rugged country.  I've driven alongside it for substantial mileage: turning it into navigable water is not a credible option.

 We already have many transcontinental routes which are vastly more practical than waterways.  They are called Railroads, and Interstate Highways.   It's important to realize that America stopped digging new navigable canals (e.g. the Erie Canal) pretty much as soon as railroads became viable--it was simply not economically competitive anymore.  Europe was much farther into their canal system at that point--it made sense to connect up canals, especially in northern and western europe, where the land is pretty flat.   Most of the canals dug in the last 150 years have been aqueducts--not for moving boats, but for moving the water itself. 

Metric Taps and Dies

 I just learned a powerful advantage that the metric system has over earlier systems.  Specifically, Taps and Dies.  When you're drilling a threaded hole in the SAE system, you need to look up in a chart what the correct size drill is, as it's not simple.  SAE uses two main systems for sizing tapped holes:  1/4" and bigger, the measurement is the bolt size, and then you have a number of threads per inch.  Smaller than 1/4", machine screw sizes are numbered 0000, 000, 00, 0, 1, 2...8, 9,10, 11, 12.   Every shop in America has a tap table, telling you what size drill to use for what size and pitch machine screw, and is it a sensible system?  No, they have numbered and lettered drills.  Some taps have the drill and clearances sizes etched on the tap, but they're often illegible and for the smaller sizes.

 Metric doesn't have this problem.  Metric screws are described by screw outer diameter and pitch length.  Standard 60 degree threads make the tap hole easy.  So an M8x1 screw is 8 mm in diameter and has threads 1 mm long.  So to drill a hole with 90% engagement, such as into plastic, you simply subtract the thread pitch from the diameter to get the hole size.  To get a clearance hole, you drill a hole a little larger than the thread outer diameter.  No tap table is needed. 

 It turns out that this is both a benefit and a curse.  You can get an amazing variety of metric taps and dies, where SAE has largely standardized on Coarse and Fine threads (UNC and UNF), which are of course different for different sized bolts.  The benefit of that is that the SAE has also made some strength definitions, which are enormously powerful if your bolt will be stressed highly.  Most metric tap and die sets will have roughly the equivalent of UNC and UNF, but you can get threads both finer and coarser. 

Colonies on the Moon

 We're about to go back to the moon for the first time since the 1970s, with the aim of having permanently occupied colonies.  Will this lead to people living their lives entirely on the moon?  Perhaps, but I don't think that will happen for a long time, if ever.  Sure, once we have enough people up there, life happens and some of them will die, and probably a few will be born.  But there are a lot of reasons the moon is not a good place for "settlements" as opposed to scientific research operations.

There are plenty of reasons a colony on the moon will be useful.  For example, radio noise from earth will be sharply reduced on the "back side" of the moon, the side that permanently faces away from earth.  This makes it an excellent place to install radio telescopes, includeing massive interferometers and gravity wave detectors.  But these things will operate almost entirely remotely.  The people who do construction and maintenance will live elsewhere--while on the moon, most likely deep underground.  I also think the moon will be a particularly useful place to mine for resources.  Lunar regolith is not terribly far from sterile earth soil, so it may prove useful for other applications in space--construction material for space stations for example, but in a much shallower gravity well than Earths.

Because the moon is well outside the protective magnetic field of the earth, people staying on the moon will be exposed to high levels of cosmic rays and other radiation, as well as high level of micrometeorite impacts.  People will need to live inside thick shells.  They can venture out inside thinner shells for a few hours, but they are taking a risk.  The lunar astronauts of the 1970s received a level of exposure comparable to a few medical X-Rays from that period, but the longest of them was only outside the earth's protection for 12 days.  People working outside for months on end will get sick.  They must spend as much of their time as possible deep underground, and when they need to be close, mostly do it from heavily shielded vehicles. 

The second problem is low gravity.   Our experiments so far have shown that exposure to microgravity does permanent damage.  The moon is not microgravity, but it is 1/6th of the earth's.  It's hard to imagine that not causing some damage.   One year is really too much for a human to be in zero G.  Let's guess it's 6 years for the moon.  This is plenty of time to get some real work on the moon, and even engage is real life there, but I'm pretty sure there will be a medical limit.

 I think we can compare it to the south pole.  There are lots of people who stay down there for a year, but they generally come back.  There's nobody that actually lives there, although the base is permanently occupied.  I happen to have two scientist friends who have over-wintered there.  They're both back in the US now.  There are lots of other bases in extreme places with similar, rotating crews, and I'm certain that the moon will join them.   

Self Defeating Code of Honor

Most of the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire milleu maintains internal sense, although there's magic and other mysterious stuff.   But occasionally, deep illogic creates terrible, fatal battles for which there is really no need.  I'll cite two examples that really bother me. 

 The fight between Arthur Dayne and allies versus Ned Stark and his allies outside the Tower of Joy is just stupid.  Arthur Dayne had been ordered to protect Raegar's new wife Lyanna, who is also Ned Stark's sister.  His absence at the battle of the Trident may have cost Raegar his life, although Raegar had no way to know that.  Arthur Dayne fights Ned to the death, and Ned wins.   But this makes no sense.  Arthur Dayne is protecting Lyanna, who is Ned's sister.  Ned would never have caused Lyanna to come to harm.

The back story is that Lyanna had been betrothed to Ned's good friend, Robert Baratheon, and he was in love.  Raegar "stealing" Lyanna away was ostensibly the cause of the war.   When Robert found out that Lyanna had betrayed him, he might have killed her, and more likely her newborn son, so to some degree she did need protection.  But Ned would never have hurt her, even had his friend ordered him to.  When Arthur Dayne realized who it was that he was fighting, and that his prince had fallen, reason dictates that he should have renegotiated.   Ned and Arthur were itching for a fight, but this fight just stretches credibility.  Ultimately, they both wanted the same thing: Lyanna and her heir's survival.  A tiny bit of renegotiation would have changed things.

When I read the books, it was clear that Lyanna was dying in Childbirth, although it was never explicitly said.  That Jon Snow was the outcome of this childbirth already seemed pretty likely, and what Robert would have done with him.  Ned, for all his loyalty to Robert, was even more loyal to his family and would have protected Lyanna and Child, even against Robert.  

Sandor "the Hound" Clegane had been traveling with Arya.  He seemed to have a special care for the Stark girls, although his stated goal at the start was to "Sell" Arya to her aunt, Lyssa.  But Lyssa was murdered and they continued north.  By this point, Arya and Sandor had become good friends.  After arriving too late to deliver her to her mother and brother--murdered at the Red Wedding--they continued on, and stumbled into Brienne of Tarth and Podrick.  Once again, the goal of these two "teams" was entirely aligned--they wanted to protect the Stark Girls and deliver them to safety--a little discussion before starting to fight would have stopped the whole thing.

I'd hope that real fighters in these situations would have had a discussion and worked things out.  In both cases, there was honor at stake, but the people the promises had been made to were dead.   Loyalty to your "team" is important, but these incidents seem designed to show that there is always ambiguity as to which team you are on.   Human interrelations are always complex.    Picking teams almost never is.   Sports makes a terrible metaphor for these situations.  There were numerous cases of brothers fighting on opposing sides in the US civil war.  Lyanna's love and marriage with her families ostensible deepest enemy could have been turned into a huge alliance and improvement for the world, but stupid adherence to codes of honor prevented it. 

A lot of the fans of the show like to see the battles, and indeed these two were among the better ones.  There was a lot of clamoring for "Clegane-Bowl", and the showrunners acceded to it.   That one was less dumb.

 

Archimedes Mirror

Lot's of people have thought that the great Syricusian polymath Archimedes made a weapon capable of setting the sails of ships on fire from a distance.  There is no historical evidence of this--the story seems to come from the middle ages.   The Mythbusters, several times tried to repeat this stunt, and failed every time.   While I can see problems with the individual experiments, I think they got it right--for several practical reasons, Archimedes probably did not try to set sails on fire by using individual flat mirrors focused by hand.  He may have experimented with it, but like the mythbusters, failed at every attempt.

That said, it is definitely possible to set things afire with a large mirror focusing the suns rays.  You can buy a hand held cigarette lighter that works this way, and a larger mirror can generate a fire at a distance of a few feet.    An accurately enough focused mirror could definitely start a fire at a distance, but it needs to be pretty accurate.  It's remotely possible that the mechanics of Syracuse could have made such a mirror, but I'm certain that had Archimedes seen such a mirror under production, he would have noticed the optical magnification it would have provided, and he'd have invented a reflecting telescope within days. This obviously did not happen, so I don't think Syracuse made such a mirror.   

Why the PNW Will Never Have High Speed Rail

 I live near Seattle, and I love it here.  We're a little isolated from the rest of the country, which is both good and bad.  One of the bad things is that it takes frustratingly long to get to any other part of the country.  If you want to get there in less than a day, you need to go by air.   It takes 24 hours to get to the nearest other region, the San Francisco Bay Area, by rail, or 13 hours by road, but only if you're lucky with traffic and break the speed limit a lot.

Lots of people advocate for High Speed Rail, and I am very much one of them.  An imaginary 200 MPH (300KPH) HSR system could get us from Seattle to San Francisco in 3.5 hours.  If the stations are near to your destinations, it would be practical to get to a meeting and back in a work day.  This isn't really practical by air unless you fly private--Airports are half an hour or more outside of town, and TSA adds 90 minutes or more.  Add that to 2 hours in the air each way and it adds up to 4.5-5 hours travel time each way.   Add that to the meeting itself and it's a 12 hour day or more.   Private Jets are slower, but not that much, and they subtract all of TSA, and they can be precisely scheduled--it makes the one day round trip possible, which it just isn't on scheduled flights.  So the people who can afford it, do so.

The Northwest has three big cities: Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.  Metro Vancouver has about 3.4M, Seattle, 4.2M and Portland 2.5M.  But those three cities are in a geographic island:  There's a huge mountain range between central Oregon and the Central Valley of California, and two even bigger mountain ranges to the east.  It's over 600 miles from Portland to San Francisco, and about 300 of them are really rugged terrain.  The SF Bay area has only about 8 million people: less than the PNW.  To make a High Speed Rail Corridor really practical, LA/San Diego, about 20 million people need to be added.  And once you've done that, you need to connect to the rest of the country.  Spokane, Boise, Helena and the other northwest cities are tiny.   You need to go down to Salt Lake City and Denver, or up to Calgary/Edmonton, to reach many folks.  

 There is already rail through all of these routes, but a lot of it is very far from being able to handle High Speeds.  Through the Siskiyous, it's barely able to handle moderate speeds and there are some radical twists and turns.  Making this capable of even 200KPH, will be incredibly expensive, much less 300.   A bunch of the existing route is comfortably able to do 80MPH--but less than half.  All the terrain north of Eugene will need to be moved into the Willamette/Cowlitz/Nooksak Corridor, and rebuilt to HSR standards.  The construction cost to do this is at least $100M/mile for the 700 miles from Eugene to Vancouver--$700B, and that doesn't factor in the cost to obtain the land and get other political clearances. Figure $2T.  Redding to San Diego is about the same: 700 miles/$2T.  Finally, you've got to do the mountains: Eugene to Redding is about 300 very mountainous miles.   That'll probably cost at least $2T, maybe even more.  

 Would it be worth it?   Perhaps.   The roadbed that's already in the various flat corridors will be cheaper to obtain than the portion that's not.  Near Seattle runs along the Puget Sound Coastline, and will be useless for our purposes--Everett to Olympia, well over 100 miles, and apart from the cities themselves, that's probably the most expensive land on the route.  Such a system will stimulate business enormously--but $6T is a lot of money: about 2 years GDP from the entire affected region.  

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 In the long term--surely not in my lifetime, we will have some form of VacTrain.  Hyperloop or maybe something even better.  Many pundits argue that this will be quite a bit cheaper than HSR, and I see their point: Hyperloop takes a tiny amount of space, and tunnels and bridges are much less substantial than for trains.  A Tunnel Boring Machine through the Sikiyous would solve a mess of problems.  Not sure it's possible, but it's an appealing thought.  Not just 200MPH.  1000 MPH.  Seattle to SF in 45 minutes, no waiting anywhere.