When Top Gear Gets It Right: Botswana Special

In the Top Gear Special in Botswana, the three presenters show up with very different cars. Clarkson with a Lancia, which was terrible. James May with a Mercedes, which was fine mechanically. And Hammond with an Opel Kadett, which gained hero status during the trip. It had the least power and size of the three cars, and had some mechanical problems (like brakes and electrical) but it had an important advantage: it weighed 1470 pounds, around half the other two cars. It was only 40 HP when new, but the that light weight was its saving grace. Here in America that car wouldn't be legal when new because it would fail the 0-60 time requirement, needed for getting up to freeway speed. To be fair a Beetle would fail too, because they didn't go 60. Mine would hit 55 if you floored it, but the vehicle was pretty much redlined at that point. This is important because the weight of the two bigger cars was a real problem on the terrible road and lake-mud surface of the salt pans in the special. Watch it if you want to understand. Even youtube has this.

The thing about light weight vehicles is they take less energy to get moving, less energy to stop, and feel faster because their light weight means they have less weight to accellerate. This is great fun when driving. The little Kadett is a very plain car, from 1963, but its still fantastic because when you're just tootling along at 35-40 mph it is easy to drive on most surfaces and doesn't take a lot of energy or attention. It doesn't have A/C or fancy electric toys, but its functional.

When Top Gear returns to Africa years later for a Nile and Lake Victoria trip, Hammond turns up in a little Subaru Legacy Rally wagon and its great, right up until he breaks it, and that road broke the other two cars as well. That was again the smaller and lighter car, and it had the fewest problems during the journey. IN the real world, this is also true, up until you start colliding vehicles. Then the light vehicle dies. Heavy vehicles driven badly by murderous people are a prime example of what is wrong with America today, but those same people have to buy a lot more gasoline a lot more often, so they suffer the consequences of their decisions, and moving and slowing the big heavy vehicle also uses more gasoline, meaning they have to spend more of their disposable income on fuel than people with little Subarus. This is also why there are so many little Subarus where I live. They are the eventual revision of the little Beetle with a water cooled engine and more horse power but the same origin: an Horizontally Opposed 4 cylinder engine, just like the Beetle and early Porsche.

What can we learn from this and apply to modern cars? How about buidling Subarus out of aluminum, to reduce weight, and use lots of carbon fiber for body panels, seats (still have the leather tops and padding, just replace the steel frame with carbon fiber at 1/5th the weight), and the doors and hood. You could probably reduce the weight drastically and use the smaller engine for the same speed and better fuel economy. Also, a lighter car doesn't have to deal with so much top-heavy tipping problems, so they can be taller and still go around corners fast. The terrible variety of road surfaces in Africa are unfortunately representative of the post-mining West. We are still paving main roads and arterials and highways, but the quality of pavement is lower than during the 70's and 80's. Many roads have had their paving responsibility shoved lower, to poorly funded agencies and pretend that the govt has made tax cuts, when actually what they've done is screw over the cities and counties. Its evil, not incompetent. Down at our level, on the edge of wilderness there are road that used to be paved, or graded, and aren't anymore and are going back to nature. Here in the mountains there's many roads that are no longer passable even with 4WD. If you absolutely have to cross them you either bring a bulldozer to rebuild the road in dirt, at great expense, or switch to a light motorcycle and use the deer trails. This is dangerous, but it will get you there if you are really slow and careful and wear sufficient safety gear and don't pretend you can carry lots of stuff on a light bike. But that's another topic.

In another couple days, The Grand Tour will be airing their xmas special in Namibia. Clarkson and company will be using dune buggies in Namibia's dunes. This is a fine idea, and while they can be made legal on California roads, few people bother. A buggy doesn't have a roof and can't be locked or left alone in a state where car theft is common. But given time, as roads worsen, we might end up seeing more of them on the road. The public just doesn't care that much about the poor return on our tax investment. California tax payers still pay for racist school programs and don't say a word about Social Justice being anti-white hate crimes. Maybe that will change one day, but I'm not holding my breath. We are much more likely to just buy more capable cars that can deal with worse roads.

ANIME: Age Problems

Anime has a number of positive traits, and several odd ones, and several bad ones. The odder trait of anime is the ages are wrong. I will explain.

In anime, elementary kids talk like junior high school kids. This allows them to make funny observation jokes.

In anime, middle school kids talk like high school kids. They're still focussed on kiddy school things, but they're also throwing in romance, which is too young for their apparent age. I think this is because Japan as a whole objects to the imposed age of consent rules. As a culture, and in their constitution, Japan has age of consent rules similar to Utah and Mississippi, though they provincially adjust to older. This means that in anime, they often use the high school behavior to offer up the first innocent steps towards crushes and harmless blushing dates. But they're doing this with middle schoolers.

By they time anime depicts high school kids, these kids are talking and socially behaving like college students. They are also physically developed, and there's frequently at least one episode with partial or full nudity hidden with "steam". But they never kiss, because that is illegal pornography. In many anime, telling the girl you love her is a marriage proposal and the story ends there. In Japanese culture, marriages are starting to get arranged at 16 years old, and happen at 18, 19 or 20. Any woman unmarried over age 23 is considered an old hag and treated like a slut by the entire culture. Obviously, if she isn't married at 24, she's running around with other women's husbands and causing trouble. Japan is not in favor of welfare moms. Abortion is free, and having a kid out of wedlock is a major insult.

High school kids act like college students. Silver Spoon is a great example of this. I keep thinking they're in college but they sometimes have to tell you they're in high school.

I think this is why they treat stories about college students in anime (like Moyashimon and Honey and Clover and Golden Time) as stories about adult life, only with work replaced by college classes, which aren't often shown actually. The social side of things tends to dominate the story.

So basically, Japan is telling you their characters are 4 years younger than they behave or look. Its baffling, but its one of those cultural differences. If you find yourself feeling confused, just remember this.

Review: Why is Steampunk so Terrible?

This is a topic that comes up a lot. Steampunk is the growth of mechanical technology around and after the American Civil War, the time when we decided to invent cartridge guns for rifles and revolvers (allowing rapid and accurate fire), steam engines became useful and common, and we haven't yet learned how to do things with electricity. This period of time, considered "gaslamp" in some areas, is also the time of airships and biplanes. Technology was ornate, and since plastic hasn't been discovered yet, so brass fulfills the same purpose for far greater weight. Leather and canvas and lots of buttons are also a big deal, since there is no zipper invented yet. Ornate handmade workmanship is common, which in the modern times of bland ugly functional technology of today explains their appeal. Clothes fitted then, and took a lot of labor to make, also making them expensive.

There have been some successes with steampunk, like the Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey Junior. They're sort of steampunk. They have the technology and the punk, with Downey snarking his way through Holmes' lines. The Lost World (same author: Arthur Conan Doyle) had a TV series about a mesa in South America with living dinosaurs, victorians with rifles and tea sets,

The cause of steampunk's failure is similar to what happened to Cyberpunk when the Hollywood scumbags tried to abuse it and turn it into marketing. The punk side isn't represented when corporate interests take over. And the punk side is important.

The other problem with Steampunk is that its originally based on Wild Wild West, a very corny 1960's TV show with a similar appeal to original TV batman. And the same sort of audience. The most serious approach to the topic was called The Difference Engine (by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling), and later followed up by Diamond Age (by Neal Stephenson), which was nearly serious. The problem with both books is the Difference Engine wasn't very interesting, and Diamond Age required a lot of technology that is improbable ever existing, as well as takes place in a strange future. Diamond Age is worth reading, Difference Engine is not. Sorry, Bill. It is not your best work. Stephenson liked the topic and switched to historical fiction from the Enlightenment, which is tragically long and dull so it doesn't have a lot of fan. He's famous enough he can publish as-is, but if it had been edited it probably would have been more readable.

So what happened to the genre after these two breakthroughs? Well, the YA writers, who write Mary Sue tramps that are universally described thus:

She's super popular and not fat and everybody likes her and she gets the boy cuz he's SUPER romantic and mysterious and she beats all the bad girls and always has the snarky comeback, because boys are simple and only girls are smart, and .... 

Stephanie Meyer and Gail Carriger are big in this problem, and their work is honestly terrible. And it sells, to girls with terrible self esteem problems and probably doomed to be social rejects and either welfare moms or cat ladies. YA for girls is an atrocity against fiction. It's a reminder that girls are vain and creepy and fans of these books would probably not reproduce in a world without Democrat social services that exploit our taxes. Most YA steampunk is Jane Austen rewritten with gears and coal.

The YA writers took the Steampunk themes, ruined them with Mary Sues, and then dominated all teen publishing. And all of it sucks. I'm not aware of a single example in the modern version that is worth reading. Gail Carrigers's Waistcoats and Weaponry makes you want to vomit. Clockwork Girl was straight communism. Meyers' Cities of Glass reviews as more "victimhood tears" remake of Twilight. I did not bother reading either series since they're clearly for welfare moms. I tried Jim Butcher's Aeronaut's Windlass and did not like it. Read the whole thing... but it wasn't good. Sorry Jim. Any setting with floating islands could be written MUCH lighter and WAY more interesting. The need for fog-monsters and this silly magical system does not appeal to me. I think I would write a more interesting setting with better exploration themes rather than monster-wars.

This reminds me that while there aren't good BOOKS for Steampunk, there's a number of good comics and anime which use the themes well. Fullmetal Alchemist, Heat Guy J, Big O, plus some space based versions like Last Exile all use steampunk and dieselpunk themes and visuals and they do them well. Even Avatar Korra uses a kind of steampunk. Steampunk CAN be done right, and I'll write a separate post about that.

ANIME: Log Horizon AI Fan Theories

In the anime Sword Art Online (SAO), video gamers are kidnapped by boobytrapped VR game consoles which use low power microwaves to directly interface their brains, but can be turned up to literally kill them. They are then forced to play a video game until they die or someone beats the game and frees the survivors. If you die in the game, you die for real, smelling of bacon. Its pretty much a horror story with lots of teen angst and most of the characters die.

In the anime Log Horizon, video gamers similar to SAO wake up in a game setting based on a post-apocalyptic version of Tokyo, and outside the city walls there are random monster encounters, like SAO they can't log out. They are trapped. If you beat the monsters, you get stronger. If you die, you get resurrected at the chapel in the city, but they start to notice that people who die more start to lose memories and become sort of like zombies. Not undead, but less like actual people. Its odd, and they don't understand what is going on. Stranger yet, they have noticed that the NPCs are probably self-aware AIs, and they aren't supposed to be, and the NPCs are starting to have goals and dreams of their own, but when an NPC dies, they stay dead.

How are these two shows linked?

The best fan theory is that the victims of SAO got recorded onto a server (its thousands of people, so SAO was the story of a mass-murder), and characters of Log Horizon are AI recordings of actual people. They're on a server, waiting because an AI is software, not wetware. It can't really die.

The server may have been shut down, left in a drawer or a vault, and there is no indication of how many years have passed before it has been turned back on again. Now these AIs are awake, in their game world, and whomever turned them on is trying to communicate with them, an ongoing theme in Log Horizon. What if the beings who turned the server on are basically Alien Indiana Jones, or the research lab where AIJ dropped it off is and they're trying to communicate with a lost/dead civilization found on formerly inhabited Planet Earth. The simulation and servers might be all that's left of us, thousands or tens of thousands of years in the future. Light Speed is still a limit, after all. Our signals have been spreading outwards since the 1934 Olympics, as shown in Contact, a terrible movie with some excellent scenes in the first part of the story.

Our signals will eventually spread to the whole universe, but the speed limit works both ways and it could be billions of years before aliens get here, do their archaeology, find the servers, fix them, and turn them on enough for Log Horizon to actually take place. The recordings of people have no idea. They're inside a simulation, and they were already gamers so they just think they're stuck in the game somehow and don't wonder about it more deeply. Its the memory loss aspect that is the clue. If you're aliens do you fly to the another galaxy for a couple billion years or do you record AIs of your best scientists into a ship with a 3D printer, arrive at the destination billions of years later, construct bodies and landing craft, and explore using robot probes with AI brains controlling them? Well, of course you would. That's what we do on Mars. Sort of. Someday we'll land some 3D printers on Mars and construct mining gear for raw materials and build all that stuff, including more rovers etc, to enable exploration without setting foot personally. There's a name for this btw. Its Von Neumann Probe. In scifi movies these often turn evil, called Berserkers because its assumed their mission was assigned by a dying civilization that wanted to wipe out all life in the universe, and build enough death probes to insure that. I'm assuming our aliens aren't here to kill us, merely visit our civilization.

So that puts Log Horizon into an interesting position. It could be millions or billions of years in the future. The NPCs might be trying to act as avatars for the aliens with their very different brains, or they may be trying to communicate with the AI players indirectly during their deaths because we aren't hiveminds, and that could be really alien to the aliens. Whatever the reason, the clues are in the show, and that's why Log Horizon is superior to SAO. Also, Log Horizon is not a teen slaughter fest. Of course, the nature of the game: killing sapient monsters as a form of entertainment might be so horrifying to the aliens that they're still trying to decide if our end was a lucky accident rather than us turning into a progenitor of Berserkers. This would certainly justify caution in communicating with us, and erasing our AI's memories after visits to the moon (season 2).

Fan theories can rock. These are the sorts of ideas which on forums lead to great fan fiction writing, or original stories worth reading. Jon Scalzi has made a career of these kinds of ideas.

Engineering Lessons Based on Top Gear Fails

Top Gear is a car show, now ended. The guys in it often did challenges with the words "How hard can it be?", which is the English equivalent of "Hey Bubba, Watch this!", which is an actual Darwin Award phrase. One of my classes last semester (semester is over now), was about teaching classes. The upside of this exercise is its meant to teach you to think of things you see as potential ways to get the attention of classrooms of kids, teens, or adults (college) students needing something more educational and interesting than "lecture, reading, report" sort of lessons.

The great thing about this phrase is this was a fine way to introduce examples of really terrible engineering, which they knew were terrible, but made the point by doing it badly, and this was comedy. One of my favorites of these was the Caravan Challenge. These are actually homemade motorhomes, based on really bad choices of vehicle. That was part of the comedy.

So imagine an entry level engineering class at your local community college to improve on this? Form groups, brain storm, and what would you do better?

1. Use a proper van or truck frame for the vehicle, with a big enough engine. A V8 is a good idea. One with sufficient cooling and the right gears to haul lots of weight. If the top part is wrecked or missing this is fine. Install things like water tanks before you build the rest. 
2. Use common materials for the frame so going around a corner won't tear it apart. In modern times this means either tube steel or aluminum. Either can be welded by a reasonably competent home shop 220 V-AC welder. The frame outlines your living space and provides support for the interior and cover. Make sure it is big enough, but not ridiculous. 
3. Cover the frame with either fiberglass, thin plywood (less common but was a practical option once), and keep the total height below 12 feet. The 18 foot tall example here was for comedy. 
4. Add insulation so it is warm enough for expected conditions where you plan to camp. In the Sierras, this means below freezing, even during summer. In Cornwall, in the video above, 50'F is as cool as it gets. Blocking the wind and a small electric heater should do. 
5. Work out your heater setup, and the battery use if electric, and install the battery and charging so it will work. And make sure the car alternator that charges the batteries won't fry doing this, with a cutoff so it won't overcharge and catch fire. 
6. Work out the propane setup for your stove and heater, if you use it. Remember that expanding propane gas absorbs heat which can freeze up the expansion chamber, creating ice until it seizes. It is common for propane heaters to shut off due to freezing in cold temps, meaning the design is seriously flawed in the real world. Using a light bulb to heat the expansion chamber can solve the problem, but it uses a lot of electricity to work, meaning you need more battery. Sometimes the right answer is not propane, but a smaller pellet stove and a car battery to run its electric system. Keep that in mind. 
7. If you decide to use a white gas stove setup, only do this with good ventilation. The benzene is toxic and the CO (carbon monoxide) will kill you. Good ventilation is a good idea regardless, but it also removes your heat if it is cold. I mention this because it is deep winter and I spent 15 minutes de-icing my car this morning. There was black ice everywhere this morning. Most of that melted this afternoon but if it doesn't dry enough we'll have more tonight. At 83% humidity, I expect more black ice. 
8. Carry enough fresh water for the expected duration of your trip. Also carry enough grey and black water tanks for your expected waste. And setup the thing to be easy to dump without getting dirty yourself, and the cleanout valve/connector is much recommended. If you do this right it is easy to do without getting splashed or filthy with human waste and blue stuff, neither of which is the least bit tolerable. 
9. Seriously consider a prefiltered tank, a filter system, and a pump or boiling system to transfer from grey water and then treat back into clean water. This might not work, so testing should be done. Prefilter tank would be a place to put untrusted water like river or stream water, filled from buckets or rainwater, then slowly treated and shifted into the main clean tank for use. If you can re-use some of the grey water that will allow you to extend your time on vacation before resupply, especially in desert areas like Nevada. Power or heat to do this is the challenge. 
10. Install solar panels on the roof, and batteries to hold the power, with vents so they won't make the cabin explode when the hydrogen released during charging, and heaters on the batteries so they work even when cold. 
11. Also install a traditional gasoline powered generator, a quiet one. 
12. Install an Air Conditioner, with a heat exchanger. This should be simple since they're made for this. Also install a CO and CO2 detector so the heat exchanger keeps the air flow moving to prevent suffocation. If the trailer is too airtight, you can die of suffocation. 
13. Don't drive too fast, and remember to pull over regularly to allow people by. 

I'm pretty sure that the above things make up most existing commercial RV's today, especially class C and B types. Despite the video, there were plenty of commercial examples which they could have driven, showing their potential for speed and polite driving. Caravanists don't pull over in the UK, which is why they're hated. They block the highways. Top Gear wanted to demonstrate faster RVs, and failed. If they were a bit more serious they might have succeeded. Winnebago, for instance, has a V10 engine with supercharger or turbo (forget which) that boosts the power enough to haul its own weight up a mountain pass road at full freeway speed.

Climbing over real world passes this is important. While Donner Pass is 7229 feet, there are several passes over 8000 feet along highway 395, which runs north and south down the back of the Sierras. Many caravans and RVs traverse this road during the spring, summer, and fall, and it s a primary route for Snow Birds, the collective name for retired people with RVs who winter in Yuma Arizona (or Florida) and summer in the high country and mountain meadows which are so pretty and peaceful and get tens of feet of snow during the winter months. If you tried to come up with a similar trick in Europe this would be like wintering in southern Italy or Spain or Greece and summer in Sweden. 

Hilarious Whining

I am amazed at the whining from the losers of this election. Seriously, either shut up or get the hell out of my country. My people finally yelled "no more!" and Obama is out on his treacherous ass. We will be blaming him and your bad voting for the next 25 years, and we'll even be right. He's scarred and vandalized America during the entire duration of his reign of terror.

And its almost over. The Tyrant Punk is about to be the butt end of the Presidential Porta Potty Library joke.

Biden was really hoping Hillary would get arrested by Comey, but apparently Comey found his own suicide note in Hillary's emails. It caused him to NOT prosecute her hundreds of felony treason violations of the Official Secrets act or whatever the legal name of the secrets law is called.

Obama made Jimmy Carter look successful. 

Moving on, things are improving. My semester is nearly over. It hasn't been great. One of the classes was useful. The other two weren't, and the fourth is best forgotten. The problem with teachers is most of them are delusional. They exist in communism. They have no idea how the real world works, and are utterly clueless about real life because they are protected by their socialist tenure contracts. You can't fix what is wrong with education until you end Tenure and fire the communists and lesbians running them. You also have to fire the hippies and junkies and sexual predators of both genders operating there. Schools are too important to allow creeps to run them.

Next semester I'll be taking more practical courses and some programming classes required for graduation. These should be more useful when turning up for a job interview, and getting the job interview in the first place. And while the leftist panic mongers are screaming that libraries will lose their funding because only leftists have been running them for 8 years, what they ought to be saying is "we are going to lose our leftist jobs and be replaced by right-wing librarians who know a library is not a machine shop or drug treatment center".

Adaptation and Business

For the last 8 years, Republican gun owners have quietly carried on despite the abuses of govt that actively hates us. Eight Long Painful Years. We have gotten by, quietly, and kept our heads down, and adapted and survived. It has not been a nice time.

The racists of the left are really ticked off their racist candidate lost the election because the majority did not vote for her. We held our noses and voted for Trump and that is that. So, leftists, what do you do now?

In prior elections where leftists' side lost, the economy dramatically improved because leftists were no longer screwing it up. Seeing that the economy was better run by someone else, the leftists went on to start small businesses like bakeries and wineries and breweries. They learned how to operate a business, and a balance sheet. This is a great use of leftist energy, making and selling things, and far more productive than complaining. Republicans kept our heads down for 8 years of misery under your racist hate monger, and its party platform of racism and hate for black people. Democrats hate the poor, which is why the keep them that way. Now it is your turn to shut up and get back to work. Do something useful.

If your useful skill isn't building a business in a physical site, or you can't stand where you live anymore and think you want to see more of America, do that. There's plenty of businesses which can happen on the road. Truck driving and delivery driving is interesting and rewards people who can do math. There's also outside sales. Selling stuff to people who need it, like selling scanners to hospitals, and arranging payment and delivery and training etc. That makes money. That is useful to people in a very direct way. Far more useful than rioting because you lost, you hypocrites.