Space MOOSE

spaceflight, technology, anime, politics, and whatever else I feel like writing about

The Map is Not the Territory: Politics and Data

The phrase "flyover country" embodies much of what's wrong with our bicoastal elites. They literally only ever fly over. They don't see most of the country by land area with their own eyeballs, because they assume the (massaged, cherry-picked) data tells them everything they need to know. It does not …

The Ki-Dynamics of Naruto Running

The stereotypical "Naruto Run", bent almost double with arms held parallel and swept back like an airplane's wings, is an eternal element of mockery from anime fans. Often this is (rightly) called out as a way to reduce on-screen motion and thus get away with less animation work, but what …

The Spark and the PHB

The brilliant "gaslamp fantasy" (steampunk + magic) webcomic Girl Genius is one of the few works of fiction I have encountered that is written by intelligent authors, about intelligent characters, that manages to convey the feeling of the process of creation as I have experienced it. Characters in the world of …

DeX Mode, M1, Unified Compute, and the Death of the PC

This spring, I moved for a new job, and I needed a new battlestation. I set one up from scratch so that it could work with my work laptop - a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, Ethernet, and sundry other USB peripherals connected to the computer by a single USB-C connection. This …

In Defense of the Draka

In S.M. Stirling's classic science fiction stories, the Draka are held up as an example of ultimate evil from the perspective of a Cold War American: Royalists from our Revolution mixed with Confederates from our civil war mixed with apartheid South Africa mixed with aspects of National Socialist racial …

Dmitri Rogozin is a Big Fat Faggot

Meanwhile in Russia

There have been several articles about the technical and political reasons for Roscosmos taking a stacked rocket with an integrated commercial payload off the pad, and so I won't get into that. I will instead discuss how those are all post-hoc rationalizations for the tiny vodka-drunk, knife-wielding gremlin wearing a …

It's Not Dead Yet

I wrote once that WSL would kill the Mac. I completely missed the implications of Apple silicon. I'm writing this on an M1 Pro rMBP and it's wonderful. Other people have written about the objective performance, so I'll just say that Windows has been steadily declining in UX quality since …

Booting Slackware 15.0 from mdraid under UEFI

Booting directly from software RAID is impossible in most operating systems. This is actually why "motherboard RAID" exists, as a layered storage driver for Windows that presents multiple storage devices as a single drive so that C: can be on mirrored storage. Linux doesn't support motherboard RAID, but Linux mdraid …

Zealtle

As much as the people selling big "cloud" technologies would like to tell you otherwise, physical place still matters very much. This is especially true when it comes to themselves. As much as they would like to sell you otherwise, you can't understand their software without understanding the people who …

Musings on Living Plant Fossils

In the time since Europeans realized Columbus had not, in fact, landed in India, the West has mostly referred to the Americas as the New World. Based on certain discoveries in geology, of relatively recent fossils, and of species still alive, it may be more accurate to say that the …