Agisoft Metashape

Agisoft Metashape is a stand-alone software package that processes digital images into a 3D spatial data. 

Improved from their earlier quite popular Photoscan, this photogrammetry program uses a Structure From Motion (SFM) technique to build a "mesh" structure of the object's surface. Briefly, SFM uses overlapping digital images combined with the camera's location data (metadata) to perform complex geometric calculations to determine a "point cloud" of surface dots. The dots are then connected to produce a polygon mesh of the object. Metashape can also extract images from video.

Metashape has a large support structure - tutorials, user manuals, blogs to rely upon. It has an educational license for significant cost savings. The Educational license ($59) is available in both Floating (installed on multiple work stations), or Node-locked (a single rehostable work station). 

Metashape has a straightforward UI for loading and processing photos.The number of photos is under no restriction (unlike other packages both free and commerical). Once photos are added, a mask function can be used to reduce irrelevant elements (background, accidental foreground, etc.) to reduce noise and prevent "merging" of the object with other surfaces. The mask function has nice feature where you only need to mask a few images, select points based on the masks, and clean up the other images automatically. It has intuitive masking tools (Magic Wand and Intelligent Selection tools) that make an otherwise tedious task less tedious,

Next the photos are aligned to refine the camera locations and then a dense point cloud is produced. A number of tools exist to refine the point cloud. For example a manual bounding box can be created to orient and refine the point cloud (this is can also be done automatically). The dense point cloud is calculated using depth information from the camera location data. Once the point cloud is built, the mesh is built and ready for export. Each step has a number of parameters that can be used to further refine the 3D model. 

The nice thing about this batch process is it is relatively quick compared to other photogrammetry packages (seconds to minutes versus minutes to hours or days) and also has a tooling feature that will optimize the batch for a specific GPU on your computer, significantly speeding up processing time. You may also have a low/medium//high feature settings to get a quick and dirty 3D model, and then reprocess with high setting for the final model.

The mesh can also be refined from the depth maps (the camera location data) to create better details as well. 

It's a solid piece of software, rarely freezing or crashing, that produces nicely detailed results in a timely manner.

A Lamentation for Old Japan

Q (the real Q from Star Trek): 

You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you've encountered so far - the British Crown, the Confederacy. Nazis. Soviets. They're nothing compared to what's waiting.

Shall I compare 1930s Japan to a summer's day in the USA? Bad allegory but still so many matches. I wish we were 1930s Japan. That whole 1931 - 1945 arc really needs to happen to the good ol' USA. And it will. And we will deserve it.

Let me back track to watching two Studio Ghibli movies; Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Both are lamentations of a then 60 year old Japanese Boomer how Millennials had given up all the old filthy habits and superstitions (not that Shintoism has gone away), but all those filthy habits and god bothering were good landscape practices.

The movies got me teary-eyed sentimental old man. I watched Spirited Away with both English and Japanese subtitles. The nostalgia of the 6th extinction is permeated throughout this movie. I understand.

Born in 1957, my world is now 2/3rds DEAD. Ten years ago it was halfway dead. now it's 2/3rds.

We are behind schedule for Soylent Green (2022) but it not for lack of trying.

The really alarming thing was helping my brother move down to Missouri. Missouri wasn't alarming. Driving 8 or 9 hours, I had no reason to wipe bugs from my windshield. In the 1970s, you had to clean bug smear all the time. We've had an alarming drop in bugs. This is bad. This explains the lowering sperm counts. 

We are very elegantly getting out of the way not fast enough. If you wonder whose schedule we're on look up and wave at the 1%. The achieved escape velocity in Q2 1972 and happily ever after. The Snakes and Spiders Club is open to all. We recognize talent in both force and fraud.

Which gets us back to Japan of late 1944-45. We USAsians really need to get it hammered in what war does. At the end, they were eating mice and sending killer kyle zombie robots we call kamikaze.

All of this suicidal fanaticism was not Old Japan, it was manufactured in the 1930s by mass media. 

(Writing being the first atomic bomb). (TV the H-bomb). (Internet???)

Point being, I had our chances at 50-50 even-steven in 2020 but now we looking at getting civilization cat-friendly after we are gone. If that's where you want to go. 

There was a SF story about how we were the rats and the dinosaurs left in spaceships (and also bombed Earth with a comet fragment), and we, the rats, are building spaceships now.

The only way we would have continued the space lunar program is if Buzz Aldrin or someone found the entrance to the ancient dinosaur moon base.

To live in that alternate Earth, I think it more likely we die sooner. 

Farm Film Report at Boca Chica

 It blowed up real good.

So, is Elon Musk wasting our time? He's selling off his properties to convince us he really is going to Mars. He's invested in companies that can be utitlized for Mars. Tesla: power generation and power storage. Boring Company: tunnels. Spacex: rickety rockets. Neuralink: mind-controlled slave army.

Because no one wants to live on Mars. Mars is a shithole. Mars is Earth after WWVIII or WWIX. You go to Mars after everyone has lost WWX. That's the way it works in the sci-fi movies, white trash move to next trailer park after fucking up last one.

Elon Musk is not going to Mars. He can barely handle Texas. No he wants YOU to go to Mars. He wants YOU to die on Mars. Like all capitalists, he uses other people's money, and other people's bodies.

Anyway, so the SN10 blowed up real good. I read a few articles about it and then made the mistake of reading the comment sections. More often than not, people have just a tiny fifteen minute memory of historical events, and think that Starship has never been done before. 

"How long would it take for the government to do this? Decades, and with the cost of trillions of dollars!"

"Scrap that wasteful government SLS program! Spacex is doing what no one has done before!"

Well, government doesn't do it. Government hands out shit-tons of monies to contractors who do it. Look at any massive public works. Duh.

And Musk has, with his as-yet-to-be-reusable rockets, duplicated efforts that go back to 1957. Congrats, Elon, you made it to the Kaputniks of the 1950s. But a lot of people forget about the Delta Clipper.

Funded by the DoD and contracted out to McDonnell-Douglas. The DC-X was developed in just 21 months at a cost of $60 million. First trial was 8/18/93, 20 years before Spacex Grasshopper. The DC-X worked not just the first time. It worked every time. 

NASA reluctantly took over the operation and kind of sabotaged it. NASA had it's own program through Lockheed Martin Venture Star. Honestly Lockheed has been resting on its laurels since the SR-71, though they still had lots of good engineers. The X-33 (Venture Star) was the victim of a lot of bad management decisions, both in design and construction. The big problem was choosing to make the liquid hydrogen tank out of advanced composites, which were just not up to snuff.

The X33 could have flown, but did not, and we have been wasting our time for 20 years. 

And as far as I can tell, Elon Musk continues to waste our time with his (eventual, I'm guessing), very expensive transcontinental cargo ship.

Ho-hum.

Stuck in the 20s

Canned ape tastes bad. I don't mean bush meat, rather us meat, in space.

Space does not treat apes well. There is the radiation, which is horrendous. Zero G is worse. It just bad. And given the difficulties of procreation in a natural environment, the idea of people breeding in space or lower g worlds does not bode well for the progeny. Not to mention our dropping sperm counts. 

There's accounting for attrition, which happens with all migrations. Colonizers to Virginia had a 2 in 10 chance of surviving. And that's with plentiful air, water, and a really nice radiation shield called the magnetic field.

So, unless trillions of humans can be produced, even the Solar System is out of reach.

Oh sure, there'll be human outposts, but nothing long term. We go to visit, not stay.

So who or what colonizes the Solar System? And how?

Here we run into the popular imagining of space. Of spaceships and moon bubble bases and all the Jetson stuff written by people who grew up in the 1920-30s. but more 20s as that is when all the tech archetypes were established, the aspects and attributes of future modern life.

Think of Star Trek. Written by old fogies with visions of Captain Hornblower in Space, Wagon Train to the Stars, with cultural references from detective stories and true crime novels. A limited vision which the populace of popular culture, bless them, can envision. Same with the Dungeons and Dragons of Star Wars. (Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, copied from 1930s serials).

Popular culture is stupid, the future of a colonized Solar System will look nothing like we see. Bladerunner 2049 cut close, but not weird enough. Nt overwhelming enough. That's the scary part of utopia is TMI.

So robots? No and yes. Modified humans? No and yes (maybe Elon Musk is developing Neuralink solely for his Martian Slave Army). Something else? Definitely. Like giant slime molds. Or, or plasma critters that dive in and out of the Sun, bringing up Helium 3. Or, well, then you get into Singularity realm.

Face it folks, we had our Monkey Singularity, but not the Nerd Rapture we wanted. Next!

So how about this? Somebody somehow convinces Nixon the NERVA program has uses beyond Mars in the defense industry. Star Wars. Nixon says, Ok keep going. That's the premise.

Consequence. So they fit the thermal nuclear rocket engine to a B1 frame and just use it as a reusable booster. At first people are freaked but then they think it is cool to watch the damn thing land. The first time two of them land together, popular imagination finally catches on. Detroit, where Chrysler makes the B1 air frame, becomes Rocket City. 

This is all before Three Mile Island, so once the first crash happens with no radiation leaks, despite pinko commie bleating, everybody shrugs it off. Besides, we can put battleships in orbit and no one else can, yet. The public is like yay Space Force! and then Nixon gets impeached.

Yay Space Force but then the public is like where's the cruise destination bitches. Boo Space Force. But the tevch was there and lots of companies competed to improve it. By the 90s Pan-Am launches the first spaceliner to orbit. Basically, 40 years ahead of ourselves. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Anyway, it can still happen. Not to diminish the engineering talent of companies like Westinghouse and Aerojet but that thermal nuclear rocket almost fell together in development like it wanted to exist. The same as Enrico Fermi's atomic pile.

We should have thermal nuclear rocket boosters as common as container ships. Else canned apes will just keep on pooping in bags in some Buck Rogers soace ship to Mars.

Nuclear Fusion Rocket Engine

But first, let's all welcome Rush Limbaugh to Hell. If ever anyone distilled the acid bile of white supremacy, bigotry and chauvinism, bottled it in victim-size personal containers, it's Rush. People will say he was being funny, kidding, joking around. No, our soft round boy was never kidding and everyone knew it. He was just a mean feral pest.

Hopefully, Rush is being passed around like an underage Dominican pajama boy from demon to demon, contracting every possible venereal disease in existence. 

Anyway, let's talk nuclear fusion rocket engines. You would think a rocket engine would be easier to build than a reactor, seeing as you don't need a sustained and contained reaction, but you always have that squishy spurts at the magnetic pinch that kablooeys the plasma burn. Fusion has been produced since 1932 with a cyclotron by Marc Oliphant at Cambridge's Cavendish laboratory. Fusion is easy to do. Why, a high school science fair student could (has) produce nuclear fusion by constructing a Farnsworth Fusor. The problem is producing a big enough reaction to propel spaceships.

My guess is a successful fusion rocket will, well, first of all it s all magnets. But my guess is a fusion rocket will require a little machine learning AI to cuddle and tickle the plasma to create an exhaust. An AI that we will find composed of algorithms we cannot understand. The fusion rocket will be an alien organ, and part of a larger animal called your spacecraft. You can read all sorts of technical things on fusion engine but I would prefer to work it as a Fermi question from three assumptions. 

First, that the engine fuses regular old hydrogen. No fancy lithium deuteride fuel like Project Daedalus used. Let's assume a boron nitride consumable along with the liquid hydrogen fuel, utilizing a cominaion of laser driven intertial confinement and magnetic compression powering a magnetic pulse plasma, and leave it at that. 

The second assumption is that whatever the engine looks like, it is about the size and weight (8400kg)of a Rocketdyne F1 engine.I choose the F1 as still the most powerful rocket engine built (late 50s) and its performance characteristics are well known. 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Managed by pumps that could drain an Olympic size pool in seconds.

The third assumption is we are using an Orion spacecraft as payload which is about 22,700kg in mass, and a rocket configuration similar to the first stage of a Saturn 1B, which gives us a rocket dry mass of about 42,000kg, for a total mass of 64,700kg. 

Ready to be bored with math? Here we go. A B11-proton fusion reaction produces about 8.9 million electron volts per reaction.

Treating the boron nitride component as part of the engine allows us to use only the mass of the hydrogen fuel for energy density which works out to about 107 trillion joules per kilogram.

So our ideal exhaust velocity from momentum equation, E=1/2 *m * V^2, converts to V = sqrt(2* E/m), plug in the 107 in E/m, gives us V = sqrt(214tj/kg) = 14,629 km/sec.

That's not bad considering. Okay, lets' go to Mars. Or Mars and back.

Accelerating at 1 g to go halfway to Mars, flip over and decelerate at 1 g to Mars, gives us a very comfy ride that takes, in total depending on the distance, about 8 days 9 hours round trip (assuming average distance of 2 AU). This is about 7128.6 km/sec total speed for the trip

So, using the idealized Tsiolkovsky rocket equation of  propellant mass is U = 1 - 1/exp(total speed/exhaust velocity) = 1 - exp(7128.6/14629) = .245 of total mass.

Given that our rocket is 66,700kg gives is a total liquid hydrogen weight of 66,770 * .245 = 16,345kg. Liquid hydrogen has a density of 71 kg per cubic meter meaning the fuel tank is about 21 meters x 21 meters which is just about the size of the fuel tanks of our Saturn 1B first stage.

For comparison purposes, a Saturn 1B equipped with an Orion spacecraft payload and using an F1 engine would use 399,400kg of fuel.

Wait, you say, I thought a ton of deuterium fusion fuel is equal to 29 billion tons of coal, and our propellant mass from crude chemical to fusion rocket is only .04 which is 4/100s. Not very impressive.

Fine. This was a crude estimation problem* and besides I'm getting you to Mars in 4 days versus 9 months. Sure we can do better on the approximation but would you rather fly my fusion rocket or end up a tumor-ridden cripple on one of Elon Musk's Starships?

The Era of Broken Dreams

Which I date to Q2 1972, the day the 1% achieved escape velocity. The Long Boom, the post-WWII good times, was an anomaly, a grotesque aberration which stuck in the craw of the rich for intolerable decades. Fortunately, we worked our way back to inequality and the hereditary meritocracy the rich felt had been taken from them. This is, of course, a false narrative as the rich have always enjoyed their economic apartheid, but Q2 1972 was when they were freed forever by machines and algorithms. Now that they had built a secure enclave of domesticated food-powered robot peasants, it was simply a matter of time before they would be entirely rid of the remaining ferals, the stinky food-powered robot peasants.

The 21st century beckoned, when all the cool technocratic shit was going to be available. Not flying cars. Fuck flying cars. What a stupid idea. No, we were supposed to have nuclear fusion, space colonies, cities under the sea, IQ enhancing drugs, smart robots, age-prolongation/rejuvenation, and food-o'plenty grown in little plastic tubs so Earth could once again become an earthly paradise.

All stale century-old dreams of some nerd from the 1920s. Let's pick a current one with the same narrow vision.

How about Elon Musk? Too easy? True, he's a dork with poor communication skills, a perfect product of the current capitalist fitness curve, the narrative of beneficial inequality, but he also has bullshitted so many otherwise sane or semi-intelligent people.

Elon Musk gonna put Texas on the map. Between his prediction of an Austin boom town to Starship, he figures he will be the first trillionaire. That's a million million, and that's something worth being scared of.

Elon Musk piloting a Texas Mecha into the sunset gonna trod upon a lot of ape-shaped ants, but, hey, Elon Musk is going to Mars.

Elon Musk is not going to Mars.

Certainly not with that goofy Buck Rogers Starship. The logistics of a space colony I briefly went into some six years ago in this essay. The odds of a successful space colony are even worse today, but there is no way you win the Solar System* without at least a nuclear thermal rocket, and, quite honestly, even then it's a no-go. You need a nuclear fusion rocket to do anything beyond delivering corpses or tumor-ridden cripples to Mars. 

Anyone who looks at the numbers realizes Starship is just a stunt, a con to separate rubes from their monies. Here's a pretty good critique about Starship. I really don't understand why people laud Musk for doing things that were done 60 years ago, and with a lot less computing power. But hey. Musk is supposedly trying to make a resusable launch vehicle to cut down the payload cost of Earth-to-LEO through economies of scale. Current cost is $2,720/kg on a Falcon 9. (Actual cost is much higher due to adding in beyond the launch cost).

The thing that really pisses me off is the USA had a perfectly acceptable nuclear thermal rocket from the NERVA test days, back when it was estimated (from actual test results) a nuke launch would be around $10/kg. True, people worried about a nuclear booster crash, but we've already got so much plutonium in our bones, what's a few nanograms-per-person more? 

I think it's really interesting that the last test of a nuclear thermal rocket, the NERVA-XE in 1969, was just at the ankle bend of the development curve, and, 50 years later, would be kicking the living crap out of any existing chemical rocket. Given 50 years development and use, there would currently be at least 10 million tons of stuff in orbit right now. Easily. As opposed to the ISS 420 tons. What's a few atomic accidents, considering the fuck-ups we've already experienced?

So, Elon is no dummy. He knows this. He's conning you. 

I have attire, you have despair

It is very close to one year under the plague restrictions and I probably should be fluent in Spanish, but instead I am reduced to watching reruns of reality TV. Click bait shows, celebrating schadenfreude and massive fail. Back in my day we called them sitcoms.

This week I realized I am watching reruns of reruns and also the library opened back up so now I have books to read. I am alarmed at how old and stupid I am becoming. 20-30 years ago I'd do 3-4 books every week or two and remember most of the stuff I read. Now, it must be because I don't sleep and dream as much and the short-term to long-term memory just ain't what it used to be. I am inexorably becoming addled. That's a joke because the family history is, thank the Nothing, dementia-free.

The thing I noticed about incompetence porn is it is not in TVtropes. Or maybe it is, as the Armenian Azerbaijan 2020 air war doesn't provide new insight on warfare, just substitute unmanned for manned. There's a category already.

Still, the main thing is that you eventually hate these people, and the only way to change that is put even more awful people on to the show. Eventually, people you used to hate become preferable what's next on the downward treadmill. Until, back to slavery, I guess. Matter of fact, a better title of any piece of fiction is Slaves and Masters.

Here's a fiction for you, flavored by the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

It's been done. This story. We'll call it Goldbot vs. Silverbot but it's an old Twilight zone take on the last war survivors, the last remnants of civilization. The robot warriors. There is competence porn. By, the way, Goldie and Silv are in a winter landscape because it took about ten years for the Earth to get back to its Icehouse phase. Don't want no Hothouse. Hothouse, from here on out, ice ape babies, is bad.

It's interesting how competence as a measure for qualities changes through the ages. Now, it means doing something well. But a century ago, when character mattered more than doing, it meant trustworthy, to be a gentleman. The lowly mechanick of two centuries ago, competent by today's standards, was thought of little better than a whore.Like actors. And if we take Modernism to be recent, then the past 5000 years of modern history views competence as simply getting along with other people not like yourself. Which gets us back to hating people on TV.

People talk about well of course there is conspiracy run amok on the Internet because it was designed to be gossipy and conspiratorial in structure. If the Internet is our brain, then I guess TV is our eyes, radio our ears. I've lost the point.

Reading an E.O. Wilson book about, what do you know, ants. The Fermi entertainment, meaning mathematically guessing, for how many ants there are tells us this is the Planet of the Ants (provided you ignore microbes and assume they aren't a superintelligent billions year old subterranean world net).

Around 7.5 billion humans in the terran Petri dish versus a million times as many ants. But! Ants on average are a million times smaller than humans so it works out biomass-wise we about even steven. So! What about infrastructure? Our techno biofilm vs the ants. Let's go one trillion pounds for each pound of human flesh. Ants? Oh. They've had a 99 million year head start. 

Ants win.

But then. ants haven't been to the Moon. Or have they?