Grandpa Weed's One Hit Wonders

I had a chance to test my prototypes and all did well. I didn't get to try the ellipsoid because I gave it to my ceramics professor. I didn't test to destruction, or at least not in the physical, perhaps in my brain.

POSTMORTEM: Jelly Bean Pipe

This isn't a one hit.  It's bigger on the inside than out. This is a party whale.

I'll add a carburetor hole a half inch down and to the left of the bowl. If this ever goes into production, 9 out of ten on the left, and 1 out of ten on the right, since most people are right-handed. There is something to be said about laminar flow through the jelly bean/hot dog form. I have ass backward engineered a mitochondrian for weed. This is a allesuzammenbindenkugel. A hologram. A really nice clean pipe that smokes like a bong. Yum.

POSTMORTEM: Golf Ball Pipe 

They say form follows function, and boy does this baby function. Again, just making something look good usually means it will fly. This is one sweet fighter jet. It may be an orbital weapon, like a death star but for getting high. The smoke is so light you think you didn't get a hit, but oh boy did you! I love Grandpa Weed's One Hit Wonder Golf Ball Pipe!

Probably around Saturday I will have the Ellipsoid in hand, and it could be this might be the last post you ever see.

Everybody Loves The Ellipsoid

My eldest brother's best friend once wrote five essays in one night in college on speed. The beginning words of the fifth essay were IT ALL BULLSHIT.

It true. This is the age of bullshit and our only saving virtue is improvisation.

Welded these two 1/12th scale figures that had been sitting in a plastic bucket for over a year.  

These figures are following my biomimetic mechanoid style I've played with since the aughts. They could easily be incorporated into the Grandpa's Funeral Project (sometimes great-grandpa). Ongoing since maybe 2017,  I've tried to add new mourners every year. Anyone who buys the whole thing, I would set money aside so that figures could be added each year. 

Prototypes of One Hit Wonders are bisqued, wet sanded, glazed and firing as I type these very words. They are astoundingly awesome flower pipes and now I need to find a ceramic place that can make them for me. Everybody loves the ellipsoid.

Side Quest

I'm running out of my little ceramic pipes that I call One Hit Wonders - The One Hitter That Smokes Like a Bong, says one of my daughters.

I keep breaking them, fragile clay things. I'm wondering if I make metal pipes they would overheat? In any case I am making more of them as my stockpile is down to four,

The ceramic pipes I slipcast with a porcelain mix, which means I make two part plaster molds to pour the slip in. I could have, as I originally did, fashion the originals out of clay, but I decided to go New School, and 3D print the mold halves. Why not 3D print the plaster mold or clay pipe itself? I don't have anything that does that.

(One partition mold with embedded pipe half and its other half , 3D print).

The traditional one-hitter was a sphere with a bowl and a big mouth as the carburetor. I fashioned carbs and downstems on some, but the big mouth carb worked best. 

Another great shape is the jelly bean or kidney pipe which goes back to the days of my kidney troubles, when my subconscious latched onto the kidney form and I made several art pieces prior to losing the kidney. By my estimation, one hundred years ago, 1914 at the time, I would have been dead, dead of the stone as they used to say.

The kidney form is a smokable form. 

Ellipsoids are also fun and they will be included in the mix of the new One Hit Wonders Collection.

Scale and Complexity

Abundance and organism mass is complexity scaled to a linear thing? I think not. Complexity looks more like scale invariant. You'd think it woud be simple, linear, and we can choose things that do that, but this chart does not measure complexity. It measures scale.

Abundance and mass is not complexity. If  anything, the protist stage, the mechanics of archaeon or bacteria, are far more complex than a human society consisting of a few billion people, a few quadrillions of cells, a few septillion molecules.

True, our human biofilm is getting big, our infrastructure trillions of pounds to one pound of flesh, but there are structures far vaster on Earth (made even vaster if scaled up to our size). Protists and fungi enjoy global connectivity. There is evidence that life goes right on down to the mantle, and could outnumber surface life to be the majority of species on Earth. There could be a plate tectonic network for all we know. Point being, complexity is scale invariant. Complexity is a dimensionless constant.

Looking at the chart, what I get is maybe we are too small for aliens to notice.

Other things.

No mosquitoes this summer. True, we are in drought. But the alarming number of murder/death/kill lawn companies, with little yard signs showing mosquitoes in anguish or death, has reduced insect populations. That's alarming. 

I had one lone mosquito appear out of nowhere while I'm on the couch. She was a her and bit me. I let her feed. I took her outside on my arm and waited until she was done eating and flew away.

(I am a shoo bug instead of a kill bug, escorting bugs out rather than smoosh them. I don't think its a moral or philosophical choice. It's a respect of life that life shows life. Naturally. Therefore, I only kill when classified vermin).

When I was a kid, the planets of the solar system were smudges on photographs taken by telescopes. People didn't know what it looked like, so they made shit up. I do know a lot of people beleieved other people lived on those other planets. I drew pictures of what the people looked like. The people of the Sun were always fire and lightning bolts. Mercury a clown face sarguaro cactus. Venus obviously a blonde. Mars little green man. Jupiter and on were tough to do and varied on who looked like what.

It helped a lot that we explored space with robots and found out what's really going on. 

Tooth Pull and a Trip to the Big Lake

There are three stages of dental problems. 

1) Cavities: youth and adolescence

2) Gum disease: adults and elderly

3) Tooth loss: mostly elderly

I enjoy the night time bruxism, and without wearing my guard one night I must have cracked the lower left back molar. Or started a crack and the bruxism kept on worrying it until cracked to the bone.

I experienced a lot of needless suffering before going to the dentist, but mainly because it quit hurting as much, I waited for my regular dental appointment. The dentist looked at it and said you that's coming out and you are an idiot for not coming in when it hurt. People can still die of tooth abcesses and, do die.

I also have a massive tori, a bone spur, on my left jaw which had to be addressed. The tori are there acting like flying buttresses holding the teeth in place while I try to grind their enamel into chalk.

The oral surgeon was great. I already told him it would be a local, as I had been under twice this year and didn't need another IQ drop. He was cutting my jaw up like he was going to eat it. He showed me the tori bits of bone and they were the most perfect white and smooth as plastic. I asked about the tooth and he brushed that off. After they were done I snuck a peak the surgeon's tray and there is the tooth.

Hm. Took a bit of jaw out with it but I'm healing fine. Follow up today and he said wow beautifully healed.

Happy Labor Day! My niece and great niece, I think she's 8 or 9, came in for a family reunion on my sister-in-law's side. We had time before they went to the shindig, so my brother - papa - and I took the youngster up to Lake Michigan. She is from Kansas and has never seen a large body of water.

Papa says keep youreye out for a big blue horizon, and as we top the last dune to see the lake-

"It's an Ocean!" she exclaimed. It's the Big Lake. All other lakes in nowrthwest Indiana have names to clarify but if you say we were at the lake, most would ask The Big Lake? 

Parking is a premium but we finally found a spot when someone pulled out. We made our way down from the road to the beach over boulders and rocks and then orcks and pebbles. My poor feet have hardly been barefoot this summer so there were lots of ooches and ouches out of Uncle John. Made it down to sand and water. The water temperature is 70-72F which is about as warm as it gets. The child complained when dipping toe and  wave washed foot but we said she would get used to it. She did.

I went in with her and after a little bit of a heart attack I was fine too. Papa took pictures from the shore.

I grew up here, ten mles south of Lake Michigan. Every chance I could get I would head to the Dunes. Summers in high school I practically lived there. When I hitch-hiked through Europe in 1976, I had on my itinerary great beaches. I almost didn't leave Denmark. I'm told the north coast of Germany (the Florida of Germany, where my dad's family is from) is even better. I could have gone to East Germany in'76, but it wasn't worth the hassle. 

I had flirted with the idea of hiking the Pacific coast of Baja California, until I read a book by guy who tried to do it. It was a nightmare and he almost died. Finally rescued by fisherman. All the towns on his map were ruins.

The kid was right. It's an ocean, and I am a son of that ocean.

The Alien Cinematic Universe

Recovering from my hernia operation I watched a lot of movies from the library and kept up with the habit. New stuff or previously unseen, favorites, and also some second chances. Two of those second chances were Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Both were stinkers with some good parts and the redeemable parts are why I rewatched them. Because I am a tinkerer of masturbatory parts I had to somehow reationalize the bullshit of these two films. 

Not that the prior 4 alien films (I'm ignoring AVP for now) aten't problematic but didn't need a rational backstory. Item: soon after the original alien came out, I'm in a bar with my coding geek coworkers and we got to talking about the weird Alien movie and the convoluted way the alien reproduced. I pointed out that parasitism is a vast and highly lucrative evoluionary niche, but the way the facehugger huged faces would suggest design. Too specific of  a vector, and Ridley Scott confirmed that aliens are designed.. These things are bioweapons. Multiply that in the movie Aliens .

The Alien franchise also inhabits the same universe as Bladerunner (and a 1998 Kurt Russell movie called Soldier} with replicants of those films being organic and eventually synthetic like Ash, Bishop, David and Walter and Call. This connection to Bladerunner/Soldier confirmed that humans had FTL transport, massive (fusion?) power generation to move gigantic shit around the stars. The other commonality is artificial general intelligence, which is far huger than mere fusion power. You see, once you have such a substrate, like a Universal Turing machine, you can run any conscious software that you like, human or alien. Couple it to a material insturmentality and you have protean technology. The only thing scarier is giving this access to life forms, input and output tailored for whatever by what looks like a black goo. (Per Sir Ridley, the black goo can only infect animal forms not plant. Its a rationalization to keep the human protagonists being eaten alive by the grass itself when they set off the lander).

So the black goo is the real villain here. Eating everything in its path to satisfy its objective function. In all the movies, there is no will or intent from this stuff except to spread. David, the android from the 2 prequel movies, is the designer of the xenomorph, but he is using another being's workshop and tools (the Engineers). 

Alien Covnenant is a glorious mess, but it solidifies where the prequels end and the first Alien begins.

What is harder to explain is that humans (per Prometheus) are engineered. In that movie, we see the replicant version of the Engineer species, the Space Jockeys, giants 8 to 14 feet tall. They are not androids, but biological replicants just like Decker and Kurt Russell's character in Soldier. (The story of Soldier is how the synthetics were favored by the corporation over "obsolete" replicant soldiers) 

As biological replicants, and unlike synthetics, they are vulnerable to the black goo, which is why the planets in Prometheus or Covenant are not the Engineer home or colony worlds. They were military bases. Go back and look at the Covenant footage when the Juggernaut docks and before David bombs them all with goo, they have the look of soldiers and airmen at Tinian welcoming back the Enola Gay from bombing Hiroshima. And then the goo hits the fans.

The alien world in Prometheus was both Area 51 and a strike base for the Engineer race, clearly. The hubris of humans to waltz in was well depicted, arrogant stupid little monkeys.

In the confrontation scene between awakened Space Jockey and Weyland, Sir Ridley tells us David asked the alien "This man wants to know if he can have more life".  The Space Jockey carresses David's hair, and then picks him up and rips his head off. The Space Jockey is enraged because their black goo weapon had sent back dolls. What the fuck am I going to do with these things as ground troops? Cancel the whole batch.

Can you blame the guy? We were supposed to be super weapons like the xenomorphs.

Where does this leave us?  The first and last question of this whole film series is why the goo? Who is the Eneny that so frightens them they create this doomsday goo? I can't see it being a rival facion of their own species. At this point you can throw in the AVP universe and suppose the Predators are their enemy but I think not.

There's something scary out there, if you think about it. Way scarier than jump scare monsters. In future Alien movies, here are known facts. 

1 David is still alive and has a planetary laboratory on Origa 4 or whatever. 

2 The Engineers are out there and they are still at war with some Enemy.

3 The Enemy is out there as well

4 Earth is a legitimate target to the section 51 crowd.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I took the summer off to get an umbilical hernia repaired. Leave it to an American to take time off from work for a medical procedure and then call it a vacation. Meanwhile all my friends and acquaintances are on vacation and I'm eating a toasted cheese sandwich.

Eight weeks on from the operation and I still have tender spots but I'm heading for heavy lifting. I've babied myself for seven weeks and hit the gym last week, so this is week 2 of I assume 9-10 weeks of trying to get to my remembered peak at 60 when I was a fucking animal.

I remember once at the gym this kid, big muscle kid in his 20s asked 'scuse me sir but how old are you? 60, I said.  60!!! Dude you are my hero.

We Kurmans are naturally muscular so I was a fucking animal from 17 on anyways. But I had a schedule at 60 I started at 20: two upper body days, two legs days, core and kettle bells on Friday. Run every day. In my 20s I was a werewolf. Now I'm a silverback, longer to heal and recover. Intermittent fasting got me from my pre-op fat slob weight of 224 down to current 214. I see no shrink of the belly but what would I do without my fat anyway?

I took a fitness evaluation and I got superior (for my age). I walk almost everyday and try to get in at least 2.5 miles. My resting heart rate is 64. My suspicion is I'm gonna be an old Norwegian fisherman and hit the high 90s. I can't afford that. 

Aside from the VR and animation, I've been looking at AI art, and what I like is not the AI and the prompts so much as the centaurs. Centaurs, the people using the AI to make stuff. There is still uncanny valley, a seeping in of nightmare realities in the images and videos. Now that artists are using their own images and prompts to embellish, I've seen some neat stuff. I like where it is going. Motion picture and TV wise, my prediction is the public will want authenticity at some point and we see more practical effects and a big revival (with the help of AI) of light weight sets, now self-assembling sets what with the robots. Perfect for quick change in the theater. What you tihnk theater is going away? Ha! AI and robots are supergay, perfect for the theater. Folks get tired ot all the CGI magic.

A hugre impact now already is editing, and AI is all over that.

Directing a picture is just creating a camera roll. The editor makes the picture. A kickass centaur film editor, or team, can give you some kickass editing. Already been happening.

LK-99 anyone? I'm still waitng for more replications since the procedure is published and simple. So far, not good for room temperature, but they got superconductor at -160C, not bad and way above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. A chinese lab has got magnetic levitation, but no one yet gets both. This copper-doped lead apatite is polycrystalline, so it is possible there is a pathway matrix that works, perhaps like a lead lined highway with copper bumper guards, that they need to isolate. 

The Korean papers said superconducting as high as 60-90C, which is the high one hundreds which makes this discovery not just astounding but ready for hard, dirty work. And wouldnt' it be ironic if the call for lead caused us to clean up all the tainted lead sites, and buried cable and pipe,  to make superconducting circuits, wire and cable?