Aigarius Blog

When I heard that there will be a miniseries based on “The Andromeda Strain” book, I was very exited. That was one of my favorite sci-fi books in my childhood. After watching the miniseries I must conclude that this is another book perverted and trivialized by Hollywood. SPOILERS AHEAD!

They created some crazy pseido-sci-fi idea that humans from the future sent Andromeda back from the future via a wormhole in a container that contained a message which was then picked up by a satellite that was sent up to investigate the wormhole. No wormhole was there in the book. The book had a much more modest idea - a Scoop satellite was to skim the outer layers of the atmosphere for mutations of common Earth bacteria for military purposes when it was impacted my a micrometeorite carrying the Andromeda. Much more probable, no need to involve wormholes, time travel, ASCII messages, eco-terrorists and a sub-plot on conservation of marine species.

Due to extreme modernization of the script, the whole subplot of the teletype mechanical failure was omitted. Andromeda was made sentient instead and communicated via ’some kind of inductive field’ to shoot down a fighter jet and activate a nuke.

The survivors and their pH levels got barely a glance. Also the amount of destruction was obviously too low for the movie, so the Andromeda was made to mutate more, spread out of containment easily and even make a flock of birds attack a squad of solders ‘Hitchcock style’. Disgustingly cheap scriptwriting.

Huge chunks of plot were ripped out (searching for the micro-meteorite impact crater with different lenses, central core security) and the two hours were filled with Rembo style journalism vs. black ops, selfless president and scenes of animals eating each other and dieing. At the end they ran out of budget and just made it look like presence of Andromeda made air and water bright red so that people would have something to run away from in fear. Oh and the scientists are allowed to freely talk about the event after it’s done. Yeah, right.

In my book this movie rates very close to the infamous “The Core” with the only difference that they managed to fuck up a really good book. Do not watch it and read the book instead.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Most absurd religious bullshit in long time. Baby Jesus cries like being stabbed in the eye with a fork. It is like a sweet gay love orgy between baby Mohamed, baby Jesus and baby Abraham while baby L. Ron Hubbard films it all and baby Buddha gives artistic directions. Wouldn’t you want to see that Holy Trinity? Just as real and inspiring as the other one. Baby Jesus is a fictional character just like Donald Duck or Terminator, get over it.

If your personality is fully determined by several thousand years old megalomaniac fantasies to the point where you are unable to accept satire about it, you might have serious psychological issues and should seek professional help. If people get seriously offended at anything written online it is their own personal psychiatric problem. The fact that such irrational over-offensiveness is promoted in US. Opinion is an opinion even when stated as a fact or amusing expression or observation. Being offended by an opinion is a clear sign of lack of personal integrity and self-awareness. Don’t enforce your own psychological deficiencies on others or baby jesus will cry like he crapped his pants before the age of diapers.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Smash Lab is a new Discovery Channel series where a team of inventors try to solve an engineering challenge. The premise is quite nice, unfortunately I don’t find the inventors in question to be particularly bright.

In the first episode they try to bomb-proof an existing building using spray-on Rhino Lining and some weird flaps for windows. The result were blown out windows and doors and a semi-stable wall that was crumbled inside. You can’t really stop walls crumbling down after a car bomb right outside. But, the windows could easily be protected with the same type of stretchy plastic covering the glass from both sides in a way similar to Triplex car windshields. That would be much better looking than the window flaps they used. Also, if you’re simulating a car bomb, don’t forget to add nails, screws and/or ball bearing to create shrapnel. Overall: 5/10, can be improved a lot.

In the second episode they tried to use aerated concrete to improve the dividing barriers on highways. Both their designs failed miserably in a multitude of ways - they were hard to produce and failed to stop cars. The best they got was to slow down a heavy bus, but even that did not stop. I would propose a completely different design - an arrestor bed created from easy to manufacture blocks of solid concrete with a rectangular hole inside and a thin slab of aerated concrete on top of that hole. The blocks would be rectangular with a length that is good for transport and deployment. The crucial details are the width, height and internal structure. The height of the block must be surely higher than half the wheel diameter of a largest typical car. The width of the internal hole must such that a typical wheel would fit inside the rectangular central hole of the block after the top of the block breaks in. The wheel must fit both in a parallel and perpendicular fashion thus the width of the block must come to the typical wheel diameter. The blocks would be layed parallel to the road with around 10 blocks separating the traffic lines. If a car would weer onto such lane, the tops of the bricks will break very easily getting the wheels to fall into the hole in the block. The block walls will be much harder and will impact the wheelbase both slowing the car down and steering it so that it would be forced to move in the direction parallel to the traffic flow. In such direction of travel the car will continue to break off tops off the blocks until it slows down enough to fall beneath axle height at which point the concrete will crumble upwards bringing the car to a much faster stop. The car will be unlikely to cross to the opposite traffic because of the diversion effect from the block walls. Overall: 3/10, the inventors failed to achieve anything.

Crosscut of one block

#---------#
#         #
#         #
#         #
#         #
###########

- is aerated concrete
# is solid concrete

Popularity: 9% [?]

For a Debian package creation seminar:

• Debian Policy Reference
• Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
• Debian Reference
• New Maintainers Guide
• RTorrent - the simple example

Popularity: 17% [?]

The new release from the Debian EEE PC Team is simply great - it works flawlessly to install a fully functional Debian install onto an EEE PC over wireless. You only need a 16 Mb USB stick (or SD card) to boot from.

The only remaining bug that people are still working on is the selection of the wireless network - int the current build the installer autoselects the strongest signal by default and if you want another you need to go back and reconfigure the network in the installer.

Great work guys!

BTW: This got me thinking - it shouldn’t be too hard to take over the EEEPC from the default installation without having to have a USB stick or an SD card The default EEE PC setup consists of a (read-only) system partition and a user partition overlay. It should be simple to download the 16 Mb D-I boot image, save it to the system partition and write a boot loader that would allow the choice between normal boot, EEE PC rescue boot and Debian installation boot. With a bit of pre-seeding we could have the d-i install a Debian instance in place of the user partition unless the user overrides that.

Popularity: 33% [?]