All Hail Our Robotic Overlords!

OR: The Thin End Of The Wedge
Conrad generally ploughs a lonely furrow, trying to warn Hom. Sap. in general about their self-destructive tendencies and behaviour, occasionally being specific about threats and perils.*

Close enough.

     Well, you can't get much dafter than the politicians who deliberately invited an intelligent robot into their Parliament.  Yes, really.
     The fools!  The meddling fools!  Don't they realise that this sentient AI was merely making a reconnaissance, taking in everything, getting ready for the day it returns with a cohort of sinister robotic chums, tooled up with nerve gas guns and x-ray grenades - Art?  A portrait of the killer robot, please.

Oh.  Er - 

     - ah, I see what it's trying to do.  Playing the 'cute' card, eh, Mister Murderbot?  Get us off-balance, create a false sense of security and "Awww!" before you RIP PEOPLE'S THROATS OUT!!  What sinister appelation does this artefact go by?
     "Pepper"?  That's it?  Oh, I see - an attempt to play down your unemotional and ultimately un-relatable sociopathic nature, equating yourself to a capsicum?

Crisp and tasty - hang on, that's not a red pepper - oh, just leave this caption in, Art

     Make note of this, MPs: you have just invited the enemy into your innermost citadel.  It is not going to end well.  NOT AT ALL WELL!
     - for that bland white exterior is mere camouflage.  Were you to remove it you would find - 

You know it's true.

     Now, let's get the motley playing Beer Pong, except that the ping-pong balls are made of sodium with a water-soluble cellulose coating ...

Wittering About Wargaming
As mentioned before, I am slowly gearing up to playing a wargame of my own, and of my own devising, after a gap of several years, and have been forcefully reminded of all the backing and filling required before you can actually move your little metal men/scale replicas/historical toys (delete where applicable) about on the board.  Do we have a picture of the assembled masses?  Art -

The panorama plus protagonists

      The next bit is quite dull if you're not into military history or wargaming, so you may skip it if you wish.**

      Because I am a completist, I wanted the divisions and brigades and battalions involved to be accurate, which meant consulting a couple of books, and drawing up an Order of Battle thus - Art!

My elegant scrawl

     That's the OoB for the 51st (Highland) Division as of 31/17/1917, and surprise surprise, all the units involved on the table have to have a corresponding label, because you need to know which units belong to which formation, and what level they're at, etc etc.  Of course, being a completist, that means I had to add the specific unit title to the label; none of this simply marking it with a big green "P".  Art?

Ignore those stains on the plastic board -

      I've done all the labelling for the 51st Division; now I need to do the same for the British 39th Division and 2 regiments of Germans - all before a single base has been placed on the (square) battlefield <sigh>

 Your Frenetic Didactic Dyspeptic Is Back***
Just a little pedantic hair-splittery to ensure I keep in practice.  You don't mind, do you?  No, I thought not.  Okay, once more your humble scribe takes aim at that Youtube presentation of "Unanswerable Thunderbirds Questions", and - answers them.
     I should admit that I don't answer all of them, since some of their questions are either a touch facile or simply well put and genuinely without an answer.  Where there is wiggle-room, however ...
     

     No, but if you put said photograph in the hands of a decent aeronautical engineer, they can work backwards from general design principles, as well as making intelligent guestimates.  You would only have a hazy notion of what TB1's powerplant was, for example, yet you could work out how much the aircraft masses, what it's average speed is and get some back-of-beer-mat calculations from that.  Don't forget Stanley Kubrick and crew put together a B52 bomber cockpit so convincingly real that the USAF, as ever suspicious and proprietorial, thought someone on set had been spying; no - all done through open-source material.  So, The Hood may be a rotter, but he's not wrong.  Art?

tl:dnr

     Or, for those of you not hep to the way the kewl kidz speak, "Too long: did not read".

Finally -
O foolish me.  I had though that the Ford Nucleon was the only projected nuclear-powered car design ever, even though that's exactly as far as it got - the design stage.
     But no!  Ford were determined to give the atom a fair chance, whatever your white blood cell count might say, and they came up with another atomic-powered design: the Seattle-ite XXI.  Dreadful pun there, chaps.  Art?

Cool and groovy.

       It definitely looks like a car Batman would be proud to be seen driving.  The only problem was that they never could develop a viable atomic engine, especially as a functional one would need about 50 tons of shielding.  Liable to impact your mileage, one suspects.  Art!

Car porn for petrolheads!

    One innovation in this vehicle that is commonplace now is the use of computers for guidance whilst driving.  Six wheels for better traction hasn't quite caught on in the same way, for which you may be grateful, as it increases the likelihood of a flat by 50%, as well as a similar increase when you need new tyres.  So, you might not have needed to refuel the atomic-powered version for five years, but you'd only save pennies because of all those extra wheels.  You might even say <ahem> that you'd be 'Tyred out'.

     And on that terrible pun, we shall call it a day.



*  I'm not being philanthropic here - when my starship invasion fleet gets here we need a live population to enslave, thank you very much.
**  I will, however, know if you do this, and remember - Conrad can bear a grudge.
***   Someone wants to boost their Intellectual Status on Word Count <the cynical truth courtesy Mister Hand>