hey guys!!! I wanted to share some progress of the big 26 (27??) page comic I’ve been working on since August! Stay tuned, I’ll be compiling it probably both digitally and in lil book form for sale when I finish it!!!
After having Aradia in progress for like 3 years(made the shirt in 15, armsocks in 16, and horns this year) I finally took her out for a creepy cryptid photo shoot. I love love the aesthetic we managed to get with these honestly!
That stock sci-fi story where aliens arrive and take over the world, and they’re seen as saviors bringing technology and progress but are secretly malevolent and evil tyrants, but the only ones that realize it are the plucky, gruff, outgunned Resistance fighting for humanity and Freedom™!
How about a story where the noble Resistence are actually a bunch of backward racist terrorists attacking the imperfect but well-meaning aliens along with a slowly blossoming cross-cultural symbiotic society because whaddya know, humans finally start thinking of the big picture and getting their shit together but the well-armed xenophobic relics of a bygone little-world can’t stand it and lash out violently. How about that?
my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.
For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb. Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.
Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.
But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)
Off the top of my head?
-advances in robotics
-advances in miniature robotics
-advances in flight technology
-advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
-ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
-ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
-less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
-ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
-fucking robot bees, my friend
-hahaha think how confused those flowers must be
Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.
Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through an intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.
Trust me. The paperwork haunts my nightmares.
So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”
But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions.
A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.
Nice work, college boy. :p
Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student. She developed this in her product design class. And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars.
‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.
ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33
As 2016 comes to a close and prospects of the new year loom before us, we take a moment to look back at what we’ve accomplished and how it will set us ahead in the year to come.
2016 marked record-breaking progress in our exploration activities. We advanced the capabilities needed to travel farther into the solar system while increasing observations of our home and the universe, learning more about how to continuously live and work in space and, or course, inspiring the next generation of leaders to take up our journey to Mars and make their own discoveries.
Here are a few of the top NASA stories of 2016…
International Space Station
One Year Mission…completed!
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth after spending a year in space. Testing the limits of human research, findings from their One Year Mission will help send humans farther into space than ever before.
Commercial Resupply
Commercial partners Orbital ATK and SpaceX delivered tons (yes literally tons) of cargo to the International Space Station. This cargo supported hundreds of science experiments and technology demonstrations crucial to our journey to Mars.
Mars
Expandable Habitats
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) was one of the technology demonstrations delivered to the space station in April. Expandable habitats greatly decrease the amount of transport volume for future space missions.
Booster Test Firing
In June, a booster for our Space Launch System (SLS) rocket successfully fired up. It will be used on the first un-crewed test flight of SLS with the Orion spacecraft in 2018. Eventually, this rocket and capsule will carry humans into deep space and one day…Mars!
InSight
This year we updated the milestones for our InSight mission with a new target launch window beginning in May 2018. This mission will place a fixed science outpost on Mars to study its deep interior. Findings and research from this project will address one of the most fundamental questions we have about the planetary and solar system science…how in the world did these rocky planets form?
Solar System and Beyond
Juno
On July 4, our Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter. This mission is working to improve our understanding of the solar system’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
OSIRIS-REx
In September, we launched our OSIRIS-REx spacecraft…which is America’s first-ever asteroid sample return mission. This spacecraft will travel to a near-Earth asteroid, called Bennu, where it will collect a sample to bring back to Earth for study.
James Webb Space Telescope
In February, the final primary mirror segment of our James Webb Space Telescope was installed. This will be the world’s most powerful space telescope ever, and is scheduled to launch in 2018. Webb will look back in time, studying the very first galaxies ever formed.
Kepler
In May, our Kepler mission verified the discovery of 1,284 new planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitably Earth-sized planets.
Earth Right Now
Earth Expeditions
Our efforts to improve life on Earth included an announcement in March of a collection of Earth Science field campaigns to study how our planet is changing. These Earth Expeditions sent scientists to places like the edge of the Greenland ice sheet to the coral reefs of the South Pacific to delve into challenging questions about how our planet is changing…and what impacts humans are having on it.
Small Satellites
In November, we announced plans to launch six next-generation Earth-observing small satellite missions. One uses GPS signals to measure wind in hurricanes and tropical systems in greater detail than ever before.
Aeronautics Research
Our efforts in 2016 to make air travel cleaner, safer and quieter included new technology to improve safety and efficiency of aircraft arrivals, departures and service operations.
X-Plane
In June, we highlighted our first designation of an experimental airplane, or X-plane, in a decade. It will test new electric propulsion technology.
Drone Technolgy
In October, we evaluated a system being developed for the Federal Aviation Administration to safely manage drone air traffic.
Our technology transfer program continued to share the agency’s technology with industry, academia and other government agencies at an unprecedented rate.
Centennial Challenges
Our Centennial Challenges program conducted four competition events in 2016 to spark innovation and enable solutions in important technology focus areas.
Watch the full video recap of ‘This Year @NASA’ here:
And here are some girls which I did for practice last month. I rarely paint women…and with colors, so I decided to do something different for fun. Before I forget how female anatomy works HA. Both were done in Photoshop CC with Wacom Cintiq 27QHD and from Adidas girl you can check whole progress video on my YouTube channel here. Enjoy.
