I really wonder about all the bragging about having paid "the extra thousand bucks, and it was more than worth it" for a toughened laptop. Now I do understand that hard drive parking costs a *little* money, though a flash drive trumps even that. Beyond that? Seems to me like a hundred dollar (new, which is way than I would be paying) neoprene case over the cheapest EEE PC with a protective five dollar bit of plastic over the screen will give you just as damage-resistant a device for most purposes as a Toughbook. Will it survive having water poured over it? No. But I would rather just buy two $400 devices and keep my important files on flash drives. After all, I would rather have my important files on something I can hide in my pocket anyway.
I'll have spent less money, be far less worried about my mobile device being stolen, as was pointed out above, and feel far more free to screw around with it, get one for my assistant, and so on.
Personally, I'm thinking of buying an HP 2133. Other than my habit of waiting for a version 1.1 of anything to get a lower price and a more stable design, the only reason I haven't bought one yet is that it looks TOO shiny. I simply don't want to be, as I was last night, sitting at the edge of a gas station in an industrial neighborhood at a few minutes to midnight and be working on a device that looks so expensive.
You're handing out/falling for the same mahooah that the RIAA/MPAA crowd have been pushing for years. The percentage of book revenues that goes to folks who physically create the books is paltry indeed. If you want to look at who is endangering your job, look to the big publishers who are increasingly moving their production to China and friends, just like every other large corporation.
Me? I'm buying my own HP 8100's, my own heavy duty binder and laminator, my own trimmer, etc. and plan to shift all of my production except for large posters and some letterpress inhouse within two years, at most. And since I won't be giving so much of my money to jobbers, I'll be all the better positioned to A.) do short runs at much lower capital investment, B.) shift to tree-free paper and other resources the large, commodity printers don't want to be bothered with, C.) produce books with unusual formats, ink, etc.
In an age of print-on-demand and ever more standardized products from the ever more consolidated megapublishers, it's more important than ever to pay attention to these things. Their stuff may be getting more and more plasticized. My stuff will be getting less and less so. And from the feedback I'm getting so far, customers love this kind of customization and attention to detail, including people in the educational market. I've been speaking to some schools who are quite interested in having some input in what they use without having to pay or charge their students an arm and a leg.
Oh, and fwiw, I think that you mean "shmoes". Unless, that is, you're a gelatinous white blog that without limbs that can't speak.
Yeah, stuff like the Model M feels so hard core, so very SERIOUS, but as a guy who has been using various keyboards since 1979 (the Wang PC keyboard was awesome), I've long since discovered that ergonomics trumps heavy duty seven days a week and twice on Sundays. I'm typing this on a Macally low-travel keyboard that I'm quite fond of indeed. Low travel keyboards are simply less tiring to use. In my case, my left arm was paralyzed by a nerve cluster accident in 2004 and then I broke a couple of bones in my left hand the next year, so I was real motivated to find a low-stress solution. If I wasn't using this one, I would get the Kensington version, which is also quite tasty. I admit that I do like that mine does give good crisp auditory feedback, but then I work from my home office, so bothering others isn't an issue for me.
I agree with you that part of the issue is that so many people judge based on the el cheapos that they picked up somewhere or other or threw in the cart at Fry's along with the cases of Mountain Dew. The idea of being offhanded about such a crucial aspect of one's life has always seemed strange to me.
Man, y'all have pissed me off. A whole cluster of you complaining about my post and none of you pointing out any of the several serious problems with a moon-based approach rather than a space-based one.
Well, if you won't do it, I guess that I should.
- DUST. Moondust is looking to be a bitch and a half. It gets in everything and we failed pretty badly in the Apollo missions at addressing it in any long-term way. Duct taped maps on the bumpers is not a "solution". As anybody who has spent time at the beach, let alone in the desert can confirm, once sharp little granules start getting into stuff, everything gets harder. Equipment breaks, joints jam, optics get scratched, you can't trust a surface when you put load on it, a cloud of crap obscures things every time you move along it. We're only now getting serious about addressing this and nothing I'm seeing looks good.
- You can't control your orientation to the sun or earth anywhere near as cheaply. This is both a bug and a feature. The good side is that vibration should be much less and much more dampable. The bad side, is, um, the side. A structure in space can do things like shed heat by rotating so as to alternate which surfaces are in sunlight. If you're built in on the moon what you get is what you get, for better or worse. Same for orienting antennae, etc.
- Low gravity can make things more dangerous. While zero G is obviously "different", which should continue to keep people more vigilant, every kind of safety study I've ever read says that the worst mistakes come when people get lazy or miscalculate because they have some degree of a needed property, but not as much as they are used to. At the least we're talking about broken ankles and overshoots on movement. At worst? Damned if I know but I would sure have that factor flagged.
- We don't know if we can trust the lunar rock.
Again, sometimes it's better to have nothing and know it than to have something and not be sure what it is. Anything built in space will be flat out synthetic while on the moon we'll be doing things like placing load-bearing struts over rock that may have an unanticipated weak spot. Do I need to explain how this could go bad?
I don't doubt that I'm missing some serious shortcomings to Lunar settlement and I would be delighted to see somebody bring them up. But with all of these underwhelming "criticisms" being posted, I just couldn't resist bringing up a couple of the massive concerns that none of you guys remembered.
Ya know, maybe it's me, but afaic, that cable and counterweight would qualify as a perfect example of a structure subject to failure. Also, while such an approach is one being considered, that has its own problems. As we've seen with things like the cables hung from the LDEF, cables accumulate resonances. They also have problems if, for example, the counterweight and primary mass for some reason get closer to each other. "Pushing on a rope", anybody? So, especially for something that actually has humans in it, docking going on, etc., I don't think that the use of a cable-counterweight approach is a given. And anyway, it will still be subject to exactly what I described. That cable breaks and everything goes zooming off in whatever direction it was pointing when it did. Not a happy prospect. Kinda Space 1999-esque if you think about it.
I agree that friction would be an issue on the moon except that it seems to me like superconducting suspension would work mighty well up there. It's sure cold enough and we're getting much better at things like current densities.
As for your other concerns:
- I don't understand why your first point would be lunar-specific.
- I don't understand your second point at all. Obviously we need cheaper access to space. Part of my point is that a lunar base would make doing many things cheaper.
- Again, what's your point? How does this relate to what I wrote?
- Legal problems? Of course. Are you willing to forgo an entire massive body rather than pay a few hundred lawyers? And, more relevantly, are you under the impression that other kinds of space enterprise wouldn't have legal concerns?
- As for health concerns, I agree. But, as I pointed out in my initial post, while those exist, as far as we know, the moon would be far safer and less different than being in space. Radiation concerns in particular worry the bejabber out of me and the prospect of an off-earth base being under several feet of nice solid rock seems to me like a mighty good idea. You're making my point for me.
Are you just expressing more concerns about space settlement in general and not responding to my points? I am confused.
I've already responded to this twice. Afaict, y'all have drunk waaay too much of Zubrin's Kool-aid. And, even worse, you've oversimplified what his folks are saying.
Again I say, please respond to what I actually said, not to things you think I said based on just sloppily scanning for your kneejerk-releasing keywords.
I'm not seeing where I ever suggested such a thing. Evidently you are under the impression that I said something that I have no impression of having said.
Maybe I'm missing something. If so, please, explain it to me. Otherwise, RTFP.
In terms of a particular vehicle going to Mars from the Earth I agree with you. And it's not only just about delta v. It's about trajectories. Space is big and the odds of the moon being "on the way" in some simple way are, ahem, astronomically small.
Otoh, as a possible "slingshot" point, well, frankly my calculus classes are long behind me and I'm not in the mood to take the problem on.
But that's not what I had in mind in the first place so I see no need to defend it. What I, and many other people are speaking of on this front is the logistics of being able to, for example, boost metals or other materials from the Moon up to a point where it could be used to build a vehicle going elsewhere. And a place where people working on such projects could have a base that isn't quite as subject to the ravages of space (radiation, zero-g, shortages of everydamnthing) as a base up at an L5 point or some such.
One point that I think is worth bringing up again is that not only would the same kinds of "spinning ring" approaches to simulated gravity work on the Moon (though obviously at a bit of a slant and with less spin needed), they would work better. I don't know about you, but if I have to design a multi-ton structure that is supposed to be subject to constant centrifugal forces, I would far rather be in a position to embed that sucker within hundreds of tons of reinforcing rock rather than needing to build the whole fershluginah beastie supported by some vastly expensive structural framework that I will expect to constantly keep from flying apart, taking the people and facilities within with it if it ever breaks.
Fundamentally, whether we're talking about missions to Mars or other planets, or even Earth orbit, whatever we can build on the Moon will get where it's going cheaper from a lunar starting point than it would from a starting point way down here. Same goes for repairing things, expanding them, etc. Maybe a base camp partway up the slope of a mountain isn't the right comparison; how about thinking of the Moon as an oasis? A place less costly to reach than our starting point where one can resupply, rest, and repair.
But we won't be able to use it until we settle it. Until we have places for humans to stay and facilities that are refining moon rock into fuel, metal, and whatever else that's useful there. And solar panels. And all sorts of other things.
It would make everything else easier. But we have to go back and build it first.
Yes. Launchpad.
And source of materials out of which to build larger vessels and simply bulk matter to provide more shielding for stuff in space. (If we're ever going to have real settlements at L5 we're going to need many tons of matter of whatever the frack is cheapest to protect them from radiation.
And, if we can mine it and refine it cheaply enough, even "sparklers", low Joule but cheap supplementary rockets.
And, if nothing else, a place to stop and "catch our breath". If you're planning to climb a mountain, it makes it easier if you have a place to stop a third of the way up to refuel, do repairs, etc. The moon provides that.
I just don't understand why we have to keep going over this again and again and again any time the idea of going back to the moon is raised. This is basic logistics, people. A base near the top of the gravity well makes it easier to reach anywhere beyond that gravity well. It's just that simple.
Amen. And again I say, amen. It blows my mind that we HAVE A FRICKIN" REAL WORLD SPACE STATION and it gets almost no coverage in the mainstream press. Last coverage I saw beyond page 15 was about the toilet malfunctioning because oooh-funny!
So, I agree. You agree. We should see more coverage and this should be partnered with more interest on the part of kids, teachers and parents.
Nice theory. Whatcha gonna do about it?
Personally, if the group I rent my space from, with their 26,000 square foot building and a big central space, can get a better video projector, I want to start doing free screenings of every frickin' episode of The Cape, the extended cut of Apollo 13, and any and everything else I can find to get folks into this and I intend to push to get local schoolkids to attend.
That's my plan. And I spent part of today getting AV equipment towards accomplishing it. What's yours?
Did you watch the video? A good deal of the functionality came from things like being able to separate the screens and use one in landscape mode and the other in portrait. I can assure you that anybody who goes through a lot of technical documents will gain from this by, as they showed, being able to have a landscape chart on one side and portrait text on the other.
I'm not going to reiterate all of the, I dunno, eight or nine UI innovations they accomplish by having this dual, separable, interrelated screen config. I'll just say that as somebody who spends a lot of time doing things like looking at a map of an area while reading a policy paper or event description that relates to that area, I would gain considerably from having such a device. My only question is, will actual commercial devices based on this be designed to let the user work with five or six of them at once? Because that's what I could really use. This would let me have a book open on one device, a couple of maps or charts on another, and thumbnails of other documents I'm working with concurrently off to the side. As somebody who spends a lot of time trying to determine the truth that lies between differing accounts of the same event, this would help me no end. And having bought a couple of them, if I could have them designed to work together, I would then end up periodically using them in meetings and training sessions, handing out one "page" to each participant, letting each of us review the same document together, with all of the displays slaved to one most of the time but with a note function that operates independently for each user.
I don't know about the rest of y'all but I want such a device a heck of a bunch of a lot.
Uh, huh. Getting your "facts" from the Ronald Reagan School of Policy and Framing, are we?
Dude, the government spends a hell of a lot more subsidizing highways, car company pensions, bailouts like the Chrysler one, and other forms of "welfare" on cars in a week than goes to rail in a year. And given that those Amtrak subsidies are, in effect, also how the government routes many millions of dollars to Union Pacific and friends for use of rights of way that the government subsidized the creation of in the first place, whose pockets that money ends up in are not the ones you seem to think.
Those of us who live in the fact-based consensus try to keep these things in mind. Try it some time; it might clear your perspectives a bit.
"alternate revenue source"
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Actually, with things as they are, more and more Republicans *are* backing rail. I damn near sprayed soda when I read that Trent Lott was one of the backers of the recent move to increase funding for Amtrak. When people with money start taking trains, as has now happened, Republicans suddenly start to care about rail service. Whodathunk?
Why are you bringing up cars in this context? Do planes bring more "freedom" than rail? I would say that, quite to the contrary, if by "freedom" you mean either more options for starting point and destination or freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, rail has it all over airplanes.
Though fwiw, I will be buying this book.
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And reading it, passing it around, and, if it's as good as this review makes it sound, getting a copy for policy folks working for *my* congresscritters.
Yet another reason to rebuild our rail system.
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I agree that air travel is pretty screwed up. But afaic, for trips of a thousand miles or less we would be far better off focusing our attention on our equally fubared rail system. You want cheap, efficient transit, a system that goes straight from downtown to downtown? Join NARP, call your congress critter to not just increase funding but have their policy geeks pay more attention to rail, and damnit, if you're serious about being a geek, get into this stuff yourself. At this point we would gain more from having more folks get into designing better rail systems than yet one more programmer responding to yet another project call on Freshmeat. Get together with some friends and build your own monorail system. It's cheaper than most Burning Man projects and a far more effective way to freak the mundanes for years to come.
Amtrak has their head up their butt. But there are a hell of a lot of other transit systems out there. And they're all dealing with swiftly increasing demand. It's past time that we shone the spotlight on them.
Um, most of the people in the U.S. *do* now live in cities. As for "almost no sense at all", well, first of all, I said that the best bet is to start with one or several streets in a given city, which leaves vast amounts of work to be done before "typical" suburban streets would be a factor, but even so, I have found that when I talk to people who make their living at this, telecommunications company engineers and project planners, government folks working in infrastructure, etc., they pretty reliably disagree with you.
I'll start by handing you a gimme and concede that for now doing this anywhere with a very high water table is simply not going to happen.
Let's work a few numbers and get at least *some* idea of the money invested in this issue.
These days we've seen some pretty open discussion of what a cable company is willing to pay to get one more subscriber. Conservatively, they've been willing to pay as much as two hundred dollars per subscriber. And these days, especially with home businesses and legal or illegal sudividing within a house, one house adds up to more than one subscriber; let's call it 1.2. So, taking your numbers as a starting point, this gives us an existing value of 25 homes x 1.2 = 30 subscribers. 30 x 200 = $6,000 per block.
Sewage lines are also increasingly required to be one per home. Even assuming the ever less valid assumption of only single family homes, each of those sewage lines reflects, very conservatively, another $200 of value to be maintained. So we've got another 25 x $200 = $5,000.
Let's be very conservative and assume only another $10,000 in utility line value at stake and move on to street repairs. And we'll calculate value just from that, not from, say, the cost of one preventable fire or any of the other metrics we could use. As we should be admitting by now but generally aren't paying for yet, the way we build streets ain't workin' out so well. As usual, we focus on short term minimized cost and end up having to rebuild the frackin' things way too frequently. Part of what doing this would accomplish would be providing far more stable and substantial foundations under the road. How much do people pay to redo a single driveway these days?
I could get into increased cost of stormwater treatment and management or the huge value of having better access to such services when a new house is being built but let's just say that from what I can see, there's quite a lot of value to such an approach, even in a street of the sort you describe.
Anyway, I'm not going to argue this in any more detail here. After all, there are plenty of higher density areas that could stand to be addressed before "typical" suburban streets would even be under consideration. After all, the very Chicago system you're talking about was a vast success that they're only now starting to publicly calculate the value of. (It got flooded a few years back so now it would all have to be redone and judging from the people I spoke to in Chicago in recent months, it *will* be rebuilt.) In fact there was a thread about this here on/. a few months back.
And to take this more obviously back to the subject of this thread, how much do you value your access to reasonably priced, net neutrality compliant services? 'Cause it looks to me like those are going away in many parts of the country. The current approach ain't working. What are YOU planning to do about it?
A lot of how they do this is because of the chowderheaded we way approach infrastructure in the first place. If we did was what some corporate campuses do and put in service tunnelswith the kinds of raceways every sysadmin on the planet knows how to access, they would lose a hell of a lot of the control they now exercise. This is about "last mile" b.s., it's about lack of transparency about technique, and it's about our relentless shift away from the envisioned network architecture of the internet to a backbone and subnode topology that puts all the power in the hands of the people who control the backbone.
A.) We need to start building service tunnels, even if only one street per city at first.
B.) We need to start building a mesh network of wireless nodes that are then owned by nobody at all. (Make a node out of a cantenna, an old PDA, and a solar panel, duct tape it to the side of building, walk away. Maybe even make tiny nodes and stick them under the seats of city buses.)
C.) Eventually we need to look at the technologies made better by the N Prize and start bloody well launching our own damn satellite network.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new familiar overlords and am working on a regular basis to route around them. How about you?
I've always been quite fond of my stuff. And very good stuff it has been, indeed. And then, four years ago, my apartment exploded. Well, between the fire and what happened to the rest over the four months I spent in hospitals and at friends' places (trust me, folks, the toxic stew left behind after a fire can wreak havoc on all sorts of things) much of my beloved stuff was fubar by the time I moved back in. And since I had lost most of my muscle mass, slept much of the time, and had shut down my business, much of what remained wasn't worth diddly any more to me.
Well, gawd knows I'm not happy that the fire happened. But it did kickstart me into finally moving back across the country from N.Y. to Portland (which, of course, reduced my total possessions even further) and I'll tell you, by now, except for stuff like my high school yearbook, I look at pretty much every possession I own as an equation of utility, cost to replace, and cost to own. And having now bought most of my possessions twice over, I've been amazed at what can be bought at thrift stores, done without, or borrowed.
It's been gloriously liberating.
And let me note that the kind of stuff we talk about here, like Portland's own Freegeek and the number of things that can now be done D.I.Y., play a huge role in reducing my emotional tie to my possessions. Among other things, books are now just more stuff to me. And Project Gutenberg, Googlebooks, Netflix, and Hulu make most content beyond that a trivial commodity as well.
Personally, I would keep a minimum box about the size of four milk crates of irreplacable stuff. And I must admit that I'm quite fond of my three aluminum chairs that survived the fire. But beyond that, hell yeah, fifteen, twenty thousand, I'd walk away from everything else with a smile on my face and have it all again, or better, in a few months.
Let me suggest an exercise: go to the three biggest Goodwills and St. Vinnie's near you. Go to the nearest couple of dollar stores. Spend an hour (no, really) at each pricing out replacing everything that you could there. Western civilization has gotten astoundingly good at making stuff and we make it damned cheap. You can dress in elegant clothes, eat off china by the light of brass candlesticks on a hardwood table, eating food cooked in stainless steel pots on a gas stove, and you can do it all cheap. There are only three things that you will have to give up utterly: a new car, a new computer, logo-bedecked stuff the media has convinced you that you need because of the image they silkscreen on the front for a buck fifty.
Not to go OT, but from what I've read, Ford really was that damn smart. The people who worked with him tended to just kinda back off and let him work when his mojo was going. Sadly, he was also, like quite a few geniuses (I hate the word but it's a useful shorthand for this convo) trained through the early disparagement of his legitimate insights by others to, in effect, disable his awareness of reality checks from the judgement of others about anything. This lead to his ever further deviation from reality in a wide range of fields where real world experience didn't teach him how things worked. Anti-semitism? Yes, clueless to a breathtaking degree. Evolution and history? Mindwrenchingly clueless and, like many an autodidact, possessed of his own weird derived impressions of how things "really" worked.
I don't want to go too far into the etiologies and mechanisms of "genius", but, fwiw, these are subjects I've devoted a lot of time to studying and thinking about and I've come to the conclusion, to expand on what I wrote above, that many of them have what one can call Michael Jackson disease. As I said above, when they're young, they have insights that they know are valid and everybody or almost everybody tell them that they're wrong. Chances are, the more fundamentally insightful, and therefore the more important, the more these insights are likely to make the people around them uncomfortable. This creates a perverse proportionality. The more important the insight is, the more the young thinker is insulted, derided, trivialized, and told that they're something between an idiot, a fool, and a troublemaker.
So, put yourself in their shoes. You have to choose. To what do degree do you surrender your convictions about your mind's products and to what degree do you shut yourself off from, delegitimize the conclusions of others about your work? For all of us this is a spectrum and, again, perversely, for those who are doing the most innovative work who intend to keep doing such work, this habit of ignoring or even holding in contempt the conclusions will likely become strongest.
So what happens if the thinker is, like Howard Hughes or Jackson, isolated from intellectually equal peers and friends? The phenomenon accelerates. And what happens when the results of the thinker's mind start bringing the validation of money, fame, etc? This isolation get even more extreme as the thinker sees their conclusions, the legitimacy of their way of seeing things proven and, if they've already got lack of experience of being part of a community of other brilliant peers, they're going to end up surrounded by yesmen and other slavish idiots.
And it's all downhill from there.
The lesson: Put smart kids with other smart kids. Don't treat them like freaks. It's healthy for them to compete and crucial for them to have some degree of friendship with worthy competitors. Help them validate their talents early and simultaneously give them a skill for, a hunger for, and a respect for reality checks from others.
I wish I could remember where I read this, but I remember reading a paper on creativity that said that the best original creative work was disproportionately done when the subject was engaged in an activity just obtrusive enough to prevent things like reading but not intellectually demanding enough to monopolize most of the subject's mind. The best times were:
Bed - i.e. in bed, when first getting up, and when getting ready to go to sleep. Lots of good results while brushing teeth.
Bath - i.e. bathing, especially in a long shower or bath.
Bus - i.e. transit time. I'm under the impression that time on mass transit got better results than time driving. Biking and walking were also both excellent.
Personally, I consider this enough reason to show up MP3 players for the bane of humanity that they are. If you fill your best time for problem solving with maximally distracting stimuli, you will become, well, stupider. The human mind improves with use. Literally. The state of your axons is changed by how and how much you use them. The person who commutes on the bus, quietly thinking about their day will, over the years, quite literally get a faster, more powerful brain than the person who is blasting stuff on their iPod all day long.
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Not only that, but it's coitens for you, Jack! Coitens, I say!
I'll have spent less money, be far less worried about my mobile device being stolen, as was pointed out above, and feel far more free to screw around with it, get one for my assistant, and so on.
Personally, I'm thinking of buying an HP 2133. Other than my habit of waiting for a version 1.1 of anything to get a lower price and a more stable design, the only reason I haven't bought one yet is that it looks TOO shiny. I simply don't want to be, as I was last night, sitting at the edge of a gas station in an industrial neighborhood at a few minutes to midnight and be working on a device that looks so expensive.
You're handing out/falling for the same mahooah that the RIAA/MPAA crowd have been pushing for years. The percentage of book revenues that goes to folks who physically create the books is paltry indeed. If you want to look at who is endangering your job, look to the big publishers who are increasingly moving their production to China and friends, just like every other large corporation.
Me? I'm buying my own HP 8100's, my own heavy duty binder and laminator, my own trimmer, etc. and plan to shift all of my production except for large posters and some letterpress inhouse within two years, at most. And since I won't be giving so much of my money to jobbers, I'll be all the better positioned to A.) do short runs at much lower capital investment, B.) shift to tree-free paper and other resources the large, commodity printers don't want to be bothered with, C.) produce books with unusual formats, ink, etc.
In an age of print-on-demand and ever more standardized products from the ever more consolidated megapublishers, it's more important than ever to pay attention to these things. Their stuff may be getting more and more plasticized. My stuff will be getting less and less so. And from the feedback I'm getting so far, customers love this kind of customization and attention to detail, including people in the educational market. I've been speaking to some schools who are quite interested in having some input in what they use without having to pay or charge their students an arm and a leg.
Oh, and fwiw, I think that you mean "shmoes". Unless, that is, you're a gelatinous white blog that without limbs that can't speak.
I agree with you that part of the issue is that so many people judge based on the el cheapos that they picked up somewhere or other or threw in the cart at Fry's along with the cases of Mountain Dew. The idea of being offhanded about such a crucial aspect of one's life has always seemed strange to me.
Well, if you won't do it, I guess that I should.
- DUST. Moondust is looking to be a bitch and a half. It gets in everything and we failed pretty badly in the Apollo missions at addressing it in any long-term way. Duct taped maps on the bumpers is not a "solution". As anybody who has spent time at the beach, let alone in the desert can confirm, once sharp little granules start getting into stuff, everything gets harder. Equipment breaks, joints jam, optics get scratched, you can't trust a surface when you put load on it, a cloud of crap obscures things every time you move along it. We're only now getting serious about addressing this and nothing I'm seeing looks good.
- You can't control your orientation to the sun or earth anywhere near as cheaply. This is both a bug and a feature. The good side is that vibration should be much less and much more dampable. The bad side, is, um, the side. A structure in space can do things like shed heat by rotating so as to alternate which surfaces are in sunlight. If you're built in on the moon what you get is what you get, for better or worse. Same for orienting antennae, etc.
- Low gravity can make things more dangerous. While zero G is obviously "different", which should continue to keep people more vigilant, every kind of safety study I've ever read says that the worst mistakes come when people get lazy or miscalculate because they have some degree of a needed property, but not as much as they are used to. At the least we're talking about broken ankles and overshoots on movement. At worst? Damned if I know but I would sure have that factor flagged.
- We don't know if we can trust the lunar rock.
Again, sometimes it's better to have nothing and know it than to have something and not be sure what it is. Anything built in space will be flat out synthetic while on the moon we'll be doing things like placing load-bearing struts over rock that may have an unanticipated weak spot. Do I need to explain how this could go bad?
I don't doubt that I'm missing some serious shortcomings to Lunar settlement and I would be delighted to see somebody bring them up. But with all of these underwhelming "criticisms" being posted, I just couldn't resist bringing up a couple of the massive concerns that none of you guys remembered.
I agree that friction would be an issue on the moon except that it seems to me like superconducting suspension would work mighty well up there. It's sure cold enough and we're getting much better at things like current densities.
As for your other concerns:
- I don't understand why your first point would be lunar-specific.
- I don't understand your second point at all. Obviously we need cheaper access to space. Part of my point is that a lunar base would make doing many things cheaper.
- Again, what's your point? How does this relate to what I wrote?
- Legal problems? Of course. Are you willing to forgo an entire massive body rather than pay a few hundred lawyers? And, more relevantly, are you under the impression that other kinds of space enterprise wouldn't have legal concerns?
- As for health concerns, I agree. But, as I pointed out in my initial post, while those exist, as far as we know, the moon would be far safer and less different than being in space. Radiation concerns in particular worry the bejabber out of me and the prospect of an off-earth base being under several feet of nice solid rock seems to me like a mighty good idea. You're making my point for me.
Are you just expressing more concerns about space settlement in general and not responding to my points? I am confused.
I've responded to this three times already. Please feel free to read any of those 'cause I'm not writing it all up again.
Again I say, please respond to what I actually said, not to things you think I said based on just sloppily scanning for your kneejerk-releasing keywords.
R.T.F.P.
That is all.
I'm not seeing where I ever suggested such a thing. Evidently you are under the impression that I said something that I have no impression of having said.
Maybe I'm missing something. If so, please, explain it to me. Otherwise, RTFP.
Thanks.
Otoh, as a possible "slingshot" point, well, frankly my calculus classes are long behind me and I'm not in the mood to take the problem on.
But that's not what I had in mind in the first place so I see no need to defend it. What I, and many other people are speaking of on this front is the logistics of being able to, for example, boost metals or other materials from the Moon up to a point where it could be used to build a vehicle going elsewhere. And a place where people working on such projects could have a base that isn't quite as subject to the ravages of space (radiation, zero-g, shortages of everydamnthing) as a base up at an L5 point or some such.
One point that I think is worth bringing up again is that not only would the same kinds of "spinning ring" approaches to simulated gravity work on the Moon (though obviously at a bit of a slant and with less spin needed), they would work better. I don't know about you, but if I have to design a multi-ton structure that is supposed to be subject to constant centrifugal forces, I would far rather be in a position to embed that sucker within hundreds of tons of reinforcing rock rather than needing to build the whole fershluginah beastie supported by some vastly expensive structural framework that I will expect to constantly keep from flying apart, taking the people and facilities within with it if it ever breaks.
Fundamentally, whether we're talking about missions to Mars or other planets, or even Earth orbit, whatever we can build on the Moon will get where it's going cheaper from a lunar starting point than it would from a starting point way down here. Same goes for repairing things, expanding them, etc. Maybe a base camp partway up the slope of a mountain isn't the right comparison; how about thinking of the Moon as an oasis? A place less costly to reach than our starting point where one can resupply, rest, and repair.
But we won't be able to use it until we settle it. Until we have places for humans to stay and facilities that are refining moon rock into fuel, metal, and whatever else that's useful there. And solar panels. And all sorts of other things.
It would make everything else easier. But we have to go back and build it first.
Yes. Launchpad.
And source of materials out of which to build larger vessels and simply bulk matter to provide more shielding for stuff in space. (If we're ever going to have real settlements at L5 we're going to need many tons of matter of whatever the frack is cheapest to protect them from radiation.
And, if we can mine it and refine it cheaply enough, even "sparklers", low Joule but cheap supplementary rockets.
And, if nothing else, a place to stop and "catch our breath". If you're planning to climb a mountain, it makes it easier if you have a place to stop a third of the way up to refuel, do repairs, etc. The moon provides that.
I just don't understand why we have to keep going over this again and again and again any time the idea of going back to the moon is raised. This is basic logistics, people. A base near the top of the gravity well makes it easier to reach anywhere beyond that gravity well. It's just that simple.
So, I agree. You agree. We should see more coverage and this should be partnered with more interest on the part of kids, teachers and parents.
Nice theory. Whatcha gonna do about it?
Personally, if the group I rent my space from, with their 26,000 square foot building and a big central space, can get a better video projector, I want to start doing free screenings of every frickin' episode of The Cape, the extended cut of Apollo 13, and any and everything else I can find to get folks into this and I intend to push to get local schoolkids to attend.
That's my plan. And I spent part of today getting AV equipment towards accomplishing it. What's yours?
I'm not going to reiterate all of the, I dunno, eight or nine UI innovations they accomplish by having this dual, separable, interrelated screen config. I'll just say that as somebody who spends a lot of time doing things like looking at a map of an area while reading a policy paper or event description that relates to that area, I would gain considerably from having such a device. My only question is, will actual commercial devices based on this be designed to let the user work with five or six of them at once? Because that's what I could really use. This would let me have a book open on one device, a couple of maps or charts on another, and thumbnails of other documents I'm working with concurrently off to the side. As somebody who spends a lot of time trying to determine the truth that lies between differing accounts of the same event, this would help me no end. And having bought a couple of them, if I could have them designed to work together, I would then end up periodically using them in meetings and training sessions, handing out one "page" to each participant, letting each of us review the same document together, with all of the displays slaved to one most of the time but with a note function that operates independently for each user.
I don't know about the rest of y'all but I want such a device a heck of a bunch of a lot.
Dude, the government spends a hell of a lot more subsidizing highways, car company pensions, bailouts like the Chrysler one, and other forms of "welfare" on cars in a week than goes to rail in a year. And given that those Amtrak subsidies are, in effect, also how the government routes many millions of dollars to Union Pacific and friends for use of rights of way that the government subsidized the creation of in the first place, whose pockets that money ends up in are not the ones you seem to think.
Those of us who live in the fact-based consensus try to keep these things in mind. Try it some time; it might clear your perspectives a bit.
And this revenue source is? . . .
Actually, with things as they are, more and more Republicans *are* backing rail. I damn near sprayed soda when I read that Trent Lott was one of the backers of the recent move to increase funding for Amtrak. When people with money start taking trains, as has now happened, Republicans suddenly start to care about rail service. Whodathunk?
Just one would be a nice start.
And reading it, passing it around, and, if it's as good as this review makes it sound, getting a copy for policy folks working for *my* congresscritters.
Amtrak has their head up their butt. But there are a hell of a lot of other transit systems out there. And they're all dealing with swiftly increasing demand. It's past time that we shone the spotlight on them.
I'll start by handing you a gimme and concede that for now doing this anywhere with a very high water table is simply not going to happen. Let's work a few numbers and get at least *some* idea of the money invested in this issue.
These days we've seen some pretty open discussion of what a cable company is willing to pay to get one more subscriber. Conservatively, they've been willing to pay as much as two hundred dollars per subscriber. And these days, especially with home businesses and legal or illegal sudividing within a house, one house adds up to more than one subscriber; let's call it 1.2. So, taking your numbers as a starting point, this gives us an existing value of 25 homes x 1.2 = 30 subscribers. 30 x 200 = $6,000 per block. Sewage lines are also increasingly required to be one per home. Even assuming the ever less valid assumption of only single family homes, each of those sewage lines reflects, very conservatively, another $200 of value to be maintained. So we've got another 25 x $200 = $5,000.
Let's be very conservative and assume only another $10,000 in utility line value at stake and move on to street repairs. And we'll calculate value just from that, not from, say, the cost of one preventable fire or any of the other metrics we could use. As we should be admitting by now but generally aren't paying for yet, the way we build streets ain't workin' out so well. As usual, we focus on short term minimized cost and end up having to rebuild the frackin' things way too frequently. Part of what doing this would accomplish would be providing far more stable and substantial foundations under the road. How much do people pay to redo a single driveway these days?
I could get into increased cost of stormwater treatment and management or the huge value of having better access to such services when a new house is being built but let's just say that from what I can see, there's quite a lot of value to such an approach, even in a street of the sort you describe.
Anyway, I'm not going to argue this in any more detail here. After all, there are plenty of higher density areas that could stand to be addressed before "typical" suburban streets would even be under consideration. After all, the very Chicago system you're talking about was a vast success that they're only now starting to publicly calculate the value of. (It got flooded a few years back so now it would all have to be redone and judging from the people I spoke to in Chicago in recent months, it *will* be rebuilt.) In fact there was a thread about this here on /. a few months back.
And to take this more obviously back to the subject of this thread, how much do you value your access to reasonably priced, net neutrality compliant services? 'Cause it looks to me like those are going away in many parts of the country. The current approach ain't working. What are YOU planning to do about it?
A.) We need to start building service tunnels, even if only one street per city at first.
B.) We need to start building a mesh network of wireless nodes that are then owned by nobody at all. (Make a node out of a cantenna, an old PDA, and a solar panel, duct tape it to the side of building, walk away. Maybe even make tiny nodes and stick them under the seats of city buses.)
C.) Eventually we need to look at the technologies made better by the N Prize and start bloody well launching our own damn satellite network.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new familiar overlords and am working on a regular basis to route around them. How about you?
Well, gawd knows I'm not happy that the fire happened. But it did kickstart me into finally moving back across the country from N.Y. to Portland (which, of course, reduced my total possessions even further) and I'll tell you, by now, except for stuff like my high school yearbook, I look at pretty much every possession I own as an equation of utility, cost to replace, and cost to own. And having now bought most of my possessions twice over, I've been amazed at what can be bought at thrift stores, done without, or borrowed.
It's been gloriously liberating.
And let me note that the kind of stuff we talk about here, like Portland's own Freegeek and the number of things that can now be done D.I.Y., play a huge role in reducing my emotional tie to my possessions. Among other things, books are now just more stuff to me. And Project Gutenberg, Googlebooks, Netflix, and Hulu make most content beyond that a trivial commodity as well.
Personally, I would keep a minimum box about the size of four milk crates of irreplacable stuff. And I must admit that I'm quite fond of my three aluminum chairs that survived the fire. But beyond that, hell yeah, fifteen, twenty thousand, I'd walk away from everything else with a smile on my face and have it all again, or better, in a few months.
Let me suggest an exercise: go to the three biggest Goodwills and St. Vinnie's near you. Go to the nearest couple of dollar stores. Spend an hour (no, really) at each pricing out replacing everything that you could there. Western civilization has gotten astoundingly good at making stuff and we make it damned cheap. You can dress in elegant clothes, eat off china by the light of brass candlesticks on a hardwood table, eating food cooked in stainless steel pots on a gas stove, and you can do it all cheap. There are only three things that you will have to give up utterly: a new car, a new computer, logo-bedecked stuff the media has convinced you that you need because of the image they silkscreen on the front for a buck fifty.
I don't want to go too far into the etiologies and mechanisms of "genius", but, fwiw, these are subjects I've devoted a lot of time to studying and thinking about and I've come to the conclusion, to expand on what I wrote above, that many of them have what one can call Michael Jackson disease. As I said above, when they're young, they have insights that they know are valid and everybody or almost everybody tell them that they're wrong. Chances are, the more fundamentally insightful, and therefore the more important, the more these insights are likely to make the people around them uncomfortable. This creates a perverse proportionality. The more important the insight is, the more the young thinker is insulted, derided, trivialized, and told that they're something between an idiot, a fool, and a troublemaker.
So, put yourself in their shoes. You have to choose. To what do degree do you surrender your convictions about your mind's products and to what degree do you shut yourself off from, delegitimize the conclusions of others about your work? For all of us this is a spectrum and, again, perversely, for those who are doing the most innovative work who intend to keep doing such work, this habit of ignoring or even holding in contempt the conclusions will likely become strongest.
So what happens if the thinker is, like Howard Hughes or Jackson, isolated from intellectually equal peers and friends? The phenomenon accelerates. And what happens when the results of the thinker's mind start bringing the validation of money, fame, etc? This isolation get even more extreme as the thinker sees their conclusions, the legitimacy of their way of seeing things proven and, if they've already got lack of experience of being part of a community of other brilliant peers, they're going to end up surrounded by yesmen and other slavish idiots.
And it's all downhill from there.
The lesson: Put smart kids with other smart kids. Don't treat them like freaks. It's healthy for them to compete and crucial for them to have some degree of friendship with worthy competitors. Help them validate their talents early and simultaneously give them a skill for, a hunger for, and a respect for reality checks from others.
Bed - i.e. in bed, when first getting up, and when getting ready to go to sleep. Lots of good results while brushing teeth.
Bath - i.e. bathing, especially in a long shower or bath.
Bus - i.e. transit time. I'm under the impression that time on mass transit got better results than time driving. Biking and walking were also both excellent.
Personally, I consider this enough reason to show up MP3 players for the bane of humanity that they are. If you fill your best time for problem solving with maximally distracting stimuli, you will become, well, stupider. The human mind improves with use. Literally. The state of your axons is changed by how and how much you use them. The person who commutes on the bus, quietly thinking about their day will, over the years, quite literally get a faster, more powerful brain than the person who is blasting stuff on their iPod all day long.