From the sounds of it, they turned the entire original second season into a dream sequence!
That really sucks. I wish they'd pick up at the end of the second season, where Arthur learns from the strange old man that the Earth was destroyed by an alliance of psychiatrists (who were afraid that the revelation of the ultimate answer would cause them to lose business) and Zaphod, and flees in the Heart of Gold.
. . . but please do these explorations in some isolated area, because while you're waiting for the herbs and massages and enemas to work the patients will still be infectious.
Um, no, allopathy doesn't simply try to "get rid of the symptoms." Antibiotics kill the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. You can't get much more direct than that.
You could argue that people who take wholistic practices to heart and live a healthy lifestyle might be less prone to infection, but that's another story.
If the doctors are at fault, it is for bowing to the demands of ignorant, demanding patients who want antibiotics for every sniffle that little Tyffany or Brett get. I have had several co-workers who just wouldn't give up the belief that they could blast the common cold by having their pediatrician shoot up Junior with penicillin.
The Mexican practice of selling antibiotics over the counter doesn't help either. They're treated as a cure-all down there, and immigrants continue the practice.
Like the poster said, you're better off living a clean and healthy lifestyle, putting up with minor ailments, and saving antibiotics for actual bacterial infections.
Read the unauthorized bio, Sky Walking, to get an idea of the changes that _Star Wars_ went through during its conception. No, the whole thing didn't occur to him in a flash with only technology holding him back from implementing it.
Like pretty much everybody, he made it up as he went along.
Even more pathetic: Why hasn't he done anything elese? Speilberg, love him or hate him, has gone beyond his kiddie-film origins, branched out and done lots of different sorts of films. He's grown up. He doesn't deal in comfortable bullshit any more.
Lucas, he's put a clothespin on his nose, settled in a bed of comfortable bullshit, and thinks he's doing us a favor by inviting us in.
Second . . . don't you think NASA guys think about this sort of thing?
I've seen lots of interesting proposals for making fuel for the return trip right on the surface, using a refueling station sent ahead of time. It would be fast, but such a station could turn CO2 into methane. (With enough energy, it could even cook up the LOX oxidizer.)
You don't need to bring your return trip fuel down to the surface with you. You can leave it (and all the supplies you need for the return trip) in orbit.
There was once a requirement that patent applications be accompanied by a working model of the invention.
The patent office once stored thousands of these little gadgets.
When the requirement was lifted, the patent office cleared out the warehouse, and gave way the models.
As you can imagine, most were probably trashed . . . given to kids who destroyed them. The surviving specimens are hot collector's prizes.
I once visited a collector's house, while doing "Dead Media" research. He had a few models. Most were of really pedestrian things, like automated brick makers.
Unfortunately, it comes with a cost: She has to watch "Animal Planet," as output by one of the digital set top boxes we are testing, and has been trained to whine whenever she sees macroblocking or other artifacts.
I rewatched this a few years back. It wasn't as good as I remembered it.
But the twenty-something century country music tune "Benson Arizona" is just great, simultaneously a spoof of the genre and kind of moving:
The years pull us apart I'm young and now you're old But you're still in my heart And the memory won't grow cold I dream of times and spaces That I left far behind Where we spent our last few days Benson's on my mind
(Except for the drugs, maybe. But I'm betting that Soma is just great compared to the dope that THX takes. Soma makes you happy; the other stuff just numbs you out.)
The happy workers in BNW are encouraged to have all the sex they want; sex is a crime in THX land.
Robots? We don't need no stinking robots. Drudge work is done by content, dim-bulb Epsilons in the world state.
Life in Huxley's world state is a happy lark. Work seven hours a day at a job you just (were brought up to) love, go to a ballgame, get some spiritual fullfillment at the Fordian temple (Soma ice cream and group sex!), then go to the dorm for more sex and more soma.
Sure, you don't have much freedom of choice. But it's not like you are a slave or anything. The World Controllers get just as much conditioning as you do.
And there's an escape valve! If you really don't fit in, you get sent, alive and with an intact brain, to an island to live out your days with other interesting misfits.
In the underground city, dissidents get beaten to death for TV, or stuck in a white void with mutants and crazy people.
The book itself is a funny satire, a bit dated because it made fun of 1920's materialism, but still enjoyable.
These are definitely more efficient than conventional liquid fueled rockets, and even more than the fission rockets we tested in the 60s, but they are not an attractive choice for manned spaceships.
It would take a LONG time for an ion-drive equipped ship to reach escape velocity. You would need to bring along life support supplies for the weeks or months it would take a ship to just get away from the Earth. Also, they would be exposed to solar flares and such during this time.
A more refined fission rocket, which might be less efficient than an ion drive, but would have sufficient thrust to get a rocket to escape velocity and on its way fairly quickly, would be the way to go.
Eventually, we'll have access to fusion drives and such, but even then they'd probably be paired with higher-thrust rockets for gross maneuvers. The low-thrust high-efficiency drives would be used for constant accelleration and deacceleration in between orbital insertion / departure burns.
Orion style bomb-drives are a possibility, but they'd have major political problems. Maybe for emergencies.
Regarding point 4:
One engineering hurdle we'll have to address on almost all advanced propulsion systems is waste heat.
If you have a nuclear reactor, you'll need to drag along great big radiators.
I live in the far NE part of Hillsboro, and it should be its own town.
NW Beaverton and NE Hillsboro should split off and be called Tanasbourne or something.
I'm convinced they're resisting this because the Post Office refuses to set up a new location. Aloha, Hillsboro, and Beaverton are all equally inconvenient from where I live . . .
Linus is actually moving to Beaverton, a largish edge city that borders Portland on the West.
It's a pretty spread-out place. There's an old, kind of abbreviated downtown in the SW portion; mostly it's strip malls, industrial / office parks, and residential areas ranging from condo-racks to nice suburban tracts.
There are some very nice wilderness parks nestled in there too. The Metro planning board keeps strict urban growth boundaries, so you can find working farms just a few miles to the SW.
Some of the office parks and complexes do have a "Silicon Valley" flavor, but are unsurprisingly a lot smaller. (I once worked in Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ, which kind of sets a high standard.)
I work in the far NW corner of Beaverton, in an area that really should be its own town because it's so far from the Post Office and town hall.
Traffic is usually not too bad, at least compared to Silicon Valley. Mass transit consists of lots of busses and a spiffy light rail line that goes to downtown Portland and the airport.
This may be a sign that The Simpsons have truely jumped the shark and are no longer relevant to the modern world.
Oh, I know:
[Homer]
OOOOOoooohhhhhuuhhhhhmm . . . RFID License Plate!
[/Homer]
Stefan
Amazing opportunity for the cleanliness industry
on
Nanobacteria Discovered?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Proper hygiene is an important contribution to fighting disease, but a lot of people are obsessed with cleanliness.
There's an entire industry that caters to these folks. Disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizers, germ-killing floor wash, etc. There are even germ-killing laundry additives. Most of these don't do anything more than proper use of hot water and soap (and occasionally bleach) will do.
But getting cynical for a moment: These nanobacteria are a great marketing opportunity. Hucksters can hype soaps, wipes, and so on that are "anti-nanobacterial." Quack doctors can advertise herbal remedies and enema preperations that blast the little devils out of the body.
I think I'll sell some high-tech stocks and invest in this fad!
Almost forgotten in the of the MMPORG: multi-player play-by-mail games.
Most of these were fairly simple strategic tournaments. Flying Buffalo Inc. was the big wheel of this industry. It's still in business, running games like Starweb for afficianados.
A few companies ran open-ended society games which were similar to Civilization or Masters of Orion.
The biggy was "Tribes of Crane" by Schubel & Son. It was entirely paper based. You led a tribe of nomads on a barbarian world. If your tribe found something neat, or your shamans learned a new spell or whatnot, you got a paper chit explaining it. Money was in the form of paper slips too. You spent money by mailing it to the game master or another player.
I played another S&S game, "Star Master." You designed an alien species, picked out a homeworld, and did standard Masters of Orion type stuff ("Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Eliminate" or something like that). If you engaged in trade, you could earn EUs, and trade them in for tech advances.
There was a vigorous out-of-channel trade in artifacts, money, and even entire species. People leaving the game would sell their empire to the highest bidder. That's what I did.
Some of the trading was illegal. After the "Central Galaxy" filled up, S&S opened up the "North East Galaxy." It was many, many months away by fast spaceship. Essentially a different universe.
Central Galaxy and NE Galaxy had different-colored EU chits. Not exchangeable in-game. However, a few players had species in both galaxies. They acted as middlemen.
Small scale and under the radar compared to the economic sideshow of Everquest, but still interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's the fellow. Thought his cat was God or something. It's been a while . . .
As I recall, season two only had six episodes or so. Season one was a lot longer.
From the sounds of it, they turned the entire original second season into a dream sequence!
That really sucks. I wish they'd pick up at the end of the second season, where Arthur learns from the strange old man that the Earth was destroyed by an alliance of psychiatrists (who were afraid that the revelation of the ultimate answer would cause them to lose business) and Zaphod, and flees in the Heart of Gold.
Damn.
. . . but please do these explorations in some isolated area, because while you're waiting for the herbs and massages and enemas to work the patients will still be infectious.
Um, no, allopathy doesn't simply try to "get rid of the symptoms." Antibiotics kill the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. You can't get much more direct than that.
You could argue that people who take wholistic practices to heart and live a healthy lifestyle might be less prone to infection, but that's another story.
Stefan
If the doctors are at fault, it is for bowing to the demands of ignorant, demanding patients who want antibiotics for every sniffle that little Tyffany or Brett get. I have had several co-workers who just wouldn't give up the belief that they could blast the common cold by having their pediatrician shoot up Junior with penicillin.
The Mexican practice of selling antibiotics over the counter doesn't help either. They're treated as a cure-all down there, and immigrants continue the practice.
Like the poster said, you're better off living a clean and healthy lifestyle, putting up with minor ailments, and saving antibiotics for actual bacterial infections.
Stefan
Man, I'm really coming to dispise this guy.
Read the unauthorized bio, Sky Walking, to get an idea of the changes that _Star Wars_ went through during its conception. No, the whole thing didn't occur to him in a flash with only technology holding him back from implementing it.
Like pretty much everybody, he made it up as he went along.
Even more pathetic: Why hasn't he done anything elese? Speilberg, love him or hate him, has gone beyond his kiddie-film origins, branched out and done lots of different sorts of films. He's grown up. He doesn't deal in comfortable bullshit any more.
Lucas, he's put a clothespin on his nose, settled in a bed of comfortable bullshit, and thinks he's doing us a favor by inviting us in.
Stefan
First, get your facts straight:
Mars' surface gravity is about 38% that of Earth.
Second . . . don't you think NASA guys think about this sort of thing?
I've seen lots of interesting proposals for making fuel for the return trip right on the surface, using a refueling station sent ahead of time. It would be fast, but such a station could turn CO2 into methane. (With enough energy, it could even cook up the LOX oxidizer.)
You don't need to bring your return trip fuel down to the surface with you. You can leave it (and all the supplies you need for the return trip) in orbit.
Stefan
Cheapass Games has created a game about the struggle to file the first U.S. Patent.
Stefan
There was once a requirement that patent applications be accompanied by a working model of the invention.
The patent office once stored thousands of these little gadgets.
When the requirement was lifted, the patent office cleared out the warehouse, and gave way the models.
As you can imagine, most were probably trashed . . . given to kids who destroyed them. The surviving specimens are hot collector's prizes.
I once visited a collector's house, while doing "Dead Media" research. He had a few models. Most were of really pedestrian things, like automated brick makers.
STefan
My dog is in my cubicle with me today.
Unfortunately, it comes with a cost: She has to watch "Animal Planet," as output by one of the digital set top boxes we are testing, and has been trained to whine whenever she sees macroblocking or other artifacts.
Stefan
Velcro wasn't a spaceflight spinoff.
Neither was TANG or Teflon.
. . . and doing rather well, all things considered.
Patience.
Set up a solar powered WiFi node and weather station with satellite uplink at every confluence!
Stefan
Some guy has actually assembled all the toys from the Acme Novelty Company comics!
http://www.niemworks.com/else/acmetoys.html
I rewatched this a few years back. It wasn't as good as I remembered it.
But the twenty-something century country music tune "Benson Arizona" is just great, simultaneously a spoof of the genre and kind of moving:
The years pull us apart
I'm young and now you're old
But you're still in my heart
And the memory won't grow cold
I dream of times and spaces
That I left far behind
Where we spent our last few days
Benson's on my mind
BNW was a hoot. It's nothing like THX1138.
(Except for the drugs, maybe. But I'm betting that Soma is just great compared to the dope that THX takes. Soma makes you happy; the other stuff just numbs you out.)
The happy workers in BNW are encouraged to have all the sex they want; sex is a crime in THX land.
Robots? We don't need no stinking robots. Drudge work is done by content, dim-bulb Epsilons in the world state.
Life in Huxley's world state is a happy lark. Work seven hours a day at a job you just (were brought up to) love, go to a ballgame, get some spiritual fullfillment at the Fordian temple (Soma ice cream and group sex!), then go to the dorm for more sex and more soma.
Sure, you don't have much freedom of choice. But it's not like you are a slave or anything. The World Controllers get just as much conditioning as you do.
And there's an escape valve! If you really don't fit in, you get sent, alive and with an intact brain, to an island to live out your days with other interesting misfits.
In the underground city, dissidents get beaten to death for TV, or stuck in a white void with mutants and crazy people.
The book itself is a funny satire, a bit dated because it made fun of 1920's materialism, but still enjoyable.
Orgy Porgy!
Stefan
Mutant woman who see in four primary colors!
3 ,4 128183,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,427
Someone mentioned ion drives.
These are definitely more efficient than conventional liquid fueled rockets, and even more than the fission rockets we tested in the 60s, but they are not an attractive choice for manned spaceships.
It would take a LONG time for an ion-drive equipped ship to reach escape velocity. You would need to bring along life support supplies for the weeks or months it would take a ship to just get away from the Earth. Also, they would be exposed to solar flares and such during this time.
A more refined fission rocket, which might be less efficient than an ion drive, but would have sufficient thrust to get a rocket to escape velocity and on its way fairly quickly, would be the way to go.
Eventually, we'll have access to fusion drives and such, but even then they'd probably be paired with higher-thrust rockets for gross maneuvers. The low-thrust high-efficiency drives would be used for constant accelleration and deacceleration in between orbital insertion / departure burns.
Orion style bomb-drives are a possibility, but they'd have major political problems. Maybe for emergencies.
Regarding point 4:
One engineering hurdle we'll have to address on almost all advanced propulsion systems is waste heat.
If you have a nuclear reactor, you'll need to drag along great big radiators.
Stefan Jones
Ira Flatow's "Science Friday" will broadcast from the museum on Friday 6/18.
_ 061804.html
Paul Allen, David Brin, Octavia Butler and others will be interviewed in the first hour.
The second hour will be about Mars, factual and science fictional.
Here is NPR's information page:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2004/Jun/hour1
Stefan Jones
Homer, shown sensory deprivation tank in back of New Age store:
"Can I pee in it?"
I live in the far NE part of Hillsboro, and it should be its own town.
NW Beaverton and NE Hillsboro should split off and be called Tanasbourne or something.
I'm convinced they're resisting this because the Post Office refuses to set up a new location. Aloha, Hillsboro, and Beaverton are all equally inconvenient from where I live . . .
Linus is actually moving to Beaverton, a largish edge city that borders Portland on the West.
It's a pretty spread-out place. There's an old, kind of abbreviated downtown in the SW portion; mostly it's strip malls, industrial / office parks, and residential areas ranging from condo-racks to nice suburban tracts.
There are some very nice wilderness parks nestled in there too. The Metro planning board keeps strict urban growth boundaries, so you can find working farms just a few miles to the SW.
Some of the office parks and complexes do have a "Silicon Valley" flavor, but are unsurprisingly a lot smaller. (I once worked in Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ, which kind of sets a high standard.)
I work in the far NW corner of Beaverton, in an area that really should be its own town because it's so far from the Post Office and town hall.
Traffic is usually not too bad, at least compared to Silicon Valley. Mass transit consists of lots of busses and a spiffy light rail line that goes to downtown Portland and the airport.
Stefan Jones
Um . . . I'm sorry, I'm coming up short here.
This may be a sign that The Simpsons have truely jumped the shark and are no longer relevant to the modern world.
Oh, I know:
[Homer]
OOOOOoooohhhhhuuhhhhhmm . . . RFID License Plate!
[/Homer]
Stefan
Proper hygiene is an important contribution to fighting disease, but a lot of people are obsessed with cleanliness.
There's an entire industry that caters to these folks. Disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizers, germ-killing floor wash, etc. There are even germ-killing laundry additives. Most of these don't do anything more than proper use of hot water and soap (and occasionally bleach) will do.
But getting cynical for a moment: These nanobacteria are a great marketing opportunity. Hucksters can hype soaps, wipes, and so on that are "anti-nanobacterial." Quack doctors can advertise herbal remedies and enema preperations that blast the little devils out of the body.
I think I'll sell some high-tech stocks and invest in this fad!
Stefan
Almost forgotten in the of the MMPORG: multi-player play-by-mail games.
Most of these were fairly simple strategic tournaments. Flying Buffalo Inc. was the big wheel of this industry. It's still in business, running games like Starweb for afficianados.
A few companies ran open-ended society games which were similar to Civilization or Masters of Orion.
The biggy was "Tribes of Crane" by Schubel & Son. It was entirely paper based. You led a tribe of nomads on a barbarian world. If your tribe found something neat, or your shamans learned a new spell or whatnot, you got a paper chit explaining it. Money was in the form of paper slips too. You spent money by mailing it to the game master or another player.
I played another S&S game, "Star Master." You designed an alien species, picked out a homeworld, and did standard Masters of Orion type stuff ("Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Eliminate" or something like that). If you engaged in trade, you could earn EUs, and trade them in for tech advances.
There was a vigorous out-of-channel trade in artifacts, money, and even entire species. People leaving the game would sell their empire to the highest bidder. That's what I did.
Some of the trading was illegal. After the "Central Galaxy" filled up, S&S opened up the "North East Galaxy." It was many, many months away by fast spaceship. Essentially a different universe.
Central Galaxy and NE Galaxy had different-colored EU chits. Not exchangeable in-game. However, a few players had species in both galaxies. They acted as middlemen.
Small scale and under the radar compared to the economic sideshow of Everquest, but still interesting.
. . . add some lace and a trail, and say it's your ex-wife-from-a-gas-giant-planet's environment suit / weddng dress.
That should up the bids.
Stefan