Magic behind Balsa Machining Service
on
More on the Versalaser
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A Use Case for this thing:
My summer hobby is model rocketry.
I usually build my own. Specifically, I recreate old, old models from the early 1960s:
http://www.io.com/~stefanj/posed_with_hustler.jp g
http://www.io.com/~stefanj/017_14A.JPG (big)
Usually I cut my own fins, and less often turn my own nose cones, but if I'm in a hurry or need exact work there's a great outfit that uses a laser cutter to create these pieces.
You send them a file in an accepted rocketry-CAD format, select a material, and use a spreadsheet to figure out the prices. They can cut cardstock, balsa, thin plywood, and special laminates.
The burning effect is really interesting. The centers of the fins and rings and such are creamy white wood, the edges a dark chocolate brown with an interesting ridged texture.
. . . will only cost $1000, and get bundled for free with new systems, but you'll need to buy $300 fusion plasma cartridges for them every few months that are designed to go critical and explode if you try to refill them.
For now, I'll stick with an X-Acto knife and that wood burning kit I got at a garage sale.
The SF Channel had . . . well, not a great start. But along with reruns of hoary old TV series they ran shows about space exploration, and even had some coverage about written science fiction (remember the review show where they let Harlan Ellison rant about stuff?).
That stuff is gone now, because it didn't rate all that well with the demographics that advertisers want the most.
Put another way: It's all about money. Every time slot has to earn its keep. Dumb-ass sensationalist documentaries are cheap to make and draw an audiance of mouth-breathing impulse buyers who don't have the sense or energy to change channels when confronted with nonsense, so that's what we get.
If they could get away with it, cable channels would show infomercials 24/7. The cost per eyeball is low, but they have no production costs.
"I'm looking for a station with integrity to throw my support behind"
The TV biz doesn't care about you. You shouldn't care about them.
. . . by the awful news about Jo Lo and Ben Affleck.
Or was it Johnny Cash and John Ritter?
Nothing to feel bad about. Most people didn't read about the discovery of those bipedal sapient weasels in Burma because of all the ruckus over Bob Hope dying.
I get torqued about this kind of thing from time to time, but far less than I used to.
Most SF movies are allegorical; they don't try or even need to get the facts absolutely straight to a) tell the story, and b) get a point across. For example, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was chock full of silliness, but it got an important moral point across about trivializing sapient creatures. Minority Report had a big plot hole, but it was a thought-provoking allegory about how reliance on a crime-predicition technique could screw over the innocent.
Bad Science is a problem when the story directly warns about a specific problem . . . typically, "awful warning" stories about health or environmental issues. For example, there was an utterly ludicrous TV movie about global warming a year or two ago. No one could possibly learn anything from it that might make than informed citizen.
We can only hope they've put in those safeguards*.
Worst case scenario: She succeeds in dividing by zero, and suddenly little Tiphany-Amber's bedroom becomes the center of a howling vortex of nonspace, frying the neighborhood with sparkling discharges of zero-point energy.
But then the thing hits that pesky hyper-hypercube configuration, goes second-order sapient, and starts looking to increase its "cultural and technological distinctiveness."
The more pathetic sort of extropian might see getting uploaded into such a gestalt as a Big Win, but really, what's the worth of an ersatz immortality with an IQ of 97 (remember that fourth-order-cube limit) and a voice interface that randomly throws in phrases like "math class is harrrrrd!?
Play it safe. Stick with FurbyNets with 254 or fewer nodes, and keep some spray paint on hand to blank out those IR transcievers, just in case.
In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer decides to set up a bar in his garage. Dialog paraphrased:
Scene: Homer is clearing out the garage.
Bart: "Is this one of those projects you start and never finish?"
Homer: "Hey, when I start something, I stick with it to the end!"
Homer removes a box, revealing a pathetic robot with a bucket body and mismatched arms, one made from a broom. It looks exactly like what Homer would come up with if he decided he wanted a robot boy.
Robot: "FA-THER! GIVE ME LEGS!"
Homer: "I thought I told you to clear out!"
He grabs the robot and tosses it into the road.
Robot, trailing modules from his open lower torso, drags himself away. He pauses and looks back, but Homer points firmly down the street.
((Shudder))
* * *
What's great about this vignette: It could have been done in 1964, by "The Other Limits" or "The Twilight Zone," only they would need a full hour.
In the hands of Groening and company, this drama of horrifying pathos gets boiled down into a throw-away segment lasts thirty seconds, tops.
* * *
And, um, to make this topical: Given the Japanese tendency toward faddishness, I fully expect the garbage dumps of Tokyo thirty years down the line to be swarming with last year's model of robot child.
(I actually wrote a story about something similar; American kid discovers that the neighborhood lawn-care robots are repurposed My Buddy Dragon and My Pretty Lioness playmate 'bots, shorn of their cosmetic foam rubber shells and sealed in utilitarian green plastic skins.)
. . . introduced by the PR whizzes behind Total Information Awareness name and logo, this new effort will be called either "SkyNet" or "Die Carbon Units," and feature a logo of a Borg drone ramming chips into the head of a howling toddler.
With this system, the government will be able to better diagnose such afflictions, and hand out Mind Control Laser proof tinfoil beanies to the sufferers.
It's not the data that's the problem; I actually have a 5.25" floppy drive on my main machine*. The trouble is the lack of the original platform.
There's a lot of talk here about emulators, but can they handle the really obscure stuff that uses EGA graphics, and audio hardware like the Ad Lib or original Sound Blaster? My limited experiences have not been encouraging.
Last year, I bought an "Ultima Collection." All the games from 1 - 8. But the Ultima 7 games wouldn't run under Win98, and the third party emulator specifically made for the job crashed something awful. I eventually gave up; I had a writing project due and couldn't spend the time troubleshooting the emulator.
I suspect I may eventually just give up and be satisfied with my memories of playing those fine old PC games. After all, I did manage to survive getting rid of my Atari 800 and its collection of worlds (M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, et al.)!
Stefan
* I occasionally have to read files off of old floppies. Old WordStar files with RPGame manuscripts and such. But I use the drive so infrequently that I have to blow it out and clean the heads each time!
I've actually heard of those interpreters . . . I hear they're available for platforms like Palms, even!
But I was hoping that this collection would make it easy to be able to get back into these games. Run a quick install program and bang, I could be touring the mushroom-strewn allegoryscape of Trinity.
But note the irony: This updated collection of classics, intended to make them available to a new generation of players and machines, is already obsolete!
If I were sane I would have ditched my original IBM PC (heavily modded, with a 6 MHz 80286 and EGA card) five years back. The box and monitor and hutch of 5.25" floppies take up a fair amount of room.
But if I were to ditch this system, it would be like shutting down the gates to a dozen little worlds: The Infocom* adventures, and the early Ultima games (including Warren Spector's early masterpiece Martian Dreams), and oddities like Hidden Agenda.
On the other hand . . . while it's nice to think about playing these old games again, I never seem to get around to it. If a flood destroyed my old PC and the associated disks, I really wouldn't feel that bad. It would almost be a relief.
If there were a computer game museum, I donate all this stuff in an instant. But I suspect that I wouldn't be alone. They'd probably be overwhelmed with donations.
Oye,gevault . ..
Stefan Jones
* I recently purchased at a flea market an unopened Infocom collection on CD-ROM. But dang it, the installer wouldn't work under Win98!
As I recall, there's at least one Canadian MR manufacturer. Yes, you'll still pay through the nose for motors, but the kits should be cheaper w/o exchange rate and duties.
Once upon a time, there was a Canadian model rocket motor manufacturer. Canaroc, as I recall.
And there's currently a Canadian maker of high-power motor reloads.
Brinley's Other Book
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Bertrand Brinley is known in the amateur rocketry community for another book, the Rocket Manual for Amateurs.
This famous, or infamous, paperback describes how to safely build, fuel, and fly steel-cased rockets powered by zinc-sulfur mixtures. It's the sort of activity that the teens in Rocket Boys (AKA "October Sky") did.
Brinley doesn't pull punches. Doing things right, by-the-book, requires you to have several square miles of land, and sandbag bunkers for storage, fueling, launching, and observation. There's a big first aid section with instructions on dealing with belly wounds and nasty burns.
Its fascinating but sobering stuff; most readers will realize that they're better off with Estes and Aerotech stuff.
There have always been, and probably always will be, far-out defense-contractor-wet-dream projects. The 1950s produced tons of them, both weapons systems and aerospace projects. The closest many got to production were Monogram plastic kits.
But I get this itchy feeling, now that the Military Industrial Complex has its dream-candidate figurehead president in the White House and a passle of ideological whack-jobs pulling the strings, that these destabilizing pipe dream projects could actually get funded and built.
Of course, given the current political climate and the GOP control of government, there will be little or no oversight. Defense contracts mean pork, n' plenty of it, for the home turf of well connected connected congresscritters.
Who cares if the tests are rigged, as long as the former generals giving the presentations at committee meetings are convincing enough? Who cares if there's no actual strategic use for a weapon systems, as long as there's a new bit of terrorism in the headlines to scare people into Unquestioning Acceptance mode? Who cares if the men and women of the armed forces -- the ones who do the actual dirty work -- continue to be underpaid, overdeployed, and underprovisioned, as long as the Administration can point to an upward trend on the defense spending graph?
It is certainly possible to terraform Mars, but as you suggest it will never be a garden spot. Call it a "life bearing" world rather than a "habitable" one.
You could make it warmer by putting in lots of greenhouse gasses. A really dense mostly-CO2 atmosphere could actually make it a quite warm place . . . but it wouldn't be "earthlike."
And, as you suggest, it wouldn't last. Low gravity would mean volatiles would eventually escape to space.
Slashdot Mirror
A Use Case for this thing:
p g
My summer hobby is model rocketry.
I usually build my own. Specifically, I recreate old, old models from the early 1960s:
http://www.io.com/~stefanj/posed_with_hustler.j
http://www.io.com/~stefanj/017_14A.JPG (big)
Usually I cut my own fins, and less often turn my own nose cones, but if I'm in a hurry or need exact work there's a great outfit that uses a laser cutter to create these pieces.
You send them a file in an accepted rocketry-CAD format, select a material, and use a spreadsheet to figure out the prices. They can cut cardstock, balsa, thin plywood, and special laminates.
The burning effect is really interesting. The centers of the fins and rings and such are creamy white wood, the edges a dark chocolate brown with an interesting ridged texture.
Stefan
. . . will only cost $1000, and get bundled for free with new systems, but you'll need to buy $300 fusion plasma cartridges for them every few months that are designed to go critical and explode if you try to refill them.
For now, I'll stick with an X-Acto knife and that wood burning kit I got at a garage sale.
Stefan
The SF Channel had . . . well, not a great start. But along with reruns of hoary old TV series they ran shows about space exploration, and even had some coverage about written science fiction (remember the review show where they let Harlan Ellison rant about stuff?).
That stuff is gone now, because it didn't rate all that well with the demographics that advertisers want the most.
Put another way: It's all about money. Every time slot has to earn its keep. Dumb-ass sensationalist documentaries are cheap to make and draw an audiance of mouth-breathing impulse buyers who don't have the sense or energy to change channels when confronted with nonsense, so that's what we get.
If they could get away with it, cable channels would show infomercials 24/7. The cost per eyeball is low, but they have no production costs.
"I'm looking for a station with integrity to throw my support behind"
The TV biz doesn't care about you. You shouldn't care about them.
Stefan
"Why would the military cover up something that would let them double their budget if it was revealed?"
Stefan
. . . by the awful news about Jo Lo and Ben Affleck.
Or was it Johnny Cash and John Ritter?
Nothing to feel bad about. Most people didn't read about the discovery of those bipedal sapient weasels in Burma because of all the ruckus over Bob Hope dying.
Stefan
Put a lifelike effigy of a MS rep at each major entrance to campus.
Effigies made up to look like they've suffered the Death of a Thousand Cuts, only using sharpened slivers of Linux distribution CD-ROMs.
Also, encouraging grad students working in the IT offices to wear pirate costumes might help, Arrrr!
. . . and let Homeland Security take care of them.
I mean, dang, wouldn't it satisfying to think of the wankers behind this stuck in a cell down in Guantanamo?
And just think: The hour of exercise they'd get each day would probably more than they're getting now!
I get torqued about this kind of thing from time to time, but far less than I used to.
Most SF movies are allegorical; they don't try or even need to get the facts absolutely straight to a) tell the story, and b) get a point across. For example, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was chock full of silliness, but it got an important moral point across about trivializing sapient creatures. Minority Report had a big plot hole, but it was a thought-provoking allegory about how reliance on a crime-predicition technique could screw over the innocent.
Bad Science is a problem when the story directly warns about a specific problem . . . typically, "awful warning" stories about health or environmental issues. For example, there was an utterly ludicrous TV movie about global warming a year or two ago. No one could possibly learn anything from it that might make than informed citizen.
Stefan Jones
It's out!
We can only hope they've put in those safeguards*.
Worst case scenario: She succeeds in dividing by zero, and suddenly little Tiphany-Amber's bedroom becomes the center of a howling vortex of nonspace, frying the neighborhood with sparkling discharges of zero-point energy.
Stefan It's out! Jones
*The early pocket-calculator manufacturers only cut corners once. Remember that HP plant in Bennettown, CA? Tire fire my ass.
Yes, it works at first.
But then the thing hits that pesky hyper-hypercube configuration, goes second-order sapient, and starts looking to increase its "cultural and technological distinctiveness."
The more pathetic sort of extropian might see getting uploaded into such a gestalt as a Big Win, but really, what's the worth of an ersatz immortality with an IQ of 97 (remember that fourth-order-cube limit) and a voice interface that randomly throws in phrases like "math class is harrrrrd!?
Play it safe. Stick with FurbyNets with 254 or fewer nodes, and keep some spray paint on hand to blank out those IR transcievers, just in case.
Stefan It's out! Jones.
In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer decides to set up a bar in his garage. Dialog paraphrased:
Scene: Homer is clearing out the garage.
Bart: "Is this one of those projects you start and never finish?"
Homer: "Hey, when I start something, I stick with it to the end!"
Homer removes a box, revealing a pathetic robot with a bucket body and mismatched arms, one made from a broom. It looks exactly like what Homer would come up with if he decided he wanted a robot boy.
Robot: "FA-THER! GIVE ME LEGS!"
Homer: "I thought I told you to clear out!"
He grabs the robot and tosses it into the road.
Robot, trailing modules from his open lower torso, drags himself away. He pauses and looks back, but Homer points firmly down the street.
((Shudder))
* * *
What's great about this vignette: It could have been done in 1964, by "The Other Limits" or "The Twilight Zone," only they would need a full hour.
In the hands of Groening and company, this drama of horrifying pathos gets boiled down into a throw-away segment lasts thirty seconds, tops.
* * *
And, um, to make this topical: Given the Japanese tendency toward faddishness, I fully expect the garbage dumps of Tokyo thirty years down the line to be swarming with last year's model of robot child.
(I actually wrote a story about something similar; American kid discovers that the neighborhood lawn-care robots are repurposed My Buddy Dragon and My Pretty Lioness playmate 'bots, shorn of their cosmetic foam rubber shells and sealed in utilitarian green plastic skins.)
Stefan "It's finally out!" Jones
With this system, the government will be able to better diagnose such afflictions, and hand out Mind Control Laser proof tinfoil beanies to the sufferers.
"I want my cat-girl, dammit."
Who'd only be In the Mood for one week a year, and who'd gnaw your face off if you stop scratching her behind the ears before she says so . . .
There's a lot of talk here about emulators, but can they handle the really obscure stuff that uses EGA graphics, and audio hardware like the Ad Lib or original Sound Blaster? My limited experiences have not been encouraging.
Last year, I bought an "Ultima Collection." All the games from 1 - 8. But the Ultima 7 games wouldn't run under Win98, and the third party emulator specifically made for the job crashed something awful. I eventually gave up; I had a writing project due and couldn't spend the time troubleshooting the emulator.
I suspect I may eventually just give up and be satisfied with my memories of playing those fine old PC games. After all, I did manage to survive getting rid of my Atari 800 and its collection of worlds (M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, et al.)!
Stefan
* I occasionally have to read files off of old floppies. Old WordStar files with RPGame manuscripts and such. But I use the drive so infrequently that I have to blow it out and clean the heads each time!
But I was hoping that this collection would make it easy to be able to get back into these games. Run a quick install program and bang, I could be touring the mushroom-strewn allegoryscape of Trinity.
But note the irony: This updated collection of classics, intended to make them available to a new generation of players and machines, is already obsolete!
Stefan
But if I were to ditch this system, it would be like shutting down the gates to a dozen little worlds: The Infocom* adventures, and the early Ultima games (including Warren Spector's early masterpiece Martian Dreams), and oddities like Hidden Agenda.
On the other hand . . . while it's nice to think about playing these old games again, I never seem to get around to it. If a flood destroyed my old PC and the associated disks, I really wouldn't feel that bad. It would almost be a relief.
If there were a computer game museum, I donate all this stuff in an instant. But I suspect that I wouldn't be alone. They'd probably be overwhelmed with donations.
Oye,gevault . . .
Stefan Jones
* I recently purchased at a flea market an unopened Infocom collection on CD-ROM. But dang it, the installer wouldn't work under Win98!
(Although not before it was co-opted by citizens wielding the mightiest of meme weapons, ironic repurposement:
http://www.cafeshops.com/totalawareness)
Now, one day in the sunlight was enough to convince the DOD to scuttle this bizarre notion spawned by market-theory-dweebs-turned-spooks.
"Springfield . . . number one in aquacar production!"
. . . my own interociter kit, I want nothing to do with them.
As I recall, there's at least one Canadian MR manufacturer. Yes, you'll still pay through the nose for motors, but the kits should be cheaper w/o exchange rate and duties.
Once upon a time, there was a Canadian model rocket motor manufacturer. Canaroc, as I recall.
And there's currently a Canadian maker of high-power motor reloads.
This famous, or infamous, paperback describes how to safely build, fuel, and fly steel-cased rockets powered by zinc-sulfur mixtures. It's the sort of activity that the teens in Rocket Boys (AKA "October Sky") did.
Brinley doesn't pull punches. Doing things right, by-the-book, requires you to have several square miles of land, and sandbag bunkers for storage, fueling, launching, and observation. There's a big first aid section with instructions on dealing with belly wounds and nasty burns.
Its fascinating but sobering stuff; most readers will realize that they're better off with Estes and Aerotech stuff.
Stefan
"The better the tech, ideally the fewer civilian deaths also."
. . . an all-out nuclear bombardment that wipes out a country's warfighting capacity in 20 minutes might have NO civilian casualties?
Dang, what are why are we holding back? WE'RE COMING FOR YA KIM JONG IL!
But I get this itchy feeling, now that the Military Industrial Complex has its dream-candidate figurehead president in the White House and a passle of ideological whack-jobs pulling the strings, that these destabilizing pipe dream projects could actually get funded and built.
Of course, given the current political climate and the GOP control of government, there will be little or no oversight. Defense contracts mean pork, n' plenty of it, for the home turf of well connected connected congresscritters.
Who cares if the tests are rigged, as long as the former generals giving the presentations at committee meetings are convincing enough? Who cares if there's no actual strategic use for a weapon systems, as long as there's a new bit of terrorism in the headlines to scare people into Unquestioning Acceptance mode? Who cares if the men and women of the armed forces -- the ones who do the actual dirty work -- continue to be underpaid, overdeployed, and underprovisioned, as long as the Administration can point to an upward trend on the defense spending graph?
Stefan
It is certainly possible to terraform Mars, but as you suggest it will never be a garden spot. Call it a "life bearing" world rather than a "habitable" one.
You could make it warmer by putting in lots of greenhouse gasses. A really dense mostly-CO2 atmosphere could actually make it a quite warm place . . . but it wouldn't be "earthlike."
And, as you suggest, it wouldn't last. Low gravity would mean volatiles would eventually escape to space.
OTOH, it might be worth doing, as practice.