"We" (high-power rocketeers; I've never done it personally) have to arrange well in advance for a FAA waiver. Lots of paperwork, sometimes met with glassy stares or even hostility. Some FAA people are great, others clueless.
Sometimes you get a short window in which to fly, or a low ceiling. (e.g., 5000'.) The group I fly with now is having a launch next weekend. They had a waiver for the whole weekend lined up, but they've been given two no-fly windows each day because jets from a (relatively) nearby airbase are doing low-altitude exercises in the area.
Even if we get a waiver, there are pilots who ignore the "Notice to Airmen" posted at the airport. When a low-flying plane gets within a mile or so, and isn't heading away, we have to hold up launches for a bit.
Tools like Bookscan could hurt the variety of SF that gets published and distributed.
A sharp marketing department could notice that SF with such-and-such a cover and such-and-such a description sells a solid 5% better than anything else.
A few weeks later, editors and slushpile readers get standing orders to only vet manuscripts that fit a certain profile.
The next year, the books in your local bookstore's SF&F section fall into maybe three categories. Cover artists who want to continue eating ape a certain sterotyped style.
But, dang, SF books start hitting the Bestseller Lists, so it would all be worthwhile.
"Success in real life: Hard work, sacrifice, hours of awkward F2F interaction.
Success in Everquest II: Sore wrists, insomnia, and $12.95 / month.
Feeling of triumph upon your virtual marriage to Yoh-Krah, Princess of the Wolf Clan: Priceless."
Stefan "Addicted to massive multiplayer games when they were played by snail mail" Jones
Think of the H2 (stored as is, or in a hydrocarbon, or temporarily bound with a metal) as a form of energy STORAGE.
Sure, you need to expend energy to make it, and that energy will come from sources that include oil and coal. But it's much easier to deal with emissions in a big plant than in individual internal combustion engines. And down the road, as wind and solar and tidal become affordable, you can start phasing out the fossil fuels and get most or all of the carbon out of the loop.
It won't happen overnight, but this is a start. Gotta get those learning economies going.
While I don't agree that The Simpsons has "Jumped the Shark,*" I must confess that there's a downward trend in overall quality. The show has always had its ups and downs, but the ups are not as high as they used to be and the downs are more frequent.
I wouldn't mind The Simpsons ending its run at this point. Better that than risk something awful happening, like one of the voice actors quitting or getting canned or Fox insisting on some egregious change.
Anyway, there are so many episodes in syndication that I can watch reruns for weeks without getting bored.
What WOULD be tragic: Groening not having a shot at another show. Surprise us, Matt!
Stefan
* #1 Candidate for overused annoying chic media term.
Sid Meir once told me that his game "Colonization" was a tribute / sequel to "Seven Cities of Gold."
(I actually noted the resemblance when I saw Colonization at a trade show booth. Meir, who was lurking nearby, was pleased that someone recognized the connection.)
The official port of Seven Cities to PC sucked. Man, was that offensive.
Remember, folks, that options don't always pan out.
Sometimes treatments get made. Sometimes scripts get written. Sometimes the projects go into "pre-production," which I suspect is Hollywoodese for "We're trying to line up the funding!"
I am pretty sure I remember the ERB Mars books being optioned about twenty years back . . . vague recollections from Starlog, which seemed to specialize in drool-spewing stories about upcoming movies.
Perhaps my title isn't totally accurate. An actual option may not have been involved. I do know that Bob Clampett, creator of "Beany and Cecil" and one of the deranged guys behind the Warner Bros. cartoons, made animated-pencil-sketch segments of ERB Mars characters.
I saw stills of some of these . . . a guy riding a six-legged beastie (thark?). Kind of stylish and simple, not the lurid Frazetta type art that people seem to envision when ERB stories are mentioned.
So. Don't get your hopes up. Even if it gets made, don't get your hopes up. It could be turned into kiddie toy fodder.
My advice: Go hunt up the books. It is about time they were reprinted anyway.
You actually have to MAKE MONEY from your home business to claim those expenses.
To judge from the article, most of the sign posting / pamphlet placing activity is a symptom of desperately shoving more money down the rat-hole in order to make back that initial investment.
"By using Yahoo and viewing advertisements, you agree to have a behavior-modifying microchip implanted in you hippocampus, and will allow the corporate logos of our advertisers encoded in your junk DNA."
Better yet: A well-reasoned, non-hysterical actual snail-mail letter, printed and signed and stuck in an envelope.
Best: A letter with a contribution check inside! I figure $1,000 should be enough to overcome the noise of all those check-free letters.
Remember, this is your last chance to get in some soft-money contributions. Make the check out to the senator's party. He or she will have the honor of bringing it over to HQ and will like you even more!
I figure if everyone who reads/. sends in $1,000, and convinces every relative to send in the same we'll about match what the entertainment industry spent on politicians in the last month or so.
Stefan "Sorry, I'm feeling awful cynical today" Jones
A good fraction of Internet enthusiasts may have been Deadheads. The seminal WELL BBS was a Deadhead haven. Heck, John Perry Barlow wrote songs for the Dead.
But for every Deadhead there were a couple of Analog-SF-reading libertarians, a few shaggy UNIX wizards looking for something fun to do, a tech-dazzled entreprenuer, and so on.
Sterling in particular isn't a Deadhead. He strikes me as far too cynical and bourgois to remotely qualify as a Deadhead. He didn't start pontificating about the Internet when Garcia OD; he was a running bare-knuckle BBS in Austin in the Eighties, for cripes sake. Before he wrote SF he was a D&D game master, an activity which doesn't strike me as typical of Deadheads.
I reread The Time Machine last year. A short, punchy book, in many ways dated*, but still great.
It looks like they've turned the Morlocks into orcs. D'uh! In the book, they're pretty pathetic, lemur-like creatures. Devolved working-class folk.
I caught a few interesting things during my re-read. On his return journey to the future, the Time Traveller packs "a Kodak." Imagine, product placement, in 1898!:-)
--Stefan
It's hard to believe, but at the time the book was written the world appeared both a lot younger, and with a comparitively short future. It won't be giving anything away to note that in one scene, the Time Traveller (he's never named) visits the Earth in 800,000 A.D. The sun is swollen and red, and things are starting to run down. The notions of radioactivity and fusion hadn't been concieved yet, and it was reasonable to guess that the sun only had a million or so years of life left!
Basic economics tell us that this is a Good Thing! Really!
Just think. Because of the economics of scale, larger media companies will be able to produce programming more cheaply, using larger, more efficient studios (plants). They can then spend the surplus on better scripts, better actors, fancier sets and more realistic special effects.
Also, more customers, providing more input, will mean large media companies have an overall better picture of exactly what people want!
The result: Better programming, and news tailored to exactly fit the world-view of their customers, promoting happier viewers who buy more product, resulting in even greater profits and even more money spent to produce even better programming!
You'll see. It will turn out just fine. Don't worry. Go back to sleep . . . we'll take care of things.
-- Stefan "Hey, why aren't my 'searing sarcasm' tags not working" Jones
I predict that about one in three characters will look like Boba Fett, and a hell of a lot of others will be bounty hunters of various sorts.
As a result, bounty hunting will be an incredibly low-wage job. The streets will be thicker with desperate BHs than San Francisco is with pinkslipped web designers . . . begging for a chance to work, perhaps even carrying around WILL KILL FOR FOOD or WILL CAPTURE FOE FOR ROCKET PACK FUEL signs.
Your argument is right out of an old Heinlein essay.
My faith in RAH dropped like a rock after I learned the Rocket Equation. If he hung out with real rocket scientists, he would have known that:
"Let's say it produces enough thrust to give 1g of acceleration, and can keep this up for, say, a year."
. . . is utter fantasy. But he wrote something like that, and a generation of editors didn't challenge him on it, and guys like Niven picked it up as gospel.
Um, well, I'm not in the mood to write out the rocket equation right here. We'll get out there, but it's not going to be quick or easy.
Antimatter is a very efficient way of storing energy, but using that energy to power a rocket won't be easy.
The job of a rocket is to create a stream of really fast particles moving in a particular direction. The faster, the better. Newton's Third Law and all that.
Those particles could be gas, accelerated with good old heat, ions accellerated with an electric field, or plasma.
Here's the rub: matter-antimatter reactions produce really energetic particles. Gamma rays, like. They kind a whiz right through the fuel you want to heat up. And the "combustion chamber." And the crew, and . ..
I read up on antimatter and fusion propulsion at grad school. (There's a suprising amount of good material out there; do not rely solely on the word of popularizers like Robert Forward!) The most-fully-realized antimatter rocket was kind of clunky. In the middle of the "combustion" chamber would be a cylinder of dense tungsten alloy full of tubules. A slow but steady stream of antiparticles are shot into the cylinder, which heats up. Hydrogen in pumped into the tubules; it heats up and "whoosh."
The disappointed bit: The specific impulse would "only" be about 5,000 seconds. This is about ten times what a liquid-fueled motor is capable of, and about 50% better than the little ion motor tested out on Deep Space One, but it's not amazing.
The most promising use for animatter: Using it as part of a fusion drive. A antimatter-catalyzed fusion drive described in the text I read was predicted to have a total impulse of something like 130,000 seconds. THAT is impressive. The thrust wouldn't be high, but you could keep it up for months and months.
What we might see are ships that use the direct-thermal sort of antimatter motor for getting a ship going (e.g., reaching escape velocity out of the Earth / moon system), then the fusion drive would be used to provide constant acceleration to speed up the trip.
Slashdot Mirror
"We" (high-power rocketeers; I've never done it personally) have to arrange well in advance for a FAA waiver. Lots of paperwork, sometimes met with glassy stares or even hostility. Some FAA people are great, others clueless.
Sometimes you get a short window in which to fly, or a low ceiling. (e.g., 5000'.) The group I fly with now is having a launch next weekend. They had a waiver for the whole weekend lined up, but they've been given two no-fly windows each day because jets from a (relatively) nearby airbase are doing low-altitude exercises in the area.
Even if we get a waiver, there are pilots who ignore the "Notice to Airmen" posted at the airport. When a low-flying plane gets within a mile or so, and isn't heading away, we have to hold up launches for a bit.
Stefan
A sharp marketing department could notice that SF with such-and-such a cover and such-and-such a description sells a solid 5% better than anything else.
A few weeks later, editors and slushpile readers get standing orders to only vet manuscripts that fit a certain profile.
The next year, the books in your local bookstore's SF&F section fall into maybe three categories. Cover artists who want to continue eating ape a certain sterotyped style.
But, dang, SF books start hitting the Bestseller Lists, so it would all be worthwhile.
Stefan
- "Destroy your marriage 47% faster!"
- "Who cares if you forget how to walk on dirt?"
- "Success in real life: Hard work, sacrifice, hours of awkward F2F interaction.
Stefan "Addicted to massive multiplayer games when they were played by snail mail" JonesSuccess in Everquest II: Sore wrists, insomnia, and $12.95 / month.
Feeling of triumph upon your virtual marriage to Yoh-Krah, Princess of the Wolf Clan: Priceless."
Sure, you need to expend energy to make it, and that energy will come from sources that include oil and coal. But it's much easier to deal with emissions in a big plant than in individual internal combustion engines. And down the road, as wind and solar and tidal become affordable, you can start phasing out the fossil fuels and get most or all of the carbon out of the loop.
It won't happen overnight, but this is a start. Gotta get those learning economies going.
Stefan
I wouldn't mind The Simpsons ending its run at this point. Better that than risk something awful happening, like one of the voice actors quitting or getting canned or Fox insisting on some egregious change.
Anyway, there are so many episodes in syndication that I can watch reruns for weeks without getting bored.
What WOULD be tragic: Groening not having a shot at another show. Surprise us, Matt!
Stefan
* #1 Candidate for overused annoying chic media term.
Sid Meir once told me that his game "Colonization" was a tribute / sequel to "Seven Cities of Gold."
(I actually noted the resemblance when I saw Colonization at a trade show booth. Meir, who was lurking nearby, was pleased that someone recognized the connection.)
The official port of Seven Cities to PC sucked. Man, was that offensive.
Clampett's work on the project happened a LONG time ago. I'm sure a Google search would turn something up, but I think it was the late 1940s.
Stefan
Sometimes treatments get made. Sometimes scripts get written. Sometimes the projects go into "pre-production," which I suspect is Hollywoodese for "We're trying to line up the funding!"
I am pretty sure I remember the ERB Mars books being optioned about twenty years back . . . vague recollections from Starlog, which seemed to specialize in drool-spewing stories about upcoming movies.
Perhaps my title isn't totally accurate. An actual option may not have been involved. I do know that Bob Clampett, creator of "Beany and Cecil" and one of the deranged guys behind the Warner Bros. cartoons, made animated-pencil-sketch segments of ERB Mars characters.
I saw stills of some of these . . . a guy riding a six-legged beastie (thark?). Kind of stylish and simple, not the lurid Frazetta type art that people seem to envision when ERB stories are mentioned.
So. Don't get your hopes up. Even if it gets made, don't get your hopes up. It could be turned into kiddie toy fodder.
My advice: Go hunt up the books. It is about time they were reprinted anyway.
Stefan
. . . why aren't they advertising this as a "Save Thousands in Taxes!!!!" scheme?
Nonsense.
You actually have to MAKE MONEY from your home business to claim those expenses.
To judge from the article, most of the sign posting / pamphlet placing activity is a symptom of desperately shoving more money down the rat-hole in order to make back that initial investment.
Careful, you're talking about border collies. They could read your comment, track you down, and herd your into busy traffic.
"By using Yahoo and viewing advertisements, you agree to have a behavior-modifying microchip implanted in you hippocampus, and will allow the corporate logos of our advertisers encoded in your junk DNA."
You can't fax a check!
Stefan
Email petitions are worthless.
/. sends in $1,000, and convinces every relative to send in the same we'll about match what the entertainment industry spent on politicians in the last month or so.
So is email.
Faxes are a bit better.
Better yet: A well-reasoned, non-hysterical actual snail-mail letter, printed and signed and stuck in an envelope.
Best: A letter with a contribution check inside! I figure $1,000 should be enough to overcome the noise of all those check-free letters.
Remember, this is your last chance to get in some soft-money contributions. Make the check out to the senator's party. He or she will have the honor of bringing it over to HQ and will like you even more!
I figure if everyone who reads
Stefan "Sorry, I'm feeling awful cynical today" Jones
A good fraction of Internet enthusiasts may have been Deadheads. The seminal WELL BBS was a Deadhead haven. Heck, John Perry Barlow wrote songs for the Dead.
But for every Deadhead there were a couple of Analog-SF-reading libertarians, a few shaggy UNIX wizards looking for something fun to do, a tech-dazzled entreprenuer, and so on.
Sterling in particular isn't a Deadhead. He strikes me as far too cynical and bourgois to remotely qualify as a Deadhead. He didn't start pontificating about the Internet when Garcia OD; he was a running bare-knuckle BBS in Austin in the Eighties, for cripes sake. Before he wrote SF he was a D&D game master, an activity which doesn't strike me as typical of Deadheads.
Stefan
It looks like they've turned the Morlocks into orcs. D'uh! In the book, they're pretty pathetic, lemur-like creatures. Devolved working-class folk.
I caught a few interesting things during my re-read. On his return journey to the future, the Time Traveller packs "a Kodak." Imagine, product placement, in 1898!
--Stefan
It's hard to believe, but at the time the book was written the world appeared both a lot younger, and with a comparitively short future. It won't be giving anything away to note that in one scene, the Time Traveller (he's never named) visits the Earth in 800,000 A.D. The sun is swollen and red, and things are starting to run down. The notions of radioactivity and fusion hadn't been concieved yet, and it was reasonable to guess that the sun only had a million or so years of life left!
Just think. Because of the economics of scale, larger media companies will be able to produce programming more cheaply, using larger, more efficient studios (plants). They can then spend the surplus on better scripts, better actors, fancier sets and more realistic special effects.
Also, more customers, providing more input, will mean large media companies have an overall better picture of exactly what people want!
The result: Better programming, and news tailored to exactly fit the world-view of their customers, promoting happier viewers who buy more product, resulting in even greater profits and even more money spent to produce even better programming!
You'll see. It will turn out just fine. Don't worry. Go back to sleep . . . we'll take care of things.
-- Stefan "Hey, why aren't my 'searing sarcasm' tags not working" Jones
Worst Internet Sex Ever!
As a result, bounty hunting will be an incredibly low-wage job. The streets will be thicker with desperate BHs than San Francisco is with pinkslipped web designers . . . begging for a chance to work, perhaps even carrying around WILL KILL FOR FOOD or WILL CAPTURE FOE FOR ROCKET PACK FUEL signs.
-- Stefan Jones
Think of the viscious fights over who gets to be the first to kill Jar-Jar Binks.
That worried me more than actual spam. I'd hate to get falsely accused of sending out "HOT SCHOOLGIRL, GOAT, AND LHAPSO-APSO ACTION!" messages.
Your argument is right out of an old Heinlein essay.
My faith in RAH dropped like a rock after I learned the Rocket Equation. If he hung out with real rocket scientists, he would have known that:
"Let's say it produces enough thrust to give 1g of acceleration, and can keep this up for, say, a year."
. . . is utter fantasy. But he wrote something like that, and a generation of editors didn't challenge him on it, and guys like Niven picked it up as gospel.
Um, well, I'm not in the mood to write out the rocket equation right here. We'll get out there, but it's not going to be quick or easy.
The job of a rocket is to create a stream of really fast particles moving in a particular direction. The faster, the better. Newton's Third Law and all that.
Those particles could be gas, accelerated with good old heat, ions accellerated with an electric field, or plasma.
Here's the rub: matter-antimatter reactions produce really energetic particles. Gamma rays, like. They kind a whiz right through the fuel you want to heat up. And the "combustion chamber." And the crew, and . . .
I read up on antimatter and fusion propulsion at grad school. (There's a suprising amount of good material out there; do not rely solely on the word of popularizers like Robert Forward!) The most-fully-realized antimatter rocket was kind of clunky. In the middle of the "combustion" chamber would be a cylinder of dense tungsten alloy full of tubules. A slow but steady stream of antiparticles are shot into the cylinder, which heats up. Hydrogen in pumped into the tubules; it heats up and "whoosh."
The disappointed bit: The specific impulse would "only" be about 5,000 seconds. This is about ten times what a liquid-fueled motor is capable of, and about 50% better than the little ion motor tested out on Deep Space One, but it's not amazing.
The most promising use for animatter: Using it as part of a fusion drive. A antimatter-catalyzed fusion drive described in the text I read was predicted to have a total impulse of something like 130,000 seconds. THAT is impressive. The thrust wouldn't be high, but you could keep it up for months and months.
What we might see are ships that use the direct-thermal sort of antimatter motor for getting a ship going (e.g., reaching escape velocity out of the Earth / moon system), then the fusion drive would be used to provide constant acceleration to speed up the trip.
Stefan
How the heck am I supposed to learn about products and services that I should be interested in now?
Stefan
Just did . . . wasn't Bill the pony that Tom gave the group?