Just looking at it . . . wow, inspirational! Like a soaring eagle caught in a trash can, or a supersonic fighter melted down and used to cast an extrusion mold for dog treats.
"This is Edison Carter, live and direct at a secret Big Fun Network testing facility where the city's children have been used as guinea pigs for the next generation of . .."
Now the Olympics are going to look like a convention of superheroes and supervillains, with each athlete alignment-doping him or herself with more and more outrageous costumes, posturing, and pre-event monologues.
"Sure, he hurled the discus five miles, but did he really have to soak it in the blood of five virgins and dedicate his performance to All-Mighty Set?"
"One of the more awesome things is that when you are at +/-0.159g, you disappear from regular space-time because you are too weakly interacting with it, like a neutrino."
A lot of grade school kids probably wish they could do that.
Of course, then the ring wraiths and Sauron could see them.
There are many textbooks available on Intelligent Design, and it is really easy to make more.
First, you get one of the wishy-washy creationist textbooks written in the 1980s, before the Discovery Institute decided that actually calling creationism creationism wasn't going to fly.
Then you do a search and replace, substituting "intelligent design" for "creationism."
Then you add a chapter at the end with the nuggets of sophistry that ID supporters came up with, and add some references to other ID textbooks and tracts in the bibiliography.
Why do you assume that this is the Gates Foundation's "guiding philosophy?"
Is it the mere mention of contraception?
Why do you assume this will somehow be mandatory, or for that matter lead to "fascism?" (Historically, fascists regimes were big of keeping women at home making babies to grow up to be soldiers.)
Without the 8 or so hours a day that cable channels broadcast mindless infomercials, retail activity in the U.S. will grind to a halt.
Meanwhile, I'll be sitting pretty with crystal clear reception of the two dozen or so locally broadcast channels, thanks to the home brew dipole antenna I made with plans from MAKE magazine.
Back in the late eighties, when the world was turned upside down by the fall of the iron curtain. my friends and I speculated that the fact that Reagan had survived assassination* had torn a hole in reality, thrusting us into a Bizarro Universe.
Now we have Russians suggesting something that only would make sense in a really bad TV movie or potboiler eco-disaster novel.
Like the man uptopic says, what could possibly go wrong?
We're there, man.
Stefan
* Schoolyard mythology: presidents elected in years ending in 0 always died in office.
Oh, we're far from facing the death of the oceans. Even acidification and warming and ocean current changes won't do that.
What the added oil is is another stressor to the system.
Instead we'll see a slow collapse of traditional fisheries, meaning lots of people going poor and hungry, and Red Lobster offering all-you-can-eat Giant Squid and tilapia dinners.
That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.
* * *
One of cool things folks forget about the movie Soylent Green: The green stuff is supposed to be made from krill. Edward G. Robinson's character goes to the euthenasia parlor after reading a Soylent Corporation research study taken from a murdered executive's home. The reason that the Soylent corporation is making the crackers from corpses is an ocean ecosystem collapse. I don't remember if they made the connection, but the movie also invokes the greenhouse effect. In 1973.
The Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, OR has a very nice collection of air and space exhibits. The "Spruce Goose," Howard Hughes' ill-fated wood composite transport plane, is on display there.
When the museum built a new hall, they designed it to hold a shuttle. The space isn't quite empty, but you can tell they really have a hole to fill.
I wonder what they'll do in what looks like the increasingly likely case that they won't get an orbiter? Maybe a Buran?
* NUKE MARS! Eliminate alien threats before they start. And incidentally destroy any pesky bible-insulting fossils.
* Spaceport Wasilla: Because Alaska is already halfway to heaven!
* Drill Baby Drill through the crystal sphere separating us from the stars!
There were several Massive Multiplayer games that didn't use computers at all.
I played one called Star Master for several years. It was run by an outfit called Schubel & Son which also ran a fantasy game (Tribes of Crane) and later did computerized PBM games.
Players created a species (limbs, senses, mental abilities, defenses), a planet (size, atmosphere), and government.
Each turn you filled out one or more turn sheets. It cost a few bucks to process each. One sheet might let you move one ship (or group of ships), conduct trade, conduct diplomacy, start a colony, etc.
Ships could discover other star systems and survey their planets. If your explorers encountered another player's forces, the game master could forward an index card with contact information.
It was typical 4xE, but with lots of colorful background information.
As I recall, things got to be dominated by griefers and deep-pocketed guys who submitted massive numbers of turn sheets.
After obsessing over the game for three years I sold my empire to a player who set up my colonies as sources of loot for his main race.
I used to work a lot of trade shows. Comdex, CES, early multimedia trade shows.
I attended the shows where Microsoft Bob was announced. The hype was amazing. Taxi had signs. The daily magazines they hand out had adverts.
The funniest bit of promotion: Microsoft hired a limo driver, or at least a guy in a limo driver costume, to wander around the arrival concourse at McCarren. He was holding a big sign with "BOB" written on it.
As in, Bob was arriving at CES (or whatever show that was)!
Of course, as a Pope in the Church of the SubGenius, I knew the greatness of "Bob" all along.
It's easy to look up per-capita water usage, and the amount required just to stay alive, etc., but this doesn't give a full picture of the amount of water a person "uses" because you have to take into account his share of industrial and agricultural usage.
When planning a moon base, you'd have to be able to figure these things out way in advance. You'd need some for personal consumption (drinking, cooking, washing), for cooling, for running hydroponic farms and O2 cracking plants, and etc.
You could then figure out how much of this could be recycled (it would be very hard to get 100% efficiency) and the waste due to the extraction process to arrive at how many people the ice deposits could support and for how long.
(There would be economies of scale, and undoubtedly the amount of investment in the plant would go a long way in determining recycling efficiency.)
Once all this is figured out, you could figure out how much of the water could be spared for use as reaction mass. You could work out a deal of sorts; "sell" water to a deep-space exploration company in exchange for a promise of non-water volatiles (nitrogen, ammonia, methane, helium, etc.), mined from outer moons, for delivery at a later date. These volatiles would be very valuable to industries on the moon.
Slashdot Mirror
Just looking at it . . . wow, inspirational! Like a soaring eagle caught in a trash can, or a supersonic fighter melted down and used to cast an extrusion mold for dog treats.
"This is Edison Carter, live and direct at a secret Big Fun Network testing facility where the city's children have been used as guinea pigs for the next generation of . . ."
Now the Olympics are going to look like a convention of superheroes and supervillains, with each athlete alignment-doping him or herself with more and more outrageous costumes, posturing, and pre-event monologues.
"Sure, he hurled the discus five miles, but did he really have to soak it in the blood of five virgins and dedicate his performance to All-Mighty Set?"
Are you deliberately ignoring the fact that Slashdot's audience are rapid unicorn enthusiasts?
The house has to ski three miles, shoot a duck out of the sky, and cook it using only solar energy.
"One of the more awesome things is that when you are at +/-0.159g, you disappear from regular space-time because you are too weakly interacting with it, like a neutrino."
A lot of grade school kids probably wish they could do that.
Of course, then the ring wraiths and Sauron could see them.
There are many textbooks available on Intelligent Design, and it is really easy to make more.
First, you get one of the wishy-washy creationist textbooks written in the 1980s, before the Discovery Institute decided that actually calling creationism creationism wasn't going to fly.
Then you do a search and replace, substituting "intelligent design" for "creationism."
Then you add a chapter at the end with the nuggets of sophistry that ID supporters came up with, and add some references to other ID textbooks and tracts in the bibiliography.
Voila! ID textbook!
Actually, take your pick:
Centuri SST Shuttle
Centuri Space Shuttle
Estes Orbital Transport
Or going way back:
von Braun Passenger Rocket (1958)
I was bitterly disappointed that the actual shuttle looked so . . . clunky.
Why do you assume that this is the Gates Foundation's "guiding philosophy?"
Is it the mere mention of contraception?
Why do you assume this will somehow be mandatory, or for that matter lead to "fascism?" (Historically, fascists regimes were big of keeping women at home making babies to grow up to be soldiers.)
Without the 8 or so hours a day that cable channels broadcast mindless infomercials, retail activity in the U.S. will grind to a halt.
Meanwhile, I'll be sitting pretty with crystal clear reception of the two dozen or so locally broadcast channels, thanks to the home brew dipole antenna I made with plans from MAKE magazine.
Cut the coax!
Back in the late eighties, when the world was turned upside down by the fall of the iron curtain. my friends and I speculated that the fact that Reagan had survived assassination* had torn a hole in reality, thrusting us into a Bizarro Universe.
Now we have Russians suggesting something that only would make sense in a really bad TV movie or potboiler eco-disaster novel.
Like the man uptopic says, what could possibly go wrong?
We're there, man.
Stefan
* Schoolyard mythology: presidents elected in years ending in 0 always died in office.
. . . Depend-able energy supply?
Oh, we're far from facing the death of the oceans. Even acidification and warming and ocean current changes won't do that.
What the added oil is is another stressor to the system.
Instead we'll see a slow collapse of traditional fisheries, meaning lots of people going poor and hungry, and Red Lobster offering all-you-can-eat Giant Squid and tilapia dinners.
That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.
* * *
One of cool things folks forget about the movie Soylent Green: The green stuff is supposed to be made from krill. Edward G. Robinson's character goes to the euthenasia parlor after reading a Soylent Corporation research study taken from a murdered executive's home. The reason that the Soylent corporation is making the crackers from corpses is an ocean ecosystem collapse. I don't remember if they made the connection, but the movie also invokes the greenhouse effect. In 1973.
The Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinville, OR has a very nice collection of air and space exhibits. The "Spruce Goose," Howard Hughes' ill-fated wood composite transport plane, is on display there.
When the museum built a new hall, they designed it to hold a shuttle. The space isn't quite empty, but you can tell they really have a hole to fill.
I wonder what they'll do in what looks like the increasingly likely case that they won't get an orbiter? Maybe a Buran?
So Heather REALLY HAS two mommies!
. . . you can expect BIG CHANGES in NASA policy:
* NUKE MARS! Eliminate alien threats before they start. And incidentally destroy any pesky bible-insulting fossils.
* Spaceport Wasilla: Because Alaska is already halfway to heaven!
* Drill Baby Drill through the crystal sphere separating us from the stars!
There were several Massive Multiplayer games that didn't use computers at all.
I played one called Star Master for several years. It was run by an outfit called Schubel & Son which also ran a fantasy game (Tribes of Crane) and later did computerized PBM games.
Players created a species (limbs, senses, mental abilities, defenses), a planet (size, atmosphere), and government.
Each turn you filled out one or more turn sheets. It cost a few bucks to process each. One sheet might let you move one ship (or group of ships), conduct trade, conduct diplomacy, start a colony, etc.
Ships could discover other star systems and survey their planets. If your explorers encountered another player's forces, the game master could forward an index card with contact information.
It was typical 4xE, but with lots of colorful background information.
As I recall, things got to be dominated by griefers and deep-pocketed guys who submitted massive numbers of turn sheets.
After obsessing over the game for three years I sold my empire to a player who set up my colonies as sources of loot for his main race.
I used to work a lot of trade shows. Comdex, CES, early multimedia trade shows.
I attended the shows where Microsoft Bob was announced. The hype was amazing. Taxi had signs. The daily magazines they hand out had adverts.
The funniest bit of promotion: Microsoft hired a limo driver, or at least a guy in a limo driver costume, to wander around the arrival concourse at McCarren. He was holding a big sign with "BOB" written on it.
As in, Bob was arriving at CES (or whatever show that was)!
Of course, as a Pope in the Church of the SubGenius, I knew the greatness of "Bob" all along.
. . . that nature INTENDED you to drink.
Coffee.
Yeah, I know you're snarking, but seriously, healthy rat meat would have a lot more nutritional value than the caloric equivalent of soda pop.
As for rats raised on high fructose corn syrup, they actually have nice marbled flesh. Fries up real good, and smells like cola on the grill.
From what I learned in my Texas astronomy class the comets will harmlessly splash against the crystal spheres that support the planets and sun.
I know there are some great colleges and universities in Texas.
But when you think Ivy League and Brainy Research Schools you're going to be heading north, east, or west.
Will college application departments start to take Texas high school diplomas with a grain of salt?
Will Texas students have to take remedial classes like "Non-theology based biology"?
Round down the value of Pi to three, like it is in the Bible.
30 day unpaid suspension for teachers using European measurements like millimeters in the classroom.
Add Red Meat Studies to curriculum.
Found Flat Earth Research Institute. Curves of round Earth lead to unclean thoughts. Flat Earth would be easier to navigate around.
Rewrite history so that America won its freedom from the British at the Alamo.
Texas schools to be connected with special filtered internet which only allows access to Conservapedia, foxnews.com, and Amway.com.
It's easy to look up per-capita water usage, and the amount required just to stay alive, etc., but this doesn't give a full picture of the amount of water a person "uses" because you have to take into account his share of industrial and agricultural usage.
When planning a moon base, you'd have to be able to figure these things out way in advance. You'd need some for personal consumption (drinking, cooking, washing), for cooling, for running hydroponic farms and O2 cracking plants, and etc.
You could then figure out how much of this could be recycled (it would be very hard to get 100% efficiency) and the waste due to the extraction process to arrive at how many people the ice deposits could support and for how long.
(There would be economies of scale, and undoubtedly the amount of investment in the plant would go a long way in determining recycling efficiency.)
Once all this is figured out, you could figure out how much of the water could be spared for use as reaction mass. You could work out a deal of sorts; "sell" water to a deep-space exploration company in exchange for a promise of non-water volatiles (nitrogen, ammonia, methane, helium, etc.), mined from outer moons, for delivery at a later date. These volatiles would be very valuable to industries on the moon.
The theory of "friction" was cooked up by grant-hungry so-called physicists, the WD-40 lobby, and Jiffy Lube.