Synova

Maybe the people who are seriously considering a one-way colonizing trip to Mars have thought this through, but I don't think that regular folks have any idea how much space is necessary for food production per person.   How big of a garden do you need to feed yourself?   How long between planting and harvest?  Remember... you can't go to the store if you run short. Greenhouses and hydroponics are well established and understood and I'm sure that the production rate information is out there.  Remember... you can't just order another tanker load of hydroponic nutrient mix. I looked around and found this... "1 square foot will yield roughly .112 lbs of winter wheat or .107 lbs of spring wheat. For 4 cups of flour you would need to plant roughly 9 square feet." For sake of argument, assume that using hydroponics the per foot yield is doubled.   So 9 square feet will get 8 cups of flour...  in about three months.   Or somewhere between 4 cups and 8 c...

I said, first, the Pascal Dome.   Drop a huge chunk of ice and cover it up. The second thing for a Mars Colony is to understand that PEOPLE HAVE TO LIVE. The assumption that colonists will have to be vegan (not just vegetarian) assumes a lot of things about what can actually be produced usefully in greenhouses.  Seeds are inefficient.  Grains.  Nuts.  Anything that takes a full growing season to ripen into the form we want to eat it.  Anything that grows on trees or vines is inefficient.  Anything perennial or seasonal is going to be inefficient and expensive.  It will still need to be done, however, and trial and error (also expensive and inefficient) to see what grows well.  And even then, the food results will be an occasional treat to break the monotony of rabbits and rabbit food, ie., salads and rabbit stew. Bread?  Only on Sol Prime bozo.   The most reasonable thing for Mars is a paleo-diet. Rabbits are probably the mo...

I'd probably have to write a best selling series about colonizing Mars in order to get anyone to call it a Pascal Dome, but whatever... we've got Dyson Spheres and O'Neill Colonies, why not a Pascal Dome? The idea is simple...  1. Send a robot probe or two out to find a BIG  ice rock, either in singles or a cluster, boost the ice to Mars.  2. Crash it into the planet making a nice new deep crater that is, coincidentally, got that big chunk of ice water in the middle of it.    3. Cover the crater with a dome or even a air tight fabric cover before the volatiles are lost. This reservoir of (mostly) water then supports an initial colonial development cluster; A town.  Housing, agriculture, life support and manufacturing is built around the contained crater. Over time, possibly over decades...  1. The pressure and air quality under the dome is adjusted to something that is human breathable.  2. The temperature can be adjust...

I’ve been re-read-skimming the Liaden Universe novels, as I tend to do when I’m out of romances. And while I think that the characters have “arcs” they also have… character. And in a sense I think that character is impervious to arc. Or something like that. My husband was talking about Tenchi and how he likes Tenchi so much and I suggested that Tenchi’s super-power was attracting all the most powerful female destructiveness in the universe to himself and neutralizing it (they all fall in love with him… guy’s got a harem.) My husband disagreed and said that Tenchi’s “power” was that he always did the honorable thing. Always. And I realized that this was also the case in the Liaden books. The characters aren't perfect, but they have character and care for honor and when push comes to shove there is no question, not even hesitation, they are compelled. And I think that, as flawed as Miles Vorkosigan is, that this is also the character dynamic in those books and for Aral and...

Union goons also trashed a man's hot dog cart for the crime of feeding capitalists. No doubt he deserved it, and also deserved to be called racial slurs on account of he was a black man making a buck with his own business and hired to feed capitalists. There is a donation portal at the link so he can get a new cart.

...would provide disaster relief if we didn't make it against the law. Shocking article in Slate. (Shocking because it's IN Slate!) It's expected from Reason TV .

One of my professors brought a meteorite to class today.  He had a 1/2" maybe 3/4" thick slab, approximately 12" x 14" of a pallasite meteor from Russia that he'd just acquired over the weekend. Passed it around during class so we all got to hold it and look at it close. Wow, was that thing heavy.  Almost like a 3/4 inch thick slab of nickle-iron or something. ;-) Pallasite Meteorites

I've been thinking lately that nothing happens, nothing AT ALL happens, unless someone has more than they need. It doesn't really need to be me.   It doesn't really need to be you.   It's just that SOMEBODY needs to have more than necessary.  Somebody needs a surplus. Until that happens everyone is operating at a survival level. Survival level SUCKS. Once someone has extra... maybe it's a windfall (as in... the big tree blew over and Caveperson Biff suddenly finds himself with 20 or 30 pounds of saturated honeycomb) or maybe it's ability (as in... Caveperson Stan is a big burly fellow and hunts better than anyone else and regularly has more hides and meat than he needs) but until that happens no one has anything to trade.   Once SOMEBODY has that surplus people can begin to live above survival level.   Stan can trade meat to Biff for some honey, so that lets Biff off hunting just a bit and Biff can spend the time figuring a better way to make arrows, or ...

I got home and got the pictures off my camera and found out that I had a smudge on the lens.  ARGH!   I can't see the display anyhow when I'm taking them, so all of these were taken blindly, but they'd still be pretty good, I think.  I like the shadow of the gondola and the last picture shows the gondola, really tiny, coming up the cables.  (I don't think they called it a gondola.) I found a few fossils too, crinoids of course.   I think these might be bryozoa. The nodules of flint in the limestone are really neat. And here's a picture of the awesome fellow who took me up on my tramway ride and patiently waited while I looked at rocks.  :)

This is fun. It's the civics quiz that AoS had posted a few days ago. Supposedly the average for people taking it hovers around 50%, 55% for college profs and 40-something for politicians. I suspect that some odd sampling occurred someplace because I got 87.88% and that was a low score for AoS.

Or rather.... new to me. I lost mine. (I suspect it was in the car we had stolen and crashed in California.) I bought this one used on Amazon. The new ones were listed at $38 or so. Eeep! I'd have bought the music electronically or one song at a time but I couldn't find the songs. Couldn't find the artists. They're on You Tube. I suppose they're someplace purchasable, but I couldn't find them. I haven't bought music files before so I'm not good at it. But I thought I'd actually put some time and effort into compiling some music I like. As old school as I am (obviously!) I was frustrated and upset. When I want something it should be there, darn it. Is there any reason I can't look up any bit of music ever published and just buy it because I want it? I didn't think that music from a movie would be the least difficult, but it was. Now I just have to get the technical help to put the music on the CD onto my computer.

(I'm handing in this paper tomorrow... thought I'd share it with more than just my one instructor.) Many countries and US states have outlawed reproductive cloning while accepting therapeutic cloning of human beings. In therapeutic cloning a human clone is created within an egg, allowed to divide to some number of cells, and then destroyed for medical research or therapy. Reproductive cloning would follow the same process except with the implantation of the egg within a womb, no different at that point than in vitro fertilization. It's backwards to view the destruction of human life as moral while viewing the nurturing of that human life as immoral. This turns reason on it's head. Why is reproductive cloning opposed by so many? Is the idea of cloned humans too new? The discussion of human cloning did not begin with the sheep, Dolly. It is not new. The conversation has been going on for decades upon decades. Doppelgangers and changelings have existed ...

Today was my first day. The classes were fun. Sort of. I sort of dread the one class because it's going to be about arguing effectively and rules of logic, which isn't dreadful at all, but we're going to be making arguments in class and I expect it has the potential to include a fair amount of cringe-worthy college-age passion about "causes." The last thing I want to do is get in an argument with idealists who just graduated from high school. (Does this count as a "don't commit this to the internet" sort of sentiment?) I do want the logic class though. And Algebra. The first Math class I've taken in over 25 years. So far I remember the material once it's shown, but before that the problems are entirely opaque and I couldn't even guess where to start. The on-line homework is new and confusing. On the one hand the way each step is shown is wonderfully helpful. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I exit if the p...

Sword and Sorcery tends to embarrass itself at the movies. The genre is simultaneously deathly serious and silly beyond all reason so it's easy to see how that might all go wrong. It seems less ridiculous if you're reading the story in a book. I don't know why, it just does. So making a new Conan is a risk. It's a risk because any movie in the genre is a risk. It's also a risk because the original Conan movies were pretty darn good and who can top Arnold? Conan IS Arnold and Arnold IS Conan. It's a risk because too many people already know what Conan is and what Conan ought to be. Everyone has preconceptions the new movie has to live up to. Well, I think they did good. No, it's not brilliant. It's not as great a movie as, say, Iron Man, but then nothing is. What it is is solid good fun. The plot is the plot to Conan and nothing particularly new. His village is slaughtered and his father is killed, he advocates ind...

I bought at least some of my books today. I'm starting (returning?) full time at UNM this fall; easing in with a relatively light load of classes. I expect that math will be a struggle as I've not had a math class in 25 years and I can't afford to do "just enough" since I'm going to have to take more for my major. In any case, it's got to be solid. My other classes range from less worrisome to "easy A" even though I'm a bit hesitant to say so. It just sounds sort of bad. I'm looking forward to them all and am actually quite excited about them because it's all interesting stuff. It's much easier to do well in an interesting class for an interesting subject than one that is so easy it's dull. So school is looking good, so far. Once it starts I have some administrative things to do. They gave me a whole bunch of transfer credits, enough so that I'm classed as junior year, but few of them applied to my ...

The Rise of... Saw it this morning. I will say this... it didn't FEEL like I was cheering the end of the human species. Contrary to what PETA said (IIRC) the apes weren't getting their own back, not getting some sort of revenge against humans. What the movie does is establish how the apes got smart and set up the reason they were able to fill a void. The movie used an amazingly light touch in dealing with animal research. None of the villains were among the scientists or researchers. That medical research was dealt with as a complex thing and the motivations of the researchers shown to be anything but evil, made the simplistic treatment of the three individual humans who were villains a disappointment. Important plot points depended on teh stupid. It would not have been hard to do better.

I finally figured out what was wrong with this movie. First, it was a great movie. It was fun. It held my attention every single moment from the beginning of it until the end. But even so I have to admit that some of the less than fabulous reviews have a point. The movie is missing something. Mostly, it seemed to me that it was missing a big payoff at the end. It was great while it was happening, but when it was over it was just over. Some critics said it could have been Cowboys vs. anything... that the aliens were pointless. Anyhow, I figured it out. I figured out where the essential mistake occurred when they made this movie. They failed to identify whose story it was. It was Ella Swenson's story. It was the alien's story. In the trailers they have her explaining that the aliens killed "her people" and you suspect that she's Native American. She's not. Her "people" are an alien race. But because they did not make it her story, the p...

He agrees with me . :-) It's amazing how brilliant someone sounds when they say something that you've said yourself a million times, but with new and different words. The movie Silent Running is a " peaty slab of crap" he says. And I'm all... that's brilliant! "Peaty slab of crap" is exactly the phrase I've been looking for all of those times when I wanted to express just how stoopid that movie is. How often can you use the word "stoopid" without it getting old? Peaty slab of crap! Or it could be that the movie itself is brilliant, if you look at it from the right direction. The proper direction. If you look at it as a skewering of the modern environmental movement it's got every single thing it needs. Lileks mentions the most egregious detail... "Gosh: you’re orbiting a planet beyond Jupiter, and there’s insufficient sunlight to keep trees happy. Who could have seen that coming." Because Silent Running is ...

Has anyone seen this and want to discuss it? I watched it last night and although the movie itself wasn't disturbing, I kept on trying to figure out what they'd done wrong, why it didn't work as well as I thought it ought to have worked. I woke up in the middle of the night with a bug in my head trying to figure it out. To start with just one tiny nit: This was a good example of why you should put your skeptic in the movie instead of on the couch watching the movie. In The Eagle, Marcus and Eska travel northward through the non-Roman parts of Brittan keeping Marcus's Roman identity secret. Both my husband and I were waiting for someone to cry out "Roman!" and point at the tack on the horses as evidence. Neither of us knew that they hadn't changed Roman tack for what would be normal in the area they were traveling but there was nothing in the movie indicating that anyone had worried about it. (My husband thought that the fact that they ...

I finally got my nerve up to watch the three episodes of Combat Hospital that are on Hulu. I dreaded even trying to watch them, knowing that there was no way that either the US military or our presence in Afghanistan could possibly be subject to a television show without the producers making sure they didn't come across as uncritical of either of them. Joy of joys... the show is Canadian. The main characters/doctors are Canadian. One is a civilian Brit. One is American. The head nurse is American and a number of other characters are American but probably the same number are Canadian or British. The "gone native" special ops guy is American. The shadowy unidentified (CIA, undoubtedly) is in the back-ground (I don't care about that as the special ops guy is obviously a hero). What being Canadian does is allow them, in one of the very first episodes, to have a situation where a soldier is shot in a friendly fire incident and the good guys *cover it up*. I d...