Nuke

there's one more direct flight that only hits the bigger airports, juneau and ketchican. and another puddle jumper route, more for people going to various places on the panhandle. usually locals, but a fair number of tourists too. its also the plane they stick you on if you miss your flight. one time i missed my flight and i had to go down to ketchican and catch the same plane on its return trip. petersburg gets two flights daily, one north bound and one southbound. our airport is one of those little single room terminals. if you come up for the may festival you will be greeted by a viking horde when you get off the plane, complements of the local elks lodge. the alaska marine highway used to be a lot better. we had this fast ferry which could get to juneau in about 4 hours. which if you account for the time spent at airports and going through security could actually save you time. unfortunately the ship was a composite high speed catamaran and they couldnt afford the maintenance. so they sold the boat to spain. now you cant even take the ferry across the gulf, so you have to go to haines and drive through canada. my sister used to live on the other side of the wrangell narrows on the mainland so ive been across that many times on small boat, but never towards wrangell. seen everything from glass calm to 4 foot waves, and one nighttime crossing which was just freakishly awesome (the wake glows in the dark).

having luck with ublock origin on firefox. no ads here. its a tug of war, google does something evil, adblockers devs counter.

i hope the astronauts stuck at the orbital hotel get their overtime pay.

i never liked the minecraft soundtrack. i always mute it and put on judas priest or motorhead or something. people say its brilliant, but i think that it just likes to play at interesting times. frankly you should be able to record music in game with redstone and note blocks, craft a blank music disc for it. stick it in your jukebox, run your redstone music contraption, eject it when youre done (any sfx within earshot of the jukebox gets recorded). then you not only get a copy but also gets added to the game soundtrack. then i could have raining blood play at interesting times. still think the best game soundtracks are probably doom (midi), descent 2 (redbook, not midi) and quake 2. various mechwarrior games also tick my boxes. the mechwarrior 5 soundtrack is the best thing about the game.

ive always wanted to fly on one of those. all we get here are 737s. was excited to see the 900 model on my last flight. the 700 is a little cramped. as for not having the cruising callout. that also happens on the wrangell-petersburg hop (im in petersburg). i mean we share a power grid. the petersburg-juneau hop is a little longer and we reach cruising there. not long enough to bring out the snack cart though. the anchorage hop is about four hours. i think i spent more time in the air because of the affordable care act than i ever have for things i actually wanted to do.

i hate phone software. the reason everything is in an app is because they dont want people to be able to control their content delivery client (browser). this is why i stopped doing pc repair. i got tired of people bugging me with mundane software problems. it is not my job to help you get laid on myspace (yea this was a long time ago). no i wont help you pirate things. you have an actual technical question fine. want me to upgrade your gpu fine. want me to install more ram fine. but im not your entertainment coordinator.

its so clean, hardly any tubes.

this is why computers like mother from alien still make sense in a future setting. you really do not need that much cpu power for all the space nav stuff, the agc managed just fine and it was slow. you do however need exotic systems for scientific data acquisition. though on the iss it is cost effective to send up new laptops periodically.

this is what happens when there are no longer any standards in media. especially when a certain kind of company buys most of the advertising and then suddenly finds themselves with a lot of leverage over what can be reported.

thats kind of what iter is and why it continues to be the best bet. but their target really isnt useful, especially in space applications. as a terrestrial power plant its gonna be a cash cow that will cost too damn much to operate.

thats the problem with the little guys, they never seem to have the money to do the research they want. there was some mention on the talk-polywell.org forum that emc2 and others presented at tofe 2024 last month, though nothing seems to have been released to the public on that yet. will keep an eye on that. bussard had wanted to move directly to a full scale demo before he died, when park took over he scaled back to some smaller tests and later to computer models, preferring a more thorough and conservative approach. rather than releasing whatever they had in a desperate attempt for capital (which seems like what fusion startups like to do). im not holding my breath. but with recent iter delays it seems like some venture capitalists might surge fund startups again hoping to get in before iter, though it might turn them off to fusion all together. iter is probibly going to do what it says on the tin, but in another decade or two, again and still require a demo to follow it up. so 50 years?

cant say i read it. i have so many e-books and audio books in my back log and maybe knock out a couple a year. the fact that i read slow doesnt help much.

uplift sea sausages. enlarge the flippers so they can "swim" in pressurized zero-g habs. they are used to 3-dimentional habitation, floorspace is a meaningless concept to them. they might have a water tank centrifuge where they can relieve themselves, also provides waste for aquaponics and for herring to filter and consume (allowing closed loop food supply). also provides water for drinking and allows the sea doggos to stay hydrated. ability to hold their breath for a long time allow them limited eva capacity with just a pressure suit. thick blubber and fur allows you to use less energy for heating (imagine apollo 13 but replace tom hanks with a seal). large eyes provide excellent vision in dark environments. and because its already a marine mammal they would be excelent for colonizing sub surface oceans like europa and others. a gene drive can be triggered to undo the space adaptations and return them to a purely aquatic configuration.

i usually spell it analogue in this context. i know that analogue is used in place of analog in other countries, but i feel it a stylistic alternative that better differentiates the terms.

having fixed launch infrastructure requirement invalidates most of the reasoning for doing a space plane in the first place. i had kind of hoped for a skylon derivative suborbital spaceplane that can loft a second stage out of the atmosphere and fast enough such that the spaceplane can re-enter without a difficult to service heat shield. think of it as a winged falcon/falcon heavy/superheavy or a stratolaunch that goes higher and faster. engines would be a sabre derivative on hydrolox. id do away with payload bay for a piggyback config. aerodynamic design on that may be difficult, especially in the hypersonic regime, but it could save significant weight. separation would occur above the karman line. staging configs could be a 2-stage fully reusable config with a lifting body orbiter, for crew/light cargo. or a 2 stage disposable rocket for heavy lift to leo. or a 3-stage disposable rocket for geo and interplanetary payloads. would compete with falcon/falcon heavy but would benefit from being able to launch/land to any orbit from any properly equipped runway, thus saving significantly on infrastructure costs. flight profile would allow for powered takeoff and landing, even allowing use of civilian runways provided you can get hydrolox trucked to the airport.

tried to play minecraft but mouse button issues make it impossible to manage inventory in the game. will require mouse surgery. i find it disturbing that an $80 mouse cant use a higher quality microswitches or a hardware low pass filter (less than a penny in parts) or even a software lpf (a few lines of code). instead it all goes into overbuilding to the point where you need to remove 30+ screws to get to the part that needs changing. ended up playing slither.io.

polywells might be better. you dont have grid erosion that contaminates the plasma and requires you to shut it down to change the grid or purge the contaminated deuterium. less consumables less down time. polywells might still be viable for breakeven at some point, its just the proponents opted for computer simulations rather than lab work to nail down the optimal design. best option for a spacecraft power supply if it works. but for now they make excellent neutron sources.

i like the 'all the things!' approach. all rockets flying. cutting one to put the funds in the other just doubles its cost of the other. and no competition so they use the same hardware for years and we get stuck in a leo rut.

he is not wrong. ive had entire projects mothballed because someone updated a library in ways my program didn't plan for. my game engine is a good example. it runs on opengl 1.3, which was old when i started. why? did you look at how much code you have to write just to get vulkan to render a pixel.?

old boom boom or bust. or both. probably both.

^ouch. and it waited for it to be carried into the least escapeable location to go boom. its this kind of thing that almost makes me want to throw away all my bare unprotected 18650 cells. almost. my town likes to eat houses. most are built on piles, since the ground is spongey and is not suited to foundations without pre-compresssion. every year you see boat houses get eaten by the sea, and most of the inland houses are not level. big construction project for this year is a new hospital, and they had gravel trucks running back and fourth for several months just to pre-compress the ground. they also encountered large boulders that needed to be blasted away. do we really need a new hospital, probably not. its going to have the same problem as the existing one, not enough staff and will ship you to another town for anything more severe than stitches. our state would rather dump money into one big, oppulent, expensive, centralized facility in anchorage than do normal construction in regional locations, then eat a boatload of travel expenses on an airline that gouges.

once observed a raven pick up crackers. there are four of them scattered about, likely dropped from some child's lunchable. raven picked up the first cracker, stacked it on the second, picked up both crackers and set them on the 3rd and so on until he had a stack of four crackers in his beak. he took off with all of them. yea i dont buy the whole instinct thing, they are capable of learning just as well as humans are. maybe not as fast, but you dont come up with tricks like that without at least some capacity for abstract thought. we get that. local bucks move in to town the week before hunting season., they are just everywhere. i saw a nice four pointer the other day on my way to the post office. hunting season opens on the first. never ceases to amaze me that they know exactly when to move in.

i think the issue is calling it waste, because most of the isotopes are still useful. part of the process is letting it sit in a pool for a few years to burn off the nasties. once its in dry storage its pretty safe. im always questioning the need for centralized storage. what you do is dedicate a nuclear site to nuclear stuff. when you tear down an old reactor you build a new one in its place. and it might be of a design able to burn up some of the fuel formally known as waste. once we get past that then all you have is medium and low level waste, which is a lot less problematic. proliferation issues are moot when we get to the point were we can do nuclear weapons without the isotopes. we aren't far from a point where we can do that.

if we did that in southeast alaska, nothing would ever get done. of course were not doing rockets. that's kodiak's gig.

watch some videos about euv machines used in semiconductor fabs. there are some impressive laser shenanigans are going on.