Nuke

canada lynx would kill everything. i mean australia has never known big cats. lynx doesnt exactly qualify because they purr, but they are big enough to take out kangaroos and koalas. they might have problems with the GIANT SPIDERS OF DOOM, but its nothing a cat cannot handle.

we buy our syrup from vermont.

yep definitely canada.

people just don't like being reminded that they are going to die. nothing does that like an active pandemic and a media that cant stop talking about it. its about the same wrt climate change. they seem to be using the term "winter weather advisory" rather liberally. even the local news does that, but i look out the window and think "typical alaska winter", "its december Darn it". they put this climate change notion in your head and then bomb you with bad weather reports (form a very large spread of locales and climates). when the weather is nice its not news worthy and they never talk of that or give it very little attention. its always told in a dramatic way, as if with urgency, to the point where i wonder what uppers they are on. regardless of what the science says, this is terrible for your psyche. media has always been bad at interpreting science. but that's not how they make money, they make money by sucking you in and bombing you with ads. see the world with your own eyes sometimes. remember why science depends so much on observation.

ive never owned a car, never learned how to drive, and i did ok. besides anyone so shallow as to shame you for something like that isnt worth having in your life anyway.

the only time ive ever seen anyone get electrocuted by an american outlet, it was when it was rigged to do so. its ok my brother deserved it. at that point im getting out my connector kit and soldering iron.

just dont get sucked into those dating apps. they are no good, for anyone (even those who use them successfully).

i had hopes for polywell but that seems to have fizzled out. last word was they were doing simulations to improve a final design for a demo. but thats a long way from having a machine. one things for sure, that rapid iteration on a small machine seems like a more conductive path than the massive machines with slow progress. the iter reactor, which even if it works out and moves to demo which is in turn successful, the result would not be cost competitive with fission, and worse fossil fuel. and renewables only move by virtue of being an off the shelf product.

i really dont like their plan to use helium 3, seems like the same problem that tokamaks would have with tritium. proton-boron seems the best way to go as it doesn't depend on a rare fuel component. protons dont fuse easy an so all your ash is alpha particles, which lends it to 100% direct conversion. but i figure this kind of thing is more for second or third gen reactors.

today i found out that it is now possible to play doom, on a lego.

that hellion video came across my feed yesterday. that reactor looks damn impressive.

temps now in the single digits. its freaking cold.

not geologically stable. nobody wants to put something expensive on unstable ground.

im one of those people who enjoy youtube videos about the isv venture star more than the movie actual. they should just make a movie on the ship.

every time i want to post a video of what im listening to its video is full of nudity or violence or blood, or satanic rituals. leading to the latter (or rather 3 out of 4) ive been listening to behemoth's newest album. the last song, 'versvs christvs' has been on repeat for awhile now.

its not just heat, humidity playes a bigger role in personal comfort than most people give credit. i could do 110 all day in phoenix and i dont need it to be 50 degrees colder inside. in anchorage, where winter tends to be dry, i could do -10 in shorts. but in southeast alaska, at 100% humidity, temps above 70 or below 40 are utterly miserable.

currently looking forward to "cocaine bear". the preview could not be posted here for content, but hey at least its an original idea. a grizzly bear does the johnny cash thing, turns monstrous, shenanigans ensue. whats not to love?

it gave me my torch ship fix for abit.

ive done that before. the steel grating on the stairs makes it excruciatingly painful, but ive done it.

accepting entropy is possibly the most constructive thing you can do. doom, of various kinds, is inevitable. you can postpone it but you can never escape it completely. i don't see it being constructive to deny this law of nature. that said we have a very long way to go before we see the heat death of the universe, or even the death of humanity, and we still do not know the limits of possibility. way i see it so long as you arent breathing in fire and committing acts of cannibalism, you are fine. people have this annoying habit of building the future with one hand and destroying it with the other. or assuming that just because things are fine for them, that things are fine. optimism tends to give people a huge blind spot. the same can be said for pessimism. neither is well equipped to handle the complexity of the real world. only by seeing it for what it is can you hope to make any real change in it. otherwise you get caught up in the current zeitgeist, change the popular things, only for the current problems to be replaced with others or for the problems to become worse. with the inability to see a failed system for what it is, especially one you participated in, you will just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. changes often have unintended side effects, people who make those changes seldom understand that, make light of them, deny they are an issue at all, and they can turn into real problems very fast. these things tend to happen in cycles. that's why history repeats itself. over many generations, humans try to adjust for their mistakes, overshoot, have the opposite problem, tries to overcorrect and you are right back to where you were. this repeats ad nauseum. i like the analogy of a pilot induced oscillation where the very act of trying to level out an out of control plane only makes problem worse over time. this is usually a problem of a poorly calibrated control loop in the flight control system where there are delays and multipliers that are not intuitive to understand in the short term. on generational time scales, these can be a lot bigger. the grass is currently under four inches of snow, im not touching that. though i do sometimes go fishing for no damn reason. sometimes i catch something i can eat later.

i never did like greebled ships. i mean they used that technique because its easy, either in modelcraft or cgi (just start with a poly grid and hit extrude a lot), to generate a lot of detail that would otherwise not be present. but spacecraft are all engineered surfaces where they are designed for re-entry or atmospheric flight, or as radiative surfaces, etc. so they tend to be a lot more ordered. pressure hulls are always more efficient when in spheres or cylinders (sphers more so because you dont have to bulk up the flanges at the ends). spheres tend to be harder to manufacture (unless you use explosives) and its easier to stick cylinders in your rocket, so that is the preferred station module profile. laying out a station with spheres would also be an awkward affair. i think my favorite designs are the spartan "dont bring anything you dont need" configuration, where its all girders and tanks, with equipment and habitation in isolated clustered modules as required. such ships would be quasi-modular, with bigger structures manufactured in space or on low gravity bodies with the more complicated modules shipped from earth. a fully integrated ship may actually be the most efficient as far as material usage (and thus overall mass) goes, but i dont think we will see stuff like that until the supporting infrastructure is established.

so planet of the apes, but with dinosaurs.

https://xkcd.com/2712/ yes there are other planets. currently on asteroid b-612. and now im stuck in a black hole.

i somehow do not think laser based fusion is the answer either. they might have a q of 1.5, but i believe that's based on optical, not electrical power. i dont think lasers are efficient enough for that to be true from-the-wall breakeven. you need a couple orders of magnitude to make a viable power installation. the progress with lasers thus far has been in sub-integer steps every couple of years. if that rate continues we will have viable fusion in a few hundred years. even then the costs will be brutal. way i see it nuclear sites will always be radioactive hot zones, since they all store their waste on site. these sites remain dead zones for awhile. also seems like the perfect place for a nuclear power plant. thus in situ waste can be managed properly. decommission first and second gen reactors for fourth and fifth gen as needed, all on the same site. if we develop better nuclear waste handling capabilities, we can start thinking about modular reactors that can plug into existing thermodynamic infrastructure, say replace old coal boilers. and when those reactors are spent, ship them to a reprocessing/recycling/decommissioning facility. as for fear mongering, i think the timetable is grossly exaggerated to stimulate action, they say 20, i think we might have 100 (its the fusion cliché in reverse). sure we should behave as if the worst prediction is accurate, but that does not mean abandoning long term solutions. stopgaps buy time for those plants to be constructed, which in turn buys time to complete development of fusion. and maybe we will sidestep it all with beamed orbital solar (environmentalists seem to want to stop development on that front as well). i like green technology, solar, wind, storage, etc, these are all effective technologies for specific purposes, but then again so is nuclear. to block one in favor of another feels like dumping out half your tool box into the ocean, and hoping to hell you don't need the wrench you just threw out when your ship starts sinking. any application that results in something that can be stored in tanks is a good application of wind/solar. desalination is one application, but another is hydrogen production. hydrogen doesn't quite work for cars but it might work with trucks. intermittent production is acceptable, just price your product based on how full your tanks are at the time.

if were making this argument, then even if fusion works, nobody will use it. it will be too expensive. history is rife with situations where cost cutting measures ended up being a bad idea in the long run. that's what got us into fossil fuel dependence in the first place.