Nuke

the next thing i read is probibly going to be leviathan falls, as soon as it comes out next month. maybe after that i will do all the foundation prequels/sequels as ive only read the main trilogy (mostly because the show has me confused). i also have a massive pile of battletech books to get into.

i dont think ksp would have been as fun as it is if it weren't for the kerbals. kerbals and their questionable design choices are what make the game fun. for years i was looking for a newtonian space flight simulator that could hold my interest for more than a couple days. orbiter was boring for lack of a better word. not to say there isnt enough room out there for a more true to life space sim out there for space historians, but i dont think it would be as fun as kerbal is.

i think a lot of that came from the fact that pre-automation oceangoing vessels were very labor intensive to operate. did you know the largest group of titanic survivors were actually crew? 192 male crew members all survived and its the biggest group of survivors. female crew members actually had better odds than first class children. the total crew was well over 900. space opera spacefaring often mirrors naval tradition. so by the time star trek aired, ships had gotten a lot more automated. now you can operate a massive cargo vessel with only a handful of crew. actual spacefaring is going to take that to the extreme. rather than more crew you just use better crew, extensively trained in more than one relevant field. you cross train your crew so if you lose a member you aren't dead in the water space (i confuse myself sometimes). i also dont consider anything we have done so far to be actual spacefaring, as everything has always been tethered to mission control. what we have done so far is more akin to taking your dinghy a few yards off the beach to go fishing while a guy on the shore tells me what bait to use.

its actually run by the high school. they use the proceeds to fund teen athletics. so you are pretty much watching the movie in the high school auditorium. its actually not terrible for what it is. short of hopping on a ferry and going to juneau to watch it, or go to anchorage and watch it on imax, which i could afford mind you if i give up on upgrading my video card. perhaps wrangel has it, they are only a couple islands over, i could probibly kayak it if the seas are calm and provided a kayak costs less than a ferry ticket and the seas aren't 3+ feet high (its fall so they probibly are).

our local one screen one movie a week theatre has suffered a equipment failure. i dont think im getting to see it on the big screen any time soon, or if at all.

that is on the grounds that people know what they are doing. you got people with poorly fitted masks, you got people with their nose out, you got people using diy masks with no scientific testing to back up their efficacy. before the vaccine we used 4-layer medical grade masks. it was hard to get a good face seal. if you have any facial hair its impossible. air is just bypassing the filter in little jets through any cracks it can find, which no doubt carry various germs and viruses at velocity. we wore them before we had vaccines, but mask disposal and handling of used mask or cleaning of reusable masks was something that kind of got glossed over. its now a new litter item thats all over the streets, and some of them no doubt contain covid for the few days it can survive on surfaces. given how little i get out, how i don't like crowds (no social, just distancing), my rural location, and local infection rates, ive stopped wearing masks in most situations. in a different situation i might still wear them, such as an urban setting, or if i need to go somewhere that is full of people, and most health care infrastructure requires them. and frankly the people who dont get their shot now are often the people who didnt wear a mask in the pre-vaccine times. i dont like the idea of masking to protect anti-vaxxers. i like to view it as evolution in progress. id like to see mask mandates go away so that people who aren't getting their shot might reconsider as nobody is required to protect them.

im of the opinion that the plague ended when i got vaccinated. im not sure if that means i get the booster or not. was at the doctor a few days ago and nobody tried to push a booster on me (these people usually jump on you with a flu shot if given the chance). i also view masking as being similar to the door close button on an elevator, to give people a false sense of control in lieu of actual control. the efficacy of properly designed and fitted masks in the hands of trained medical professionals was somewhat questionable, they work when coupled with the trained discipline of health care professionals and either one can fail. in the hands of the general public, i don't think they do a damn thing.

its like science, with poop!

had an option to buy an rtx3070 at about $800 which i had to very reluctantly turn down. only problem was the card was a little too chonky to fit into my sff build. i mean i got tons of space as far as an sff build goes, this thing can fit a dual slot 3-fan card all the way to 332mm. height is an issue, a lot of cards are just too tall and dont give me room to connect the power, only 3.5cm is available between the top of the bracket and the case panel, this one would have barely scraped by because it used recessed power connectors. it the thickness that kills it though, id have to remove case fans and the front panel usb, both of which i kind of need.

in space, crap is a much more valuable resource.

im still a proponent of outhouses. not a common urban appliance except the plastic port-o-potties you see at construction sites and sports events. no im talking that little wooden 4x4 shack out in the middle of the field. dig a hole, drop a section of plastic culvert with perforations in the bottom end (we just used a spade bit) and fill in around it with dirt. then you drag your shack over it. every few years you have to start a new hole, you move the shack to the new tube, line it up with the toilet seat, and just fill in the other one with dirt and the culvert just stays in. buried plastic is effective carbon sequestration (though you can build a wooden box if you want something biodegradable, just make sure you replace the hole before the wood rots). its a good trade off between environmentally friendly and sanitary.

anything that can be craped can be burned of you dry it first, thus reclaiming the water in the process. also crap can be mixed with mud for making bricks or for plastering various constructions. probibly not useful on a space station unless it was a huge tourus or oneil cylendar with a lot of land area. perhaps more useful in planetary colonization. i can imagining traveling millions of miles to live in an adobe hut an mars. i wonder if crap is an effective sealant. a more environmentally friendly approach is to use gray water for toilet flushing. with the amount of gray water that gets wasted, the 1.5 gpf doesnt seem like that much. just run the water feed from a tank placed above the toilet to the toilet and gravity will handle the tank refils, all you have to do is pump filtered gray water into the tank from various sources. usually its as simple as putting the plug in the tub before a shower and then pump it to top off the tank. your morning shower alone could probibly handle a days worth of flushing. feeding it waste water from laundry or other appliances. a bigger tank means you can save even more water by reducing showers or laundry. i think the biggest issue might be the various detergents coming off of appliances, and gray water from showers is likely going to have a problem with soap scum buildup on the tank that might cause problems down the line. so you will probibly need additives and filtering to keep the gray water as clean as possible while controlling bacterial growth. we actually throw out quite a bit of water for the sake of hygiene, sometimes to the point of excess.

this is why we need a cat centrifuge module. cats could probibly work out in zero g, but they sure as hell wouldn't like it.

sounds like an engineering problem to me. you would probibly just use the innards from a zero g toilet (assuming it can function in gravity) and reinforce the seat.

not the monkees! the beatles.!

lucy in the sky! with diamonds?

are you sure it was static and not something else? ive had a few mobos over the years that just did not like 4 sticks or needed their overclocks reduced when using 4. tweak until memtest 86 doesn't fail. if you observed static its entirely possible it was disipated by the heat spreader. most chips are in bga or other packages without exposed leads, and the vias are usually covered by silk screen, so the only way for static to get in is the contacts. its also not unusual that modern parts have esd resistant i/o ports. since i got into sff builds ive only been using 2 slot mobos. really cuts out the guess work. i just get the best thing on the qvl i can find/afford. my machine is still not done. i got it mining eth on my 1060 but until i get a better cooler and a new video card its staying on the bench. im just going to put in an aio, i cant get the air cooler to fit without my $200 case looking like ass. i also dont want to take the performance hit of a smaller air cooler. its a shame i really liked the performance i was getting (was turboing faster than my 8086k and the benchmarks had it slated on a whole different level).

i think i left out a few. dont waste time chasing perfection, its unobtanium. manors are free, broken bones are expensive. sometimes solving a problem is easier than complaining about the problem. when this is not true, complaining about the problem is pointless. stop calling people stupid. for stupidity befalls everyone at some point no matter how smart they are (even einstein had his derps). its often hard to tell the difference between someone who is stupid from someone who is simply using their brain. cats always find less enjoyment from a luxury item than the box it came in. humans should learn from this. don't go looking for dirt, you will find it. bacon can be used as an antidepressant. you can never collect too many tools. never miss an opportunity to learn new skills, especially when it doesn't cost you anything. it never hurts to be frugal, if you spend all your money then you don't have any money. fast food is neither fast nor is it food. never waste good weather, especially if you live some place that doesn't get any. don't hold people to standards you cant hold yourself. when people are handing out free stuff, declining is always an option. don't ask for help you don't need. save it for someone that does. if you find a good fishing spot, don't tell anyone about it. never pick up a crab by the front. for those who live in rural areas, your front porch is often the best nature channel. do not turn your burners up all the way, you will burn things.

life is a scam. give them nothing. create entropy, everyone else does. never turn down a good thing, they are vanishingly rare. don't sweat the small stuff, or the big stuff either. don't try to change the world, someone will inevitably try to change it back. don't try to save the world. according to the laws of physics, its already damned. people are liars, especially when they think they are speaking the truth. don't work too hard. 10% of the people do 90% of the work, don't be one of those fools in the 10%. don't waste your youth, it disappears faster than you think. the chase is better than the catch. get a cat. if you already have a cat, get another cat. don't waste your time having virtues you can't live up to. always use a beer cozy, it keeps it that much colder. be wary of happy people, they tend to be a delusional lot. dont do a rich man's work for him. instead do your own work. and a few others i cant say here.

they are going up on the cw. no sub required.

i think that all centrifuge types have a place on spacecraft depending on purpose and size of ship. i came up with 10 different gravity classes in order of least to most massive: 1. no gravity (everything we have done so far) 2. tether gravity (ship from stowaways) 3. single module on boom (with counter weight, like the edward israel from expanse s4) 4. multi module on boom (ship from europa report) 5. modular ring (endurance from interstellar) 6. small ring (discovery from 2001) 7. spun up ship (avalon from passengers) 8. medium ring module (ship from the martian, propulsion, fuel, etc at hub) 9. ring ship (with distributed propulsion, fuel, etc in the ring. may be hubless using structural cables or may locate a reactor or nuclear propulsion in hub to reduce radiation shielding requirements). 10. massive cylinder (think orion powered interstellar generation ship) early interplanetary missions would likely be 2-5, and maybe 1 (though i figure thats only useful for a mars/venus flyby or missions to asteroids and small moons with low gravity). military will probibly use 1, 6, and 7. cargo ships will likely be 3 or 4, though 7 can be used if cargo requires gravity. bulk passenger transport would be 6-9 depending on capacity. colony ships would be 8-10 with 10 for long range colonization missions. mining ships could be anything depending on what you are mining and where the refinery is. i dont see us getting past 5 or 6 in our life time.

with a ring station i think the counterintuitive part is that you need more material close to the hub than you do near the deck. most materials are better in tension than in shear, and you got lots of tension near the deck and lots of shear near the hub. im not sure that this is a huge problem with cables though, as they tend to be flexible. also a tether system is going to mean a significantly more light weight solution. construction cranes might be the model to go after as they lift heavy loads long distances on relatively thin cables. its unlikely you would have a kilometer of cable on a construction crane, but some of the cranes used for undersea operations got some reach. needless to say its an engineering problem, and not really a very hard one when compared to something like a rocket engine or nuclear reactor. wrt needing 1g. it makes sense for large stations built for long term habitation but not really for crew gravity on space craft especially in transit to a planet/moon with something else. one of the advantages of a tether system is you can tweak the parameters of the gravity to acclimatize astronauts to their destination. a large centrifuge can too, its just you can only tweak rpm and cant control radius and you likely have to build it beefier if you want 1g or higher (not really a problem with a light weight tether system though).

getting paid to play video games may actually become a thing. in ye olden days of yore, you paid money for video games, they would run on modest hardware, they tended to have exit points and hardly any grind at all. it was for fun. games were simple and not something you really could live in. but things have changed since the golden dos era. video hardware started getting insanely powerful. software renderers gave way to hardware acceleration which led to better and better video hardware that rival what people in the '90s would call a supercomputer. at the same time games changed. multiplayer became a thing in the quake era, but the games were still simple. around the same time were games that started to have a cinematic story, then cutscenes gave way to interactive storytelling, games also got bigger games, like minecraft and elite dangerous and the amount of time you can sink into them became astronomical. changes in pricing models made it possible to pay subscriptions to play games depended on external datacenters and the mmo was born. but gamers didnt like the subscription fees. some time later devs figured you could make more money letting people play for free and selling premium content, the f2p model became highly lucrative. somewhere in there gpu crypto mining became a thing, while its possible to run a large scale farm and get filthy rich, you can use small scale farming to fund your gaming hardware and many games, because most of them take place in the datacenter, my gpu is grossly underutilized and as a result i can turn a small amount of profit just by playing video games. these are things that have happened. fastforward a hundred years. power has become cheap due to commercial fusion and environmental catastrophes have been averted. all world currencies become cryptographic. population is still an issue and needs to be controlled (video games are good at this and high end gaming hardware is as ubiquitous as tv was in the 80s, the internet in the 90s, and the smartphone is now). meanwhile companies have developed software to put the capabilities of gamers to work to solve real world problems (for example basing real-world logistics after virtual infrastructure that someone made in a game). computers have reached the pinnacle of their performance, virtual reality sets now feature direct neural interfaces (it is no longer possible to know if you are in a virtual world or not). production is almost completely automated and ubi becomes widely adopted. there are very few real world jobs, however virtual jobs exist and you can support yourself irl just by playing video games. some might eve opt to have their brains jacked in at the datacenter and discard their bodies entirely (in the name of efficiency). this might even be an option for robotic space missions, where astronaut brains live in a small self sufficient module and can construct a colony through telepresence robotics.

alaska pfds in drop in a week. what can i get thats better than the rtx2070 super (zotac mini sff version)? lets say a $900 budget. the rtx2070 has been mining for about 8 months while im not using it and i dont expect it to last forever. new case has significantly more space for gpu, though i doubt a 3-fan card will fit. ordered the power supply a couple days ago, can measure for fitment when i get it installed. its a 750w corsair sfx supply, so it should clear the gpu bay (in theory). hash rate also important, i intend to mine with it when its not gaming (and sometimes while it is, kerbal for example is so cpu driven it barely effects my hash rate). lhr may be acceptable with 3 cards running instead of just 2. also not opposed to going red this time. sitting on the money is not an option, entropy will eat it alive if i do nothing with it. we will call it entropy.

no video yet but babylon 5 is getting a reboot, and jms is doing it.