Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

This ship, the "Icon of the Seas" is generating a lot of controversy. Up to a point, i don't see the problem.

By all means, let everyone who wants to board it do so, and let it sail. The only part I object to is letting it ever come back.

Voting made easy:

Researching the issues and candidates can be time-consuming and baffling. instead, try this. Pick the most reliably wrong-headed person you know who likes to buttonhole you and tell you their theories about the world. Ask them how they intend to vote. Then do the opposite.

(Half-stolen or at best heavily paraphrased from Robert A. Heinlein)

Been trying here and there to watch the third series of #JackRyan on #AmazonPrime. It feels terribly padded: long conversations that don't reveal anything new, entire scenes and set pieces that backtrack rather than advance the plot. The first two series didn't have this problem. I might stop here in the middle of the third episode and see if the fourth series is any better.

It occurred to me that the Spın̈al Tap quote from Nigel Tufnel, "none more black" would be a good band name. So I googled it. First result is a band that had the same thought.

You never know how much you mutter while driving until you review your dashcam footage for the first time.

If someone is a bloviator is that which causes them to bloviate a bloviant?

Offhand I can think of two situations in which someone tells you "go stand in front of that brick wall", and only one of them is to do comedy. Though both can lead to "dying'" in some sense.

I'm still waiting for #Putin to bring #Russia's #Soviet-legacy population of militarized elderlly 1970s-era #psychics into play on #Ukraine, to try to "#manifest" #Zelensky's death by the power of wishful thinking.

It'd be about as effective and non-embarrassing as anything else he's tried.

Having read a lot of #Wolverine-centric #Marvel #Comics, I have to say I think "The Bubs" would be a good band name

By contrast, 2001's Discovery centrifugal habitat ring, thanks to being wholly contained within the pressure hull, was not different in any important way from having a hamster wheel in an Apollo command module. You could plan it in such a way that you could avoid the need for much in the way of crazy-robust and complicated couplings. A single -- admittedly probably pretty elaborate -- coaxial power and data link, some WiFi (1968 version) and simple package transfer of solids and liquids and you're all set. In principle.

#SF #Engineering #Spacecraft

(2001: A Space Odyssey got one thing right, at least: the rotating section was fully contained within the pressurised hull, so you didn't need to build and worry about atmospheric and life-support couplings. 2010 and The Martian, etc, didn't even have this mitigation.)

(If you're using solar collectors and your path isn't radial to the sun, then you don't want the solar collectors to be mounted to the rotating part either. But we've already established that you'll want some minimal nonrotating section with power and comm links, so that's covered.)

My current #SF movie bugbear: Non-rotating #spacecraft with a large rotating section for the human habitat. Bonus points if the habitable part spans both the rotating and non-rotating portions and the crew can move freely between them.

It's an absurdly complex #engineering challenge to build it this way, it introduces an open set of failure modes that would not otherwise exist and there's no good reason for any of it that I can think of.

Instead, rotate the whole ship, and if there are a few things which for some reason must not be rotated (scopes, antennae and cameras, perhaps?) place them in the smallest and simplest possible unpressurised nonrotating segment at the axis.

August 7th:
Feast day of Dometius of Persia and Donatus of Arezzo; in deference to vulgar practice now merged and observed as the feast of Dominos of Pizza. To those still groaning under the yoke of bitter servitude: if you're not delivered in 30 minutes, you're free.

@cherold (the age range is an idiosyncratic choice of my own, of course. 15 is about the earliest age with which I feel much connection to the popular music of the time, and 35 is about the point when I largely stopped feeling much one. Your mileage may vary. Not all stocks go up: some go down. Ask your doctor if highly subjective pop culture generalizations are right for you.)