TJIC: Getting ready for the belt

Travis is thinking ahead . .

We need a few things before we move out to the Belt:

• space elevators to get us out of the gravity well
  
• good hydroponic mini-farms
  
• efficient airlocks
  
• a replacement for government title registries

The linked article is good - very infomration dense. I would add that things will really take off when fabricators are perfected enabling settlements to sever supply lines and live off the land.

'Tis the season

I blogged Dr. Pournelle's learned take on the 'war on Christmas'. Foamy has his own opinion as well ...

Leave the Christmas folks alone. 'Tis the season to STFU and stop being a whiny bitch.

Foolish Consistency

Speaking of exploring space . . .

Please do what you can to help us build pressure against the launch of New Horizons. Cancel the mission. The planets have been out there a long time and aren't going anywhere. Explore space sure, but don't risk the lives of people here on Earth. Develop alternative technologies for space exploration. No nuclear launches!

Hunh. This is the same guy who last year wrote;

Generally I think our membership would first support building a real mass transit system here on planet Earth before we go rushing off intospace. It is our belief that until we get our shit together here on this planet we ought to slow down the rush to move our bad seed of war, greed, and environmental degredation into the heavens.....

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds as that foolish little man said. Glad to see Bruce - and by extention his network of fellow travellers at GNAW is on board with the program. Next year the moon.

Attention ET: We taste terrible

This is the first thing an ET will hear as he / she / it approaches Earth. Good if they get the joke. Better if they have no sense of humor and conclude that treating homo sap gently and with respect is the prudent course of action.

Via Transterrestrial Musings

Just squint and mentally add a rusty red hue

Hey look .. the future . . .

Concordia Station is one of the most isolated -- and most important -- permanent scientific outposts on Antarctica. A joint project of French and Italian national research programs, with the involvement of the European Space Agency, Concordia has just completed its first "overwinter" mission and is now home to its second
crew. Antarctic research, while interesting, isn't inherently worldchanging, but Concordia is special: its location, Dome C, is rapidly becoming the best spot for a variety of scientific missions on Antarctica; and this year's overwinter crew at Concordia has the assignment of prepping for a mission to Mars.

Home Sweet Home

Haliburtonish Subway Empire and Marching Society

GET THE F*** OUT.

Pardon the profanity. But .. really .. do you guys expect the great big Haliburtonish Subway Empire and Marching Society (HSE&MS) to listen? Or ... really ... to care? You've elevated the discourse past 'loud' to 'crude'; if I wouldn't listen to you - indeed after being told to get the f*** out I'd do all in my power to get the f*** in just to annoy you and watch you turn purple in hapless fury - why should the HSE&MS?

*Motto: Coming soon to dominate your hometown and make you eat six-inch BLT on wheat.

From Interdependence to Independence: A Path Forward

From Event Horizon;

For instance how many people dare not speak their minds on important matters – not for fear that they will be arrested by some secret police – but merely from fear that they will lose their jobs? What I'm trying to say is that as society becomes increasingly interdependent the individual must necessarily lose independence and become subject to the will of the whole in order to just subsist. It was for this very reason that Theodore Kaczynski (AKA the unibomber) came to believe that all technology must be destroyed. So the question remains: How can ever increasing interdependence be squared with human freedom? The answer is that it cannot be.

So should we just throw in the towel and all become Luddites? Certainly not. The advance of technology could not be stopped even if it were desirable. The solution to this problem is technology it self.

I foresee a radical new state of affairs arising in which every individual is self-sustaining and independent and yet continues to enter into states of cooperation willingly and not because it is necessary. Let's take a look at what kind of technologies will make this possible and then I will flesh out the concept.

More at the link. These are important things to think about. It is certain that the advances of the past several hundred years - from muscle power to space flight in just a few generations - are down to rule of law and the rights of the individual. How do we keep that engine going?

Pournelle - The War on Christmas

Pournelle on the War on Christmas. Of course he dives into the heart of the matter;

Our system is designed to appeal from Peter drunk with emotional appeals to Peter sober and rational, and it has generally worked; but I urge all of you to think on what happens when the majority finds its will frustrated over what it perceives to be trivial matters: trivial to those who object, but not at all trivial to the majority itself.
...
So my concern in this War on Christmas is that those who seek to manipulate the system to remove from it all traces of support for the religious principles that generated the nation may find they have done a better job than they intended; and that if enough people begin seriously to ask why they should put up with people not like them, and whom they do not like, they may come to conclusions most of those here would abhor.

In Which Jane Fonda Irks Me

Jane Fonda has never bothered me. Hanoi Jane was a long time ago - I found her actions there irksome but that was another war; I was five.

But this is really damned irritating.

One doctor, she insists, told her U.S. troops had been deliberately trained to be "killing machines."

True enough actually. See neo-neocon for a nuaned discussion of that point.

"This began," Fonda maintained, "because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren't killing enough."

Again, true. See the above link.

"So they changed training procedures" to teach troops how to commit atrocities.

Hunh. Somehow at Infantry Training School (now called SOI) I missed the training blocks devoted to rape, abuse, mass murder and etc.

Damned foolish woman; what is irritating is that people will latch onto this as gospel. Not the least of them our enemies.

Thinking long term

Why Democrats should support space exploration

The fact that it has fallen to a Republican president to issue the Vision for Space Exploration should not keep Democrats from supporting it. Divided as Americans are on so many other issues, the expansion of humanity throughout the solar system is a cause worthy of a Grand Alliance.

Well yah, good luck with that. My own (modest and, I admit, politically naive) judgment is that if a Democrat wins the Presidency VSE is dead in the water. Not for it's flaws, but because it was Chimpy McBushitler's plan, and for that reason alone it's got to go. You spend (not you, nor you but those other guys) spend eight years equating someone with a mad dictator and a primate ... obviously nothing much good can come from it, nu?

Sow the wind and weep; killing VSE might well spell the end of any manned exploration for yet another generation, all things considered.

In twenty or a hundred years our clever robot probes that we'll throw across the system in our stead (we're saving money! for more return on our investment!) can be picked apart for salvage by explorers and colonists from a more vigorous culture.

-----

This is 'why' space4commerce, this is why I work gratis for Liftport. Because the species needs space and the options it will give us. More, we'll benefit by having a liberal Western culture growing ascross the system. It is not improbable that a more vigirous culture, with values anithetical to Western values, could take up the challenge and win the high ground.

Weep, should that happen.

Dear iTerm

Dear iTerm.

It's just not working out. You're flashy, you're hip and cool - you bring things to a terminal session that Terminal just doesn't have.

But sweatheart - you've got problems. The "won't save default settings" issue I can overlook. Heck it's fun editing preference files to save a default setting, when that option clearly does not work in your menu. Once.

But worse, you crash. With frequent abandon. This just is not cool in a terminal session, and it's your worst sin of all. I'm sorry, but it's .. over.

Going on a bear hunt

In New Jersey. They've bagged (as of today) 216 black bears including a six-hundred pounder. This might sound like a slaughter except they estimate the (pre hunt) population of black bears tops out at 3,000. New Jersey, for the love of sweet-thorny-headed Christ.

In which I display my lack of tolerence for bums

Freeganism. Everything you fear it is, and more. So much more.* I'm getting old and grumpy. In my day we'd call these guys 'bums'.

*phrase borrowed with glee from Dave at Garfield Ridge.

A modest proposal: American / Australian Union

He's kidding of course.

Modest Proposal Number 317: America becomes part of Australia.

Yet .. weather and the women aside the idea does have it's merits.

Columbus or Erikson?

Columbus or Erikson?

Human history has favored both the spatial and cultural expansion. Fresh prospects yield new perspectives. Life springing from the sea to land was similarly favored. We now stand on a beach, our world, timidly dipping a toe into the sea of space.

We stare into this ocean of light and imagine we are the Columbus generation. I fear we may be the Lief Eriksons.

Via Music of the Spheres.

The merry sound of children

screaming in terror. Inside a snow globe. Don't look at me like that .. it's funny.

Via.

We need a space frontier

This on Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Mail 390;

I agree with you in today's view, but, I also believe that holding back automation is a cure whose results are worse than the disease. Keeping skilled jobs that could otherwise be replaced with machines is just another way of saying those workers are not smart enough for the real work.

What we need is a space frontier. Our society in this country has no place for the young to aspire to. The frontiers are gone. The current model of rock star and mega rich is simply too shallow and of course pointless. And it is only going to get worse. A space frontier would provide an environment where the left of the bell curve as well as the right would find great opportunity. Hard work and guts would be just as valuable as advanced skills and in many jobs more important.

Phil Tharp

The sign of a truly intelligent man is when he agrees with you ...

Hunh. The English middle class tired of the Laud's gaudy Episcopapacy and fled to the New World. Some of my ancestors sought the frontier, bypassing the settled Atlantic colonies for the West. When the solid American middle-class tires of seeing their world eaten into from beneath, and tires of seeing their close held values mocked by the rich and Progressive elements .. where will they go?

In a hundred years will we see a revitalized, Anglosphere presence in the heavens? And will they ... you know .. care as little for the new Old world as the Americans of Jackson's and Houston's era cared for Great Britan?

This is what I get for re-reading history books at night.

Linkage

The Dunbar Number as a limit to group sizes. Because group dynamics are important for a small organization.

"In short, alternate energy eliminates many of the problems which turn natural disasters and economic problems into crises." See Alternate energy is civil defense.

Ramsey Clark is a tool. Sorry, he's a past AG and a good guy but there it is. Via TJIC.

Michael Mealing has some interesting things to say about infrastructure.

Space Station Sims.

Bruce Gagnon is going all Thoreau and babbling about snow.

Pandora's Box

Pandora. They're evil, no doubt, because they make you register, demanding a modest amount of information and they display ads. But they've got a neat trick in the area of music streaming. Pick a singer or song and they'll stream music similar to you choice. Similar to last.fm, granted, but it's not a clone of that service but a country cousin.

And they've gone better than last.fm in at least one respect; they know about Robert Earl Keen and Jerry Jeff Walker - artists that last.fm never could manage to find. Ya gotta love an online service that is either so cool or so dorky they've got Robert Earl Keen and Jerrry Jeff Walker in their database. It's like listening to Bruce Kidder and Brett Dillon at KHYI whenver I want.

Via Infectious Greed.

12/4/05 Update: Pandora is hiring - and oh-good-golly it sounds like a little slice o' geek heaven. You can always tell a lot about an organization by what they look for when they hire people.

Core Technologies: Linux, bash/sh, tcp/ip, nfs, x86 hardware, and dns/named, Linux, Java, Python/Jython, Apache, distributed systems, embedded systems

Secondary Technologies: Cisco/Foundry, ipchains/iptables, ipsec, Debian/GNU, apt, rpm, Postfix, VNC, evms, Raid, Postgres, python, C, PostgreSQL, XML-RPC, Jetty, Lisp, Oracle, PL/SQL, streaming media.

Drool.

Comic Goodness

Dunno if they'll be in it for the long run (Hi Schlock Mercenary) but La Casa Comics is entertaining.

This one about Washington's weather is funny.

Via Dean's World.