How to make it into a porcupine.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Latest SLS Travails
Every time I read a status on the thing, I’m struck by just how terrible a design this is. They couldn’t have come up with a better way of wasting money and time ad infinitum. And people in comments are rooting for a catastrophe. Hard to disagree with them.
What Was Old Is New Again
Will we return to privately funded exploration, for space?
It’s much more likely than NASA going anywhere.
Lucid Dreams
A chemical method of inducing them.
When I was younger, I rarely dreamt, period. (And yes, I get the bullshit that I was dreaming but I just didn’t know it. Sorry, if I don’t actually have any memory of experiencing it, it’s not dreaming — it’s just some weird and useless unrememorable mental state ).
But in my elder years, I dream quite a bit, and most of it is unpleasant (sort of a nightmare, in which things are continuously shifting, and where I am and what I have, or what I possess, or how I am being transported is inconstant).
But I have also started, on rare occasions, to have lucid dreams. I particularly remember one in which the cat started talking to me (in English), and I realized, “Gee, I’m pretty sure cats don’t do that. I must be dreaming.” And the dream was amazingly realistic, just like real life, so it was pretty cool. I’m not sure it’s useful, but it’s a lot better than the crap dreams I was having in which I didn’t understand that I was dreaming, until I finally realized (because everything was continually changing) that it was a dream, but at that point, I woke up.
How Space Can Aid Human Flourishing
An interview with Bob Zubrin.
The Ukraine War
Private Space Stations
A good overview from Jeffrey Kluger.
The Return Of The Third Horseman
We’ve had pestilence and war, and now famine appears inevitable in the near term.
Eating Plastic
Is it killing your gut?
I rarely drink out of plastic bottles. And most of the water I drink comes from our four-stage reverse-osmosis filter. Not sure where else I’d be getting plastic.
Brownian Motion
…as an energy source?
We’ll see.