Tuesday, March 26, 2024
A City On Mars
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Non-exciting update, I promise
Little by little I am getting ready for mass production of the turtle. I could send the shape to a aerodynamic analytic bot and it would say A-OK. If it looks good it will fly.
The 3D print negative mold for a silicone rubber positive mold is a dream. Plaster molds almost demold themselves. What a happy material partnetship I've found.
Silicone rubber is fun stuff actually. I honestly can't praise it enough. Such fidelity!
On a reality note, hopefully my last eye operation to save this valiant brave eye. My right eye is thirty years older than me, and it shows, but I will have no secessions from my Union. Keeping the eye, godammit
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
You Should be Afraid of Your Government
The more I complain about not wanting to do anything, the more shit I end up doing. Imagine Frankenstein Happy.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I'm reading A City On Mars and the topic that is screaming to me is infrastructure. Plenty of energy out there, same as here. Ah, but infrastructure, like we have on Earth? That costs a lot of money.
Not just money, lives, little bees what live in tomorrow's trees and make the honey money; us busy little creatures. How are you going to get a million people on Mars, like Elon Musk wants? (BTW, a viable Martian colony starts at 100 million people, assuming one person can wear two hats).
Material, wanted material, needs to be gathered and distilled same as down here. We have the same infrastructure problem as here, but you are doing it out there; in a Solar System with no free air, water, gravity, radiation shield, a microbial ecosystem of unknown benefactors?
The thing on Earth is the distilling and transport of materials - since the Modern Age - been energy cheap, but still material scarce. Or rather, the right kind of material. Before modern times, we were energy scarce but materially wealthy. Slaves extracted and distilled the material from vast sources. Not so much now. And, what good is a ten million trillion dollar platinum asteroid? Except maybe as a threat to drop it on someone?
The infrastructure problem of space for space is just too big, because space is too big and spread out. You need big, huge infrastructure to do the job. The argument is but we will have so much energy. Yes, you'll need it. Even though E=mc2, you need infrastructure to do that. Big time, long term, and the only way that happens is to involve government. That should worry you. As I've argued before, governments are the AI we've been worrying about, and corporations more limited version of these monstrous.. monsters.
The objective function of your government may not coincide with your comfort zone. Most educated US citizens are well aware of the horrific beastly shenanigans of our adolescent corporate self, a 360 million cell slime mold living on a globe of slime molds, each snarling and snapping at pseudopod limbs.
What to do about this big kaiju? Become a virus, I guess.
Friday, February 23, 2024
Peach Tree Dish
Friday, February 2, 2024
Texas cannot secede.
Friday, January 26, 2024
Non-exciting update on the one hit wonders
One of the little old ladies in my ceramics class noticed the last batch of flower pipes I made. She asked if she could have one and I said sure, expressing surprise that she smoked weed.
"I don't", she said, "but my son works for one of those dispensaries, and he might be interested in this product".
I said I don't think I want to manufacture these in bulk but let me dial in the protoypes and get the construction more streamlined and we will talk. I figure a licensing aggreement in which case, I know I would get around 5% of any proceeds. Definitely not interested in spending my days in mass production hell, but I also am interested in some extra dough.
I modified how I produced the plaster molds. Making 3D prints for the two-part plaster mold halves (software modification easier than contructing a new pipe to mold), but I often had to destroy the 3D print while demolding from the plaster.
So instead I made a 3D print of the mold part, and then poured silicone rubber in to create the working mold halves.
I made a two part plaster with the rubber mold parts today and it worked slick as snot.
This was such a painless process that I am now interested in applying this reusable mold teachnique for other projects, possibly even complex multipart plaster molds, which is a step back into the past, tech-wise. No matter.
So, I will have distracted myself on to other things, per usual.
Saturday, January 20, 2024
Oh, NOW you want nuclear fusion power?
At DAVOS, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares new sources of power to meet the energy demand of AI, particularly nuclear fusion. Like the cryptocurrency clusterfuck, AI is consuming vast amounts of power, and Sam Altman finally says maybe we should get commercial fusion power going.
Hey, I'm all for it, but rather than create the bloated turd that is ITER, with a corrupt and sclerotic bureaucracy, and piece meal efforts of various institutions, we could have provided a concentrated, multi-hundred billion dollar effort to get there. Had we wished to, we probably could have had fusion power by the year 2000. We did not wish to. Money wasn't a problem, as we managed to throw tens of trillions at stupid wars. Just a fraction of that money gets you nuclear fusion.
Part of the reason is a rather wise choice not to pursue such superdense energy systems due to lack of knowledge and technology. That's fair. If the tech and knowledge was in place (now they are), do you really want chain saws and off road vehicles run on Mr. Fusion? Why the planet would be a wreck in no time. For that matter, what if it is easier to build a fusion rocket than a reactor. A fusion rocket gets you to Mars, but it can also be a devastating weapon on terrestrial targets.
The spending of $100 billion to date on self-driving cars (replacing cheap human drivers with shoddy expensive robots) probably could have gotten us a aneutronic fusion power source. My vote is for hydrogen boron fusion being pursued by HB11 and Helion Energy. Billionaires are now finally throwing their money at it, and devoting AI architecture to the now familar problems.
But for what? Don't we have enough scams already? More than half the stuff on the internet is AI generated garbage. It's clogging Google search, which I can personally attest is getting worse. Not to mention this AI adventure is still a Mechanical Turk, with humans tasked to sift out the horrible and hallucinating content to be fed to the robots. Not to mention glean out the AI generated garbage to be scrapced as data. The only people I see making money on this is the billionaires who already have a monopoly on, well, everything. Looks pretty grim.