Mars City Planning Commision, Beginning of a Series

Well I have recently been thinking a lot about what it would take to colonize mars. (Yes yes, I know, it’s not very surprising that my thoughts have gone this way is it, oh mythical regular reader?)


So, to this end, I am announcing a new recurring feature for this blog 'Mars City Planning Commission" where I will attempt to list the problems and possible solutions for setting up a colony on mars. To this end, if you have any ideas, any problems, any comments, I certainly could use them. Every bit of information helps. Hopefully, I can get my ass in gear enough to make this a weekly posting, either on Mondays or Tuesdays.


So step 1, brainstorming a whole load of problems.

1. Air
2. Water
3. Heat
4. Food
5. Shelter
6. Transportation to Mars
7. Landing on Mars
8. Solar Radiation
9. Where to Land
10. Dust storms and other Martian Weather
11. Illness of Colonists
12. Sanity of Colonists
13. Building Materials (Thanks to Orodromeus for bringing this one up)
    

Also it looks like I am forced to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy again...


Anyway, I'm going to continue looking at this list and next week, ill have a longer and more exhaustive list of problems with a little run down of exactly what the problem is.


And Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I will be Bogging (perhaps, live, I mean, I will have my laptop with me) on the Premiere of Hard Problems at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

And so i make my triumphant return. admittedly a tad unceremoniously. with little to no fanfare (at least here on my so called blog) I moved across the country (the planning of this move is partially why I titled this blog between worlds although perhaps the unwritten subtitle in my head would have been better "The Insane Ramblings of a Mechanical Crumbum" (hence the URL)) from Washinton DC to the East Bay in California(about 5 miles north of Berkeley).

Its weird in some ways I am almost infinitely far away (in the only measure that really counts, time) from everyone and everything I once knew and in other ways I am right there with it all. a weird by-product of the internet age seems to me to be that meat-space travel has become, by contrast to mere communication, so slow and tedious as to be almost completely worthless. I mean actual travel, thats a day at the least, and add in the planning needed and the packing and the hassle, who would ever go though with all of that?! but thanks to the internet communication means I am effectively right there with the people I knew back east. we can still send links of weird things back and forth to one another. Given that our brains and ideas can still flow almost freely (you do lose something important without visuals or sound but the influx of cheap webcams like the iSight and microphones and things like SKYPE make that lessen by the day) means the gain from actually meeting someone face to face is minimal which draws our world closer together but also throws it further apart.

Thats all for now.

The Pope Pirates say ARRRibadurrci

my problem with blogging and XOR

Blogging is not easy for a man like me. i can never think of anything interesting to write about.

well, that's not exactly true, i can think of some interesting things to write about but i cant write about them. and i can only write about uninteresting things. its a hellish circle of evil. So at least in this case, i decided well if you cant think of anything why not go meta! everyone likes meta!

wait a second, that's only true if either
A: everyone now means no-one

XOR

B: likes now means hates.

god i am such a douche. but moving on. going more into the realm of meta I'm going to analyze my use of that XOR over there. why does English not have 2 separate words for the inclusive and exclusive or? the closest we get is the XOR which, lets face facts, is just sort of dumb sounding. Logicians really dropped the ball when they came up with that one. i mean sure its fine if you are just trying to draw a circuit, but for conversation, it just doesn't slip off the tongue. and its not like i can say "lets do this or that but not both" in just regular conversation.

anyway back to the original meta. fuck blogging. that is all


see you later alligator.

First post, some thoughts, overall plan.

I am a crappy writer. In fact, the only thing I do worse than writing is blogging (possibly extreme spelunking). So, I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I suck at this very thing, which, incidentally, is why I'm doing it, so that i can suck just one iota less. Seriously, did you read that sentence? (of course you didn't, you don't exist, I mean who actually reads this type of blog anyway?) It was terrible.

Okay, okay enough bitching, its time to get down to brass tax. I'm using this blog as a place to think about various things, for example, why the baby boomers fucked everything up. what the fuck is wrong with the world, what the fuck we, the children of the baby boomers can do to fix it, (as if we can, i mean they really screwed the pooch on that one. and lets be honest, we suck something hard too). why we cant live in the retro-future, no matter how awesome it would be. the lack of any new frontier (god what i would do to go off to a little country in the middle of nowhere and oppress the natives. Daniel Dravot is the one true god). Morality, Logic, and the fall of the American empire.