Thought Patterns

There be power in 'em.

Was cruising folkses blogs today and visited Irysangel (aka Jill Myles). She has a post up titled "LiveJournal Hivemind, help!" With a title like that, I just had to see what she wanted (although I am not part of the LiveJournal Hivemind, fer shur)

As folks helped her out, they gave links to various sites and I am just droolin' like mad!

Synonyms24.com - whoa, dudes. "Welcome to synonyms24.com. This is a collection of more than 100 000 english synonyms. You can search for english synonyms by typing in a word above or by browsing through the synonyms." How cool is that? I had fun there, looking up various words, following thoughts and concepts along the way. Awesome.

The Phrontistery, Compendium of Lost Words - "Welcome to the Compendium of Lost Words, a component of The Phrontistery. The Compendium lists over 400 of the rarest modern English words - in fact, ones that have been entirely absent from the Internet, including all online dictionaries, until now. By revealing the existence of these words online, I do not necessarily promote their revival, but I do encourage an appreciation of the flexibility of English vocabulary. In theory, the Compendium will be the only web page on which each of these words occurs in its proper English context." You must check out this site. The words are just amazing. And you can use a few and people think you actually know something! Seriously, though, some of these will be perfect for this one character I have. Be sure to check out the links in the sidebar.

I always use WordWeb to get the meaning of a word and possible synonyms. Now, though, if I am not quite happy with the results, I can hop over to the Synonyms24 site.

As always, I am constantly looking for the perfect keyboard. Since my laptop's monitor died and I am stuck at a desk (vs where ever), my research into them has dropped to minimal effort.

But today I see an article about the "new" keyboards out there. LiveScience.com has a video article (short and sweet) about the different ergonomic keyboards out there.

The video article mentions a several keyboards. I'm not sure on the spelling of the last two and will be looking them up in a minute.

Kinesis Advantage
Goldtouch
Kinesis Freestyle (check out the YouTube video)
Safetype (the site has sound come on when you first load the page so be aware and don't jump out of your skin like I did!)
G-tech (also has sound! and has more annoying sounds as you move the cursor across a link. annoying)
das keyboard (not sure why this one was included in the article….)
Saitech - couldn't find the keyboard on their site. Again, not sure why this one was listed in terms of ergonomics
I-tech

Another site, speedingcomputer.com, had a listing of "25 Coolest (and most unconventional) keyboards" almost all the keyboards above, plus several others. The most intriguing are the AlphaGrip and the Combimouse.

I find myself drawn, still, to the Kinesis Advantage and to their new Freestyle. I like that the Freestyle can come with a 20" cord between the two sections. I don't like that I have to buy all these accessories to make it at an angle or curved.

I'm droolin' over the possibilities and the story ideas sparking off in me 'ead.

From Wired News:

Space Dust: It's Alive and It's … Us?
By Brandon Keim August 17, 2007 | 11:47:06 AM

That life should be carbon-based is a pretty dated assumption. These days, the zeitgeist is all about sustained organization and patterns of energy flow. Really, should aliens be organic just because we are?

So cast aside the blinders of earth-based life, and open your mind to this:

… an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

The right conditions are found in a plasma — that "fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas, in which electrons are torn from atoms leaving behind a miasma of charged particles."

They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma. […]

"These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve."

(link to article - check out their continuing links at the bottom of the article)

Plasma. As in plasma drives. As in plasma whatever, Scotty. Droolin', abso-freakin'-lutely droolin'.

What if the plasma is alive and works for a living inside your ship's engine? What if they were inorganic gerbils spinning the wheels to propel your ship through space? What would you feed them? What do they want for pay? Or are they slaves? Unwilling since we don't realize they are sentient? How would they be contained? What would keep them from getting bored and moving on somewhere else?

Inorganic life.

Granted, the fact that they organized into "helical structures" is based on a computer model. Whether or not it would happen in reality, we don't know. And do we want to find out? We can't store enough of the sun's energy, how do we think we could store energy from plasma? It would have to be one heck of a powerful Swiffer to control that kind of dust. Brings new meaning to the term "dust bunny", don't it?

I use several bits of software as I write.

I use OpenOffice.org as my word processor. It is open source and free.

I use Notepad2, a free text editing program that makes M$ Notepad look like rock and chisel.

And I use WordWeb Pro as my dictionary/thesaurus. And dude, this program is the best! I use it quite often. There is a free version but to really take advantage of all it can offer, I suggest the Pro version. The biggest change from 4.8 (which I had) to the 5.1 (which I just upgraded to) is the web browser look-ups.

With my purchase, came a Wikipedia plug-in. This means that when I look up a word, it not only checks the dictionaries on your computer, but also Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and WordWeb Online.

Another new thing is its ability to connect to other dictionary programs you may already have, such as Encarta or Webster. This would be great for those more high-brow words.

So, yeah, WordWeb Pro is expensive ($49 package or $73 separate) if you get all the bells and whistles in terms of word lists (language, geographical, and "additional"). If you just want the program, that's $29. I sprung for the entire thing to see how much I actually used any of the lists.

I once read Battlefield Earth. It was awful. Predictable, far too easy solutions, and just plain hokey. But still, I read it because I wanted to see humankind survive.

One thing I liked about the book was that since disaster (the arrival of aliens) struck suddenly, there were lots of stuff laying around. No one knew how to use them or what they were for, but there they were. About the only good thing about the book was how the author described the humans trying to figure out what things were.

When I was in college, oh so long ago, a professor read an anthropologist's report. It described the bizarre ritualistic behavior of the humanoids in that culture. It wasn't until the end that the listener figured out that the behavior was what most of us were doing every morning. Bathing, grooming, using mirrors, using cosmetics and perfumes, etc.

Another time, I can't remember where or when, I read an article where they pretend to have unearthed a motel. It is far in the future and no one knows what a motel is. So they try and figure out what everything was for. The concluded that it was a burial ground. The toilet seat was a crown for some deity called "Sanitizedforyourprotection". They had the bed, the remote, the television, etc. It was quite interesting.

All this leads to something, honest.

I just read an article over at Wired News about Norway's proposed ultimate seed vault: "Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a fortress for up to 3 million seed varieties on a remote island 600 miles from the North Pole. It is an interesting concept, albeit a scary one. We are fucking up our world so bad that we are having to put plant seeds under heavy guard to protect our future. How sad is that?

The project is the first comprehensive effort to protect the world's agricultural gene pool. Some 1,400 seed repositories throughout the world safeguard roughly 1.5 million varieties against crop failure and serve researchers hoping to breed desired traits. But these collections are fragmentary and loosely organized. Many are vulnerable to threats like floods, civil strife, and simple mismanagement. The Svalbard facility will be a backup to the backups, preserving the DNA of every crop on the planet along with wild relatives. Once the doors open, seeds will be released only if every other source has been depleted or destroyed.

The short article ends with a quote:

"This vault is not a time capsule," Fowler says. "It's a living institution." And while it lives, so will the crops that mankind relies on to survive.

For science fiction writers, this is, pun intended, seeds for thought. With no way to read the codes on the vaults, and perhaps no electricity, how would our future selves be able to understand what was in there? What would happen if the vault were to be lost then found again? What if global disaster did strike? Would that place become humankind's mecca? Would the person with the key become the world leader?

Linkage:

The Global Crop Diversity Trust | Svalbard Global Seed Vault

BBCNews: Work begins on Arctic seed vault

Live Science: Norway to House Seeds in Doomsday Vault (from 6/06)

From BBC News Science/Nature:

Galileo system 'in a deep crisis'

Europe's proposed satellite-navigation system, Galileo, will need more public funds if it is to be built.

Hope is receding that a private consortium asked to run the system can end its infighting and meet a 10 May deadline to move the project forward.

This is likely to mean European taxpayers stepping in to cover costs.

German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee, speaking on behalf of the EU, said: "Galileo is going through a deep and grave crisis."

He added: "We're in a dead end street. The cardinal problem is that the companies still have not been able to agree on the way forward. We need to find an alternative solution."

The consortium comprises leading aerospace and telecom concerns: EADS, Thales, Inmarsat, Alcatel-Lucent, Finmeccanica, AENA, Hispasat, and TeleOp.

The European Commission (EC) set the May deadline for them to come forward with a single company structure to run Galileo, a chief executive and common negotiating position.

But with little sign of the target being met to the Commission's satisfaction, the EC is now expected to present new proposals to overhaul the project on 16 May.

link to full article

Politics and business will always be around. This would be an interesting twist to science fiction novels.

Way cool concept!

From Wired News - Science - Space:

Riding the Solar Wind on a 30-Mile Sail
Emmet Cole

A spinning web of electrified wire 30 miles wide may become the spacecraft propulsion system of the future.

A team from the Kumpula Space Center in Finland is proposing a huge electronic sail for spacecraft that may dramatically reduce journey times across the solar system. The giant sail, which would be twice the length of Manhattan, is made from about 100 wires spun up into a whirling disk. Electrified by an onboard, solar-powered electron gun, the positively charged wires repel the negatively charged protons of the solar wind, providing thrust.

The solar wind is a high-speed plasma stream blowing outward from the Sun. The average pressure of the solar wind is miniscule (a mere 2 nanopascals, or 0.2 grams of weight per square kilometer), which explains the need for such a large sail.

"It's such a small force that it's really hard to imagine even," says Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Center, who leads the team behind the concept. "But it's still enough to move the spacecraft because it's doing it continuously over a large area." The sail is described (.pdf) in the latest issue of physics journal Annales Geophysicae.

Because the wires, or tethers, are thinner than human hair, they can create a sail (.avi) that is much larger than a solid surface — up to 30 miles wide.

"The most difficult challenge is posed by the tethers and the tether reels," says Jahnunen. "Manufacturing 25-km-long tethers (the equivalent of 15 miles long) thinner than human hair is an engineering challenge, as is development of the mechanics of the reel."

Results drawn from computer simulations indicate that in an average solar wind, a 440-pound spacecraft could achieve final speeds of up to 62 miles a second (or 1.9 billion miles a year), allowing a spacecraft to reach Pluto in less than five years.

link to full article

Ever since Cosmos 1 was built (it never reached space due to the Russian rocket failed), I've been anxious for new ideas about solar sails. This type of stuff is great fodder for science fiction writers.