Spotted in traffic…
Tag Archives: transportation
Lesson for the day
If there’s only one thing you take away from this blog today, it’s this:
When giving a presentation to the military about new technological advances, make sure you first show how you’re protecting the lives of military personnel on the ground, in the air and/or on/under the water — technology is replaceable stuff, expendable, but people are not.
Sandbagging
How to maximise the local resources?
That question dogged us for many years as we planned our electromech construction crew that would “set up house” on Mars before we got there.
The mechs were fully capable of building adobe houses on Earth.
Water, though, was a key missing factor.
That encouraged us to find liquifying alternatives because we wanted to minimise the material we sent with the mechs.
We could have sent tonnes of sandbags and had the mechs build dry adobe huts under which our habitation modules would fit, providing extra protection in the Martian atmosphere, like parking an RV or caravan in a garage.
We challenged ourselves to create a solution that was both energy-efficient and easy to build.
Then, one day, after we had received the list of common chemical elements in Martian soil samples tested by the first wave of mech probes sent in the early 21st century to find suitable colonisation sites and entered it into our lab network, our semi-autonomous 3D printer on a mobile robot base started constructing an extruded Martian home.
Watching the 3D printbot create its own construction scaffolding was fun as it built a two-story structure that hinged and opened up to accept our current working version at the time of the habitation module that also served as transportation ship and landing craft.
Our Test and Evaluation department set to work calculating the wear-and-tear on the 3D printbot, estimating how many spare parts would be needed as the bot coordinated with the mechs to excavate Martian surface for the right ingredients, processing the Martian soil and then feeding the bot or its future equivalent the “right stuff” for habitation module protective shells.
To verify their theories, they drove the printbot and several prototype mechs out into the high desert, skipping a Martian landing simulation in order to focus on the printbot/mech adobe house construction techniques.
One of our lab personnel proposed commercialising the process, which later helped fund many of our side projects that we encouraged in case a crazy idea panned out and led to better procedures and/or understanding of settling Mars — whole desert communities were 3D-printed, followed by sustainable neighbourhoods in temperate zones around the world.
A story to fill me dreams!
Sacrifices
My wife and I sat down and looked at our finances this afternoon. I have done what I’ve always wanted to do — I put the desire for dancing above my need for hearing aids — I’d rather be deaf and move my body to the sound of music than be a cyborg with enhanced auditory functionality.
Again, the happiness of overcoming physical fears is almost impossible to describe, like I changed bodies last week and am a new man.
Time for this new old man to get off of his cloud and sleep!
The new theme for your reading: the real-life adventures of astronauts in training and in practice!
Plate of shrimp, the prequel
What are the chances that two nights ago I tripped over my copy of “The Saga of the Sour Toe” by Capt. Dick Stevenson, edited by Dieter Reinmuth, and then today this story pops up in the news?
All I can say is thank goodness the universe was exists purely to create me and entertain me.
Otherwise, I’d go mad (no, don’t tell me I’m mad — let it be your secret you can keep from me!).
Tolerance for pain
Bai jumped across the colony’s esplanade with Shadowgrass.
“Mom told me that you’re one of the main reasons I’m here.”
“She did?”
“Something about your grandfather and a war?”
“She remembered! That’s great. Yes, my grandfather was a soldier a long time, during the period many on Earth call World War II. He was a radio operator.”
“Dad told me about those. Specialists who were responsible for sending signals between groups of people because they didn’t have a love/hate relationship with the ISSA Net yet.”
“Hmm…hahaha. True. But my grandfather is famous back home in the Philippines. He was the man who first contacted General MacArthur, an American soldier in charge of many troops.”
Shadowgrass nodded, mentally scanning the information about World War II as they skipped and hopped. “So how does that account for me?”
“Oh, yeah, it doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, you see, my grandfather was a strict soldier which led to my father’s interest in discipline but for a totally different reason. You’ve probably never heard of ‘Star Trek,’ have you?” She watched his eyes flicker slightly. “Well, I guess you know about it now?”
“Yes, Bai.”
“My father fell in love with the TV show. It was like having his grandfather and all of his grandfather’s friends and uncles live the life of space soldiers. When I was old enough, he made me watch every episode of the original TV series, all the spinoffs such as ‘Next Generation,’ up to ‘Enterprise,’ and, of course, the films as they were released. Inside of you is a little bit of Data with a little bit of Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko.”
“Mom said you were able to infuse my genetic material with the propensity for personality traits of fictional characters. How did you do it?”
Bai ran her gloved hand across her faceplate, intending to but unable to rub her eyes. “Did Guin tell you I used to date Brannon Braga?”
“Huh-uh.”
“Yes. He was the one who inspired me. I hope I inspired him some, too. His place in Melrose, not far from the film studios, was amazing. I remember one party he had, it was a food bar from front to back. You walked from his kitchen to the backyard, which opened onto an English garden, and then the pool…the pool…” She stopped and looked up at the Martian sky.
“What is it, Bai?”
“He said he put me in one of his scripts. I never asked him which one.”
Shadowgrass flipped a few times in the air, bounced up and down like a kangaroo and landed in a three-legged stance. “Did he write about me?”
“No. You are my creation. I mean, it was me who gave your parents the idea to call you their son.”
Shadowgrass flipped up in the air and landed in a standard bipedal configuration. “That’s what Mom said. But I thought you might know something else.”
Bai heard a note of disappointment in Shadowgrass’ intonation of curiosity.
“Shadowgrass, you are a part of everyone’s life, don’t you know? You are the culmination of our species’ achievements. Do you know how many kids on Earth dream of being you, able to change out body parts on a whim, with superstrength and superspeed?”
“Yeah, but…”
Bai nodded. She knew where Shadowgrass was taking his thoughts. His mother, Guin, had been a competitive boxer from an early age, trained by her father, a former member of the U.S. Marines, with assistance from his military and boxing buddies. Growing up on a farm, she had been kicked and stomped on by calves and cows, raising her pain tolerance above normal levels. She had later become a ballerina before switching to a career in rocket science.
Shadowgrass wished he had his mother’s natural abilities, and didn’t have his enhanced abilities that made him so much more capable than his parents.
At age two, he had completed his space exploration vehicle. When his parents were two, they were barely walking and talking.
That’s why Bai had asked to spend the afternoon with him. He needed encouragement to take Martian society to places he couldn’t believe possible when he’ll look back in a few marsyears.
She couldn’t believe she was with him herself, remembering the nights decades earlier, alone with her thoughts when she was at her lowest, torn between her French lover and being near her children on the North American continent.
She wanted to teach Shadowgrass to embrace his emotional side and use the energy he generated to plant seeds in his thoughts that would sprout into giant oaks in no time.
She had done that for so many other people. She knew she could get Shadowgrass to, too.
Sometimes, it’s the shock factor that’s mild enough to offend
To address the concept of freedom, one asks oneself what is the attitude one adopts to question “the concept of freedom.”
Tonight, the one who addresses the question is the one who writes the words, thinking in broader scopes outside of one’s inner circle yet operating within one’s circle of influence.
One is.
Yet, one is not.
There is no “one” that exists outside of space and time, separate from the universe.
One chooses, therefore, to write upon subjects of personal interest to answer the question, “Who am I in this moment that constitutes who I was and who I was not a moment before?”
What are decisions I make or made that move me out of one swimming lane and into another?
What are the masks, the walls, the false identities that divide the bigger concept of me seen by myself in a mirror and seen by those sets of states of energy that clearly are not me within the timeframe of seconds/months/decades?
To be sure, a breath from another person can be inhaled by me — to whom do the molecules “belong”?
Why would someone be nice to me for no other reason than to share a moment when two male whitetail deer should be walking closeby, eating apples under a line of apple trees near the creek the same as any other dusk in the past few weeks?
I am not a complex person. I do not compose symphonies or design planetary socioeconomic systems from scratch.
I am a person who loves the person who has been a constant part of his life for 40 years but who loves a lot of other people, too.
I test social situations, then report what I observe.
I am what some people call devious.
I am helpful, courteous, kind, cheerful, thrifty and friendly but not always obedient, trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent.
I listen in order to learn.
If people don’t mind me being devious, then I don’t mind using our connections and our friendships for good stories.
There are many new characters to introduce to our main story and I have the better part of this week to get them written down, their lives painted on this canvas for posterity, giving them a place in our Martian colony, our Moon base and our Earth support network.
Some of them coincide with the lives of people I’ve met, some people more like acquaintances I’ve bumped into and other people I’ve gotten to know better than I know myself.
I remind myself in this blog entry that writing about people I know, putting their words and actions into my thoughts so I can imagine what they’ll do in imaginary situations is not the same as my living their lives, although it might be.
I have to see how much I can stretch my imagination and how much I choose to look at the limits I’ve placed on my thoughts and actions, deciding which limits were set arbitrarily at one point in my life and no longer apply.
Is it “art” above all else, including my subcultural expectations?
What am I doing here in this blog?
As a person fully aware of his surroundings, what am I willing to say is background noise and ignore? What of the background noise is worth my attention? What is in my face that is masking something more important? What needs to be in my face that isn’t?
These questions set my thought patterns in motion for this week’s stories.
The answers may or may not involve me, but they will certainly involve the characters who appear in future blog entries.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we blast off toward new horizons!
TDOT “marquee”
Driving on Tennessee freeways, I’ve noticed the Tennessee department of transportation display on overhead signs the current number of roadway deaths with a plea to the driver not to be the next fatality.
Everytime I see that sign I think the only thing that number can do is go up.
What if the message stated, “Only 19 deaths last week, thanks to you! Let’s go for only 15 this week!”
treetrunkdings 