Note: some material in this blog entry may be familiar.
Tag Archives: travel
Do your neuronal connections have labels?
Do you know what your neuronal connections look like?
I think I know mine:
Truth, fiction, stories, tales
Do Sikhs eat meat?
How many of us do something against our wishes because it’s our “job”?
How many of us go against the wishes of others because it’s our destiny?
Yesterday evening, my wife and I drove to a food store chain called “Cheeburger Cheeburger” because a day or so before we had listened to “50s on 5,” a satellite radio station dedicated to the popular American rock’n’roll music of the 1950s, which put me in the mood for a ’50s style eatery.
Delayed gratification had us sitting at a two-topper, recently cleaned off by Russell.
Courtney took our food order and Mayra brought us our food.
As we were close to finishing our delicious ground-up cow meat patties on buns and basket of frings (sliced/fried onions/potato), a large group of teenagers entered all cheery, bright-eyed and photo-happy, obviously not having eaten at this particular fine dining establishment before.
Of the group of 27, four young lads sat next to us, one wearing a T-shirt with the words “KEEP CALM I’M THE DOCTOR” emblazoned below the emblem of a old telephone booth, affectionately known as the time machine called the Tardis to fans of an internationally-popular show on the tellie called “Doctor Who.”
The young gentlemen were quite polite, informing my wife, upon her inquiries, that they haled from across the Big Pond in a small burgh called Birmingham (pronounced BIRM’ing-hum as opposed to our local town we call Birmin-HAM’).
They and their pals had enjoyed a good time at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center before being whisked off to the local shopping extravaganza known as the Madison Square Mall.
In like fashion to my wife’s curiosity, satisfying us that they were interested in a future career of engineering when they entered university (one favouring mechanical engineering and the other civil engineering), they pressed us for our favourite fast food joint.
As we hemmed and hawed, they informed us that they had the international fast food chains such as McDonald’s in Great Britain but not ones like Wendy’s.
I told them I believed my favourite place is Steak ‘n Shake, similar to Cheeburger Cheeburger but without the one-pound special, closer in style to my alltime favourite, Pal’s, which was too small for them to know about. My wife believed her favourite is In-N-Out Burgers, which is concentrated on the West Coast.
The young men told us they were still in secondary school and that one of their chaperones, a woman with pink stripes in her hair, was their physics teacher whose specialty is astrophysics.
We wished them well and told them we hoped to meet them on the International Space Station one day, imagining these guys and their friends the future of space exploration and settlement.
After all, the enthusiastic pursuits of our youth often encourage us to expand our horizons.
These young men, some of them wearing what I believe to be the head gear of the Sikh religion, are part of our future, going on into fields of science and engineering along with their colleagues of many races, religions, genders and backgrounds, inventing new ways of observing our universe that we hardly imagine possible today.
I am happy that our ancestors put us on the path for Americans and Brits to meet at a small restaurant tucked into a shopping centre in the south part of Huntsville, Alabama, USA, Earth.
Even as early as 25 years ago, I would not have thought it possible for us to meet like that.
Fifty years ago, not long after I was born, it was practically impossible.
Can you see how much progress we’ve made, how much farther we’ll go in 25 and 50 years from now?
Can you see why I don’t believe in secret societies and never chose to belong to one, even though I know they still exist and contribute in part to my being here today?
Digging out the last century’s stuff
Southern Living, rediscovered
While excavating further into the bowels of the hoards of our house well-furnished with modern antiquities (sounds better than junk or trash), we found a box of Southern Living magazines from around the turn of the century. Here are a few scanned samples for storing in our electronic pile of “historical documents”:
Energy now and forever more energy
Just to show that energy studies have been studied for decades, thousands of years after our ancestors discovered fire is good for warmth and a good pot roast:
Old 41 and 42 Make Last Runs, Closing An Era
Have you ever ridden on an old passenger train?
I and my friends, Ricky (standing behind me), Kevin (in glasses and checkered glasses), along with other classmates did, way back in 1969:
Some passenger train services, like the Alaska Railroad, offer the thrill of a nice, slow ride on railroad tracks.
Maybe a bullet/maglev train is in your future, instead?
In the not too-distant future…
It doesn’t seem that long ago, does it?
Now, though, there’s more than one settlement, with new owners coming in, redesigning the old housing units to look familiarly like ancestral homes on planet Earth.
Used to be we thought we’d start over.
Not anymore.
The humans have generally congregated into one or settlements while the exploration bots keep spreading across the planet, no need of houses or other reminders of a life they neither remember nor need to carry on for the sake of descendants.
We are one group, one “people,” but our requirements for stimulating sensory organs vastly different than algorithms designed to process sensor array input.
I am a farmer for us, making sure we have the energy sources for our various sets of states of energy.
This is my story.
I live in a small hut at the end of the hydroponic growth chambers.
I provide food and nourishment for those amongst us who eat through their mouths or mouth equivalents.
I also maintain a miniature factory that cranks out spare body parts for our robotic friends.
The medical staff handles the surgical procedures like replacing body parts for our biological friends, however much I’ve protested that I can easily handle those duties, having built a robotic surgeon from parts I manufactured myself, downloading new algorithms from my Earth-based social network of farmers, ranchers and DIYers who delve into self-sufficiency and other survivalist tactics appropriate to solar system explorers like myself.
As a farmer, my secondary duty is analysing soil samples to determine which chemical reactions I need to conquer in order to convert Martian soil into edible foodstuff palatable by crew members with a variety of tastes and preferences.
In other words, I’m an ecosystem expert, creating microorganisms from scratch that efficiently perform the soil conversions for me so I can concentrate on my main duties that feel like I have to pull a rabbit out of a hat or worse, water out of thin air.
Water, water, water.
Solar energy, though weaker on Mars than on Earth, is abundant, which makes water production easier than we first thought.
But, problems crop up all the time.
Most of us may be rational scientists and engineers but that doesn’t mean we’re always careful about conserving water.
We can talk about that later.
Lee is coming over to review my plans for tightly-regulated metabolism control which, I believe, will greatly reduce our dependence on water.
Designing microorganisms has given me insight into the mechanisms of the human body that we were just beginning to understand when we assigned humans a decade ago to train for this mission.
If only we knew then what I know now!
Redesigning a human from the inside out is my ultimate goal and will make our Mars settlements grow like weeds, if my calculations are correct (a quick shoutout to my buddies back home who let me borrow their supercomputers).
Will Lee allocate the supplies I need?
Here’s Lee. Talk to you again soon.
treetrunkdings 