Undecided

I spent the morning with my girlfriend, and the afternoon doing house work in preparation for the arrival of the new computer I purchased. I sort of promised myself that before I set the computer up, I would finally gut the “office” (spare bedroom) of everything that had accumulated there and completely clear off my desk.

I was even more motivated when I realized that the computer would show up this week (and it did show up Thu Aug 2).

Needless to say, I’m backdating some of these posts.

As you can see, when the computer did arrive on Thu Aug 2, it was a really large box. The box filled the doorway (width-wise) and was about half the height of the doorway. A truly monsterous box.

No more will I have to suffer through system freezes and reboots (I still think the reason my last computer acts that way is either because of the power supply being too low power or the fact that I went completely stupid when I assembled the CPU & Heatsink the first time around and I didn’t evenly apply the heat transfer gel when reattaching the heatsink… either would cause that kind of problem.) I could have saved money by building it myself, but I might also have had to deal with the fact that I’ve lost the experience I once had. (I’ve only built one computer in the last 6 years… you forget some things when you let it go that long between exercising your skills.)

Sasha, freshly washed. Later she rolled around in the mud, invaded a trashcan and bathed herself in the buttered microwave popcorn bag that I had discarded while watching a movie with my girlfriend, and swallowed a foam earplug before we could pry it out of her mouth. She’s perfectly ok (the ear plug was soft foam and did not breakdown in her digestive tract), although until she got another bath, she reeked of popcorn/butter smell.

I think she doesn’t like the “clean” smell.

I find William Gibson to be fascinating (in a remote and cursory way).  I’m a big fan of his earlier works and purchased Neuromancer in hardback many, many years after it was written simply to have it in my library.  Certainly the world has not gone Cyberpunk, but there are many elements of Gibson’s writing style that have come about.  I’ll spare you the off-topic banter and move on.

I subscribe to the Amazon Blog which listed an article today, the third in a series of three, detailing an interview with William Gibson wherein, Gibson referred to Charlie Stross’ assertion that there will never, ever be any manned space flight.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross‘s argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it’s so convincing. I read that and I’m like, “My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child.”

William Gibson, in the above referenced interview.

Googling for Charles Stross led me to this blog about the Stross speech concerning the future of Space Flight.  It’s a fascinating read, if you want to take the time.  The summary is that apparently Gibson got it half wrong.  Stross is not anti-Space Flight, he’s just very practical in his approach to what it takes for space flight to happen.  It would be better said to say “Stross believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel, until certain fundamental sciences catch up with the human imagination (i.e., magic wand.)“  Stross in his response to the above referenced blog (he makes an appearance) comments on how shallow (my words, not his) pro-space-settlers are:

And in the course of wading through 650-odd comments on my own blog, I’ve become rather less tolerant of space settler enthusiasts who assume that if we can just fire a few thousand tons of construction materials into orbit, the messy biological details will be taken care of by the janitor or somebody. Environmental science is the key to space colonization (if we don’t end up doing the upload/AI/posthuman thing), not just an afterthought or minor detail to worry about once we’ve sorted out the space elevator and lunar mines.

Charles Stross, in response to the blog article referenced above.

Of course, following a link from one of Stross’ responses, I ended up at his personal blog (I think), wherein, in much the same flavor of Michio Kaku‘s book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century.  (Although the Amazon review is somewhat derogatory, the idea I’m aiming at is the attempt to theorize real-world advances in science and the socialogical changes that result therefrom.)  I’ve not had a chance to read all of the article, but it was such a fascinating jaunt in to the internet, that I felt it was worth sharing.