A more detailed look at the Doctor Who episode “The Bells of Saint John” reveals that the opening sequence has given away clues about web sites, sports and music that the visual designer who created the sequence enjoys.
Inspired by @maddeningscientist‘s shitpost about throwing things into the Sun via gravity-assist, I thought I’d infodump spaceratblr on the subject of GTOC, “The America’s Cup of Rocket Science” and the most hardcore math contest in the solar system!
Basically it’s a yearly competition of ridiculously unconstrained orbital mechanics optimizations. You need to get [spacecraft] to do [thing] with a minimum amount of fuel, a minimum amount of time, both, or something else entirely.
The first year’s competition, for example, was to deliver the most momentum to a particular asteroid within 30 years (say, to prevent it from hitting Earth), given that you have a spacecraft weighing 1500kg initially, with a low-thrust, high-efficiency nuclear-electric engine. So you want to use as little fuel as possible to maximize your mass when you hit the asteroid, but still hit that bad boy like a Rod from God. The winning team from @nasajpl came up with THIS SHIT:
Their spacecraft toodles around the inner solar system for a couple years, banks off Jupiter, TURNS ITSELF AROUND on Saturn, and hits Jupiter again on the way back in towards the target. If you’ve never played KSP, turning a spacecraft around relative to the Sun is virtually impossible. It’s roughly twice as hard to do as just throwing something into the Sun. Humans have literally never put anything in a retrograde heliocentric orbit, and the space wizards from JPL (and their poor, beleaguered supercomputing cluster) found a trajectory that uses the fuel-budget equivalent of two tin cans and a piece of string. The final trajectory output was so badass that the trophy given out for winning the contest is literally a picture of it:
Anyway, the winning team gets to define the next year’s competition, so you’ve basically got the world’s raddest steely-eyed missilepeople challenging each other to optimize-offs every year or two. Man, I wish I’d taken second-level orbital mechanics in college.
drawing hands is so bad. like i’ve mostly got it down but sometimes i’ll check my hand for reference and. it’ll just be wrong. i’ll look at my actual physical hand which is definitely not drawn wrong and i’m like “god damn it this won’t do as reference, this doesn’t look right at all, someone drew it wrong”. hands are just the worst. evolution fucked it all up; there must have been some selection pressure such that it was evolutionarily advantageous to piss off artists in the ancestral environment.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”evolutionarily advantageous to piss off artists in the ancestral environment”)
“And now, the weather. There’s a winter storm coming in, and it’s going to be a doozy- no snow, this time. It’s just 100% hail, accompanied by a dense layer of fog that’s going to make driving more dangerous than usual. Everyone is recommended to stay inside, or at least go out with a warm parka and a sheet metal umbrella.
That’s it for the weather today- apologies for the unusual format, by the way. Just to summarize, the weather is going to be: All hail; thick, low cloud.”
It’s not actually known if lemons were made by humans or if they were just natural hybrids of citrons and sour oranges. Apparently it’s super common for citrons to fertilize basically anything they’re near.
great now we gotta kinkshame the fruit
Everything about this post is going in so many directions at once
lime/lemon fic classifications had a basis in reality
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#well this post was a wild ride #food #nsfw text? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
Someone left a diet pepsi can on the empty table next to us and a person walked by it on the way to our table. They looked at it curiously, then anxiously touched it and then scurried to our table saying ‘YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TOUCH THE ART AND I TOUCHED THE ART!’
So we had a long discussion about dadaism and what is art and is art art and what makes an art an art and how the majority of artist’s statements are complete and utter bullshit fabricated to fill an arbitrary word count.
It should be mentioned that this person worked in an art museum and that we are both went to art school. We are certainly qualified to expound upon the 2% reduced fat fuckery that is art movements.
So when our visitor left our table, my girlfriend grabbed an index card and made the art official art.
If it’s still there tomorrow after the cleaning crew has been through, then its is now official art art that goes in an art art museum. If it is gone, then someone has TOUCHED THE ART.
And that is part of the art.
The act of the janitor tossing it in the bin… is a statement on art.
We all think we’re god-damned hilarious.
Well, someone came by in the morning and removed the soda can, but left the label.
Then later in the day, someone saw the tag and decided to put a Coke bottle there.
Okay, I have done Math and also talked to a live Customer Service Person! Result: I think I need to raise about $200 to make the rent and cover my phone bill this month. (Y’all are *awesome*, just let me say; the reason I have nearly $500 left over from last month is totally down to y’all’s enthusiasm and generosity. <3)
In case anyone was worried, I am actually applicating to jobs as hard as I can – the mills of the corporate gods just grind really REALLY slowly, so even if I had an interview tomorrow there’s no way I’d have a paycheck by the first. So I’m going to put up dolly things at super-reduced prices, see if I can scrape up one more month to apply to ALL THE JOBS in. ;P
Signal boosting would be greatly appreciated. Also, I’m thinking I’ll list most of the remaining outfits at $10 each, so there are actually some pretty good deals here. :D #ufyh #americangirl #americangirldoll #agig #altagig #agsale2 #thediscounting
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#oh look an update #American Girl #sales #signal boost
I’m into furry things and vore things and tentacle things and so on. But I feel like I’m almost cheating because these all flow from having my preference for morphological freedom set really high. It seems rather *unremarkable* given that.
I guess there *must* be some transhumanist people who aren’t into generalized furry and bdsm things. Robin Hanson didn’t know what futa were until a few months ago.
It just seems that given you indicate a preference for full morphological freedom for yourself and given that you don’t want to *stop* having sex… it seems like either you would be into this range of things or you would anticipate your future self being into it.
Hm. I also have a really strong preference for morphological freedom, yet vore doesn’t do anything for me? Nor does it seem obvious that my Shiny Morphological Freedom Future self would be into it. She might indulge a partner, but.
I don’t think these things are unlinked, but the link is not as strong as you imply, imo.
Ah, there was a misparsing. It isn’t specifically vore that I would expect but the cluster of sex things which aren’t currently physically feasible for most people. Like being a futa whose hand gets cut off or being eaten alive or being able to restrain your catgirl clone.
If someone imagines being in the Shiny Morphological Freedom Future and changing forms a lot and still planned on having sex, it would surprise me if they weren’t into [current projection of sex that is infeasible now but would be feasible with uploads] and did anticipate their future selves liking it.
I think I can imagine what they may be imagining, but the exercise is a little weird. I can imagine people imagining spending long milliseconds as 11-dimensional squid and spongy manifolds. Softly brushing against an object of their desire a sense of ~pleasure rising. Their body feeling ~warm and ~glowing. Them morphing the system of them and the Object into human forms and having kinky earthling sex.
I mean, I guess??
I think that if the people who plan to [change their form a lot come {simspace, nanomachine swarms, full-body transplants}] and [have sex in the Future] thought about Future sex for five minutes I think they would find some of the scenarios which aren’t currently physically possible quite appealing. I would be surprised to find all of their desires funneled into a narrow region of what sex is reachable by humans of the early 21st century.
I think it depends on how sexually adventurous you are to begin with. Given that as it stands, my desires are funneled into a narrow region even compared to the narrow region of what’s currently possible, I suspect the sex life of Morphological-Freedom-Utopia!me would look like a somewhat-enhanced-but-the-same-basic-idea version of mine.
(Some forms of future-sex might very well be interesting experiences to me, but not necessarily sexual ones.)
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#and there are definitely erotic acts that would be easier with gills #(or just not needing to breathe at all) #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #transhumanism
Brinens and Things 