Author Archives: tacit

Of Dyson spheres, consumerism, and the Great Old Ones

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God bless consumerist society. It makes me all tingly inside to know that we live in a time and a place where Shelly and phyrra can go shopping together, and come back with matching Hello Kitty panties. Is this a great time to be alive or what?

So anyway, we went to dinner with phyrra and nihilus last night at the local Cheesecake Factory, which is (for some reason) decorated in a style that can accurately be described as “trendy chain restaurant meets shrine to the Great God Cthulhu.” The dining room is flanked by tall pillars with glowing orange eyes of the Greater Old Ones ato them, for reasons not entirely clear to your humble scribe.

So we ate beneath the scowling glower of the Great Old One, and nihilus and I started talking about Dyson spheres, and specifically what a Dyson sphere would look like from the outside.

The idea behind a Dyson sphere is pretty straightforward: you are a member of a super-advanced alien race, you have the technology to construct objects on the scale of solar systems, and you need energy. Lots and lots of it. So what do you do? Why, you take apart your solar system and build a Dyson sphere–a shell, about 90,000,000 miles or so in diameter, that completely encloses your sun. You live on the inside surface of the sphere, which has the land area of hundreds of millions of earth-sized planets, and you capture all the available energy from your star.

Now, the laws of quantum dynamics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics impose limitations on how efficiently it is possible to capture and use energy to perform useful work. The law of entropy always wins out in the end; no matter how advanced you are, there are certain limits imposed by the laws of physics themselves on how efficiently you can capture the energy from your sun. Some of it is going to leak out in the form of waste heat. A Dyson sphere cannot be a perfectly dark body; there must be some radiated waste, there’s no way around it.

I believe that a Dyson sphere, when viewed from the outside, would appear as a dark stellar-mass object radiating strongly in deep infrared. nihilus believes the limitations imposed by the laws of physics are much smaller, and that a Dyson sphere created by an advanced enough civilization can capture and use the star’s energy with such efficiency that it would appear as a dark stellar-mass body radiating only a few microdegrees Kelvin above the universal microwave background radiation. Unfortunately, I don’t have the background to be able to calculate which is more likely–anyone?

During the course of this conversation, nihilus and I apparently missed Shelly doing something lascivious with a cherry, which is a pity, but at least phyrra got to see it…

Because I don’t have enough to do…

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…I’ve put up a new section on my Web site, a friendly advice column to help you over life’s little hurdles.

Or something like that.

Ask Agent Smith. Get those letters going!

And ganked from Sinboy’s journal…

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Republican senator calls for nuking Syria in church, everyone laughs and claps.

Where do these people come from? I don’t know what’s more insane–the fact that there are still people who think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or the fact that there are legislators who think those weapons were secretly buried in Syria, or the fact that in this day and age a man can go to church and call for an unprovoked nuclear attack on another country and get cheered for it.

Guys, not to be the bearer of bad tidings, but:

Back to posting again…

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…after a rough couple of weeks in which Shelly and I were very, very, very sick in rapid succession. All manner of nastiness, misery, vomiting, and so forth, which resulted in the two of us missing movies with the Smoosh and camping with smoocherie…suck!

Shelly is an angel, though, and even put up with me whining and throwing up a lot. 🙂 phyrra is also an angel, and called often to check up on us. She and nihilus even came over to keep us company, which was very sweet.

And to watch Lexx, which I still don’t know how I feel about.

In any event, all better now, so without further ado (from femetal via phyrra and khepra)

Banned Books, with snarky comments Clicky-clicky, you KNOW you want to…

Relaxing with friends, and big giant space bugs…

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Shelly and I spent part of the weekend last weekend with phyrra and nihilus, with Shelly and phyrra doing girl stuff while nihilus and I geeking out on laptops. The girl stuff involved hair dye, with very cool results:

Afterward, they subjected us to many hours of the TV series LEXX, which is, if you’re not familiar with it, a show about a sex slave, a dweeb, and a dead guy as they journey through the universe on a gigantic bug-like living spaceship that destroys planets and eats people. It features lots of brains and body parts, people being sawn in half, and the most gratuitous shower scenes outside of anime. I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about the show.

Prejudice is expensive

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Last week, I was on-site with a client of mine I haven’t seen in quite some time. My client was complaining to me that she and her husband are planning to move, and the two of them can’t afford a house that’s even as good as the one they’re living in now. They’ve lived in their current house for quite a number of years, but a combination of changing property values and the recent Florida hurricanes, which have made insurance for houses near the coast impossible to obtain at any price, have created a situation where they can’t really get much from their house and moving into a new house of similar size, age, and condition will cost them three times more than their current house is costing them.

The reason they’re moving? They’ve discovered that one of their neighbors down the street runs a porn Web site. It’s “disgusting,” she says, to have to live in the same neighborhood with one of those kinds of people, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

Now, what’s interesting about that, aside from its inherent silliness (“that kind of environment”? What, is he shooting porn flicks in the middle of the street?) is the way I responded emotionally to it–my opinion o fthis particular client as a person immediately dropped through the floor, melted its way through the Earth’s crust, and now sits at the center of the planet’s molten core, where it can’t get any lower unless the earth is swallowed up by the sun. I responded exactly as if she said they’re moving because there are Negroes living in the neighborhood, and “who wants to live in that kind of environment?”

What she probably doesn’t realize, though, is that there’s no neighborhood she can possibly move into where her neighbors aren’t doing things behind closed doors that she disapproves of. The other thing she doesn’t seem to grasp is that the proclivities of her neighbors really don’t have anything to do with her at all, and are None Of Her Business.

It’s all about the marketing

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So, it would appear that there are so many people taking Prozac in Great Britain that it’s actually ending up in the water supply, as sewer treatment facilities aren’t set up to remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater.

Now, other people may see a problem there, but I see it as an opportunity. Rather than spending lots of money changing all the wastewater treatment facilities, what’s needed is just a different attitude–a different outlook on the situation. All they really need to do is convince the public that psychoactive drugs in the water supply are a feature, not a bug!

A good way to start, I think, would be with some creative pro-psychoactive slogans. Something like “I’m Xany for Xanax,” perhaps. With enough positive spin, people might start expecting–hell, demanding–antidepressants in their water.

And why stop at water? Just think of the marketing possibilities here! “Hey kids, are you bummed out because Mom is pressuring you to clean your room? Stressed over homework? Disappointed about the prom? Try new Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Plus. The “Plus” is Prozac!”

Anyway, just thinkin’.

Randomness at a grocery store, and the suckitude of life

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At the grocery store this evening, between the frozen aisle and the canned goods, two women bumped into each other and started talking about a mutual acquaintance. “Has So-and so gotten married yet?” “No, she’s still not married.” “Really? That’s too bad.” “Yeah, i don’t know what it is. She has to find a husband some time.” “Maybe she’s just too picky.”

Dear God, I didn’t know there was anyone left like that in the world–not for real. Seriously. I thought that was something you’d only find on bad TV sitcoms. This is 2004, not 1904, right? Women do have value that doesn’t derive from their husbands, right?

Later, at the checkout line, the cashier looks at me and says “You know what’s interesting? All these countries that don’t like the USA, and say bad things about America, when something happens to them, who do they turn to? We give everyone in the world handouts and they still don’t like us. Like Russia. And why doesn’t Canada have its own army?”

The Universe of Suck Department: This weekend, Shelly and I were supposed to go to Atlanta with nihilus and phyrra so we could look at apartments, then from there up to Nashville to pick up their car. And as it turns out, next weekend I’ll be in Miami Beach with a client instead. Suck, suck, suck.