(galactic empire continued from here)
About finding planets that will support life

Here's a radical thought:  We won't. And we won't want to.

This is the #1 thing people are really getting wrong when it comes to looking for exoplanets to colonize.

All indications are that the basic chemical building blocks of life are actually fairly ( Read more... )

(... Space postings start here but no prerequisites for this one...)
So I've been thinking some more about what our Galactic Empire is actually going to look like, assuming we ever get to that point. To be sure, I've been generally pessimistic about our ever getting out of this stupid solar system in any meaningful sense, the obstacles to practical ( Read more... )

Previously, re absolute pitch:The only real way out for me is to read it as a different clef -- which I didn't consciously figure out until I got to college, but it is effectively what I was doing the whole time with horn parts from 5th grade on.

To wit: Treble clef means the top line of the staff and the first space from the bottom both denote F ( Read more... )

a healthy respect for the challenges of playing on a transposing instrument.

So I was originally going to answer this in the comments but this is really a huge topic worth its own post. It's always been a bit weird what people think should be difficult vs. what actually is difficult.

See, playing a transposing instrument isn't supposed to be a ( Read more... )

Weird thing I saw today (well okay, actually this was several days ago, because these take me a while to write): A horn player using the 3rd valve all by itself, a fingering I was taught never to use. And then I started noticing other WTFery.

Granted, all of my horn playing was in middle school and high school, and I never actually got to the ( Read more... )

Well okay, I guess there is a way to get Trilorne to hover.

If we're willing to toss the usual definition of "North" (rotation axis points that way), we can put the sun over the equator, and then we can have it be tide-locked. Meaning this planet is basically Mercury but farther away so that only the stuff directly underneath the sun is getting ( Read more... )

So there's this Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Wall of Darkness" (1949). I read it as a kid and found it really haunting. Clarke does Haunting really well.

If you haven't read it already and want to go read it before I completely and totally ruin it, feel free.
(I found the whole thing by searching for "Trilorne" in google, which then gave ( Read more... )

Carmen

Georges Bizet
(premiered in Paris, 1875)
[Trigger warnings:  domestic violence, rape, animal cruelty]
Dramatis Personae

DON JOSÉ "nice guy" who is also the protagonist, for some reason ( Read more... )

Continued from Part 3, what happens when there is no "parallel", the rules for circles aren't what you thought they were, and so on. Napier's Rules

So how does trigonometry work in this world?

See, I belatedly realized that spewing walls of equations like this is not actually going to be much use when you're stuck in a rowboat in the middle ( Read more... )

Continued from Part 2, exploring the benighted universe where "parallel" is Not a Thing. How circles work

So, to review the weird things we've seen so far:

• When we have a circle radius of 90°, otherwise known as a straight line, and we're traversing the circumference, i.e., measuring the total length along it as we sweep out 360° from ( Read more... )