(no subject)

I read Galactic North, a collection of Reynolds stories, half of which I hadn't seen before. Good stuff. I have new appreciation for the Great Wall of Mars, a novel approach to paraterraforming: rather than roofing off an area, *wall* it off, which high walls the atmosphere can't go over (yes, very high), convert the atmosphere in there, and expand the walls as you can. Walls grow linearly with radius, vs. quadratically for roofs, so above some size there's less mass in the wall than in a roof. Probably a big size, given the difficulty of building 10 mile high walls. Lower gravity means its easier to build high walls but also that you need higher walls, since the atmosphere is less bound.

I'd wondered just why human terraforming machines, the greenfly, could be such a threat; I'd missed that "Galactic North" explicitly addresses that, with the machines having apparently adapted and incorporated more advanced techs, like the Melding Plague and Inhibitor weapons. Whoops! I'm guessing the greenfly were run by at least gamma level intelligence.

I speed-read a Data Mining book, and killed a day reading webpages on data compression, encryption, and error correction. Nothing clever to say, but it's neat stuff, and I'm particularly fascinated by correction, perhaps because we just did quantum EC in the quantum information class.

* Supporting the troops
* Hunger among US children skyrockets
* Global heating [sic] denialist debunking.
* Sunshine T-shirt. I contributed "He's not a tame vampire."

( Lots more random links )