more randomness

[mindstalk]

Temperatures here have plunged from 80s to 50s overnight. Hello, autumn? I repeat my call for climate controlled cities; the environment is too important to be left to nature.

Pretending I'm akashiver (entertainment news): Warner's president of production says no more female leads.

Suburban blight

Zombies for Jesus. I don't know how this interacts with "God is a fairy".

Odd Republican sex death. Yes, this is the one with two wetsuits.

I just had this thought: space colonies not being obviously profitable, some people have fantasized about billionaire space fans building them for the hell of it. Others have imagined space hotels slowly expanding. Reading Richard Conniff's Natural History of the Rich I wondered if space mansions might not be a takeoff point. After all, the real question is not "what can colonies do for Earth" or "for humanity" but "for the people living in them."

Well, I guess "for Earth" is relevant for investment purposes. But "for the people" works for buying purposes, and people do buy weird shit.

ADDED: Mules occasionally foal despite normally being sterile due to odd chromosome number. I was alerted to this by a Usenet thread on books by Alan Dean Foster and Robert Heinlein where colonies on other planets lack amenities such as maps, as might be taken by a satellite, or even by a handheld camera from orbit. Time Enough For Love has mules, okay, rifles, okay, and no maps, not okay.

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Satellite images /= maps. Usefulness depends greatly on how they are to be used and how they are used. You know, map making is a science prone to regression.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Photos aren't the same as maps, but I'd think they're still useful; reportedly, these books featured basically blind exploration of the colony worlds, as in "what in general is on the other side of that mountain?" or "where does this river go?"

[pompe.livejournal.com]

In my story the maps are 120 years old... ...and largely forgotten.