Pink Terra

Tuesday 27 November 2001, 20:11

After Contact, all our petty global economic concerns became irrelevant. Large-scale hyperspace transport made imports cheap; almost anything that humans would want could be grown or manufactured more cheaply on some other planet. Like all new frontier worlds, Terra was forced to concentrate on its few unique local industries, the things we invented that no other planet had ever seen before.

Dilution

Monday 26 November 2001, 22:31

Homeopathic medicine is based on the claim that the dose-response curve does a funky little dipsy doodle near zero, so that extremely small doses of various substances can produce therapeutic effects. For instance, there's a homeopathic remedy very popular in France which is made from the heart and liver of a wild duck, diluted by a factor of 10 to the 400th power. You're supposed to take it if you think you're coming down with the flu. The more you know about chemistry and suchlike, the more you're likely to pooh-pooh this idea; after all, there are a lot fewer than 1e400 atoms in the average-sized duck liver, and so the chances are extremely small that any of the original is even present in the medicine at all. You might as well be taking placebo pills, and the systematic double-blind studies (indicating that actually it does work better than placebo pills made without the duck heart even though the duck heart can't possibly be there at all for any practical purpose anyway because it's so diluted), anyway those studies have just gotta be some sort of fraud. It's psuedoscience, dammit! Don't confuse me with journal papers!

The cosmic brokers

Monday 26 November 2001, 00:12

Einstein taught us that space and time can be considered equivalent, and the Gilbreths taught us that time and money are similarly connected. Money, by definition, can be used to buy matter and energy, and those things can also be sold for money. These relationships form a sort of skeleton, technically what graph theorists call a "spanning tree", among the five elements of space, time, money, matter, and energy. The existence of a spanning tree, with the transitivity of the equivalence relation, implies a complete graph, with all vertices adjacent to each other. Each of of the Five can be exchanged for any other, and in a perfectly efficient economy, that would be the end of it all.

Where it goes

Saturday 24 November 2001, 22:10

Sometimes it gets into the nose, and you can hear it humming and rattling around up there, but that's not too bad, it comes out again pretty soon and you barely even remember.

Nothing new under Ra (100 words)

Friday 23 November 2001, 21:58

THE CHAPTER OF BUILDING AND MULTIPLICATION OF THE TOMB, FAST

The soul that speaketh this chapter during the day of going forth shall dwell peacefully all its days within a grand tomb of noble stature.

Hail to thee Ra, and to thee, oh Horus and Thoth. Let this be the spell of the construction of my tomb, in just five days with minimal effort. It is known that this is perfectly legal in your sight. Let me place one stone upon each grave named on this list, and then upon adding mine own name to the

[remainder of text lost]

sci.crypt

Thursday 22 November 2001, 21:31

Yeah, I subscribe to sci.crypt. It's pretty good. Right now they've got a thread going on marble versus concrete. Of course, I'm not really qualified to debate with these guys, they have some pretty high-powered scientists on both sides of the issue, but it sure is interesting to listen. I'm learning a lot and you never know when it'll come in handy. It's great sometimes in the club I'll just break into a conversation and throw in a comment like "Well, actually, it's seven feet, there needs to be some extra for settling and erosion" and they'll just be like awed because it sounds like I know my stuff. Girls in the palm of my hand, baby, palm of my hand. Now, of course, it isn't all moonshine and lilies. We get some vicious porn spammers, I have to warn you, some of those binaries you do not want to download. I just delete 'em. And there are the kooks and the people who like to flame newbies. Don't mention shovels, especially not in your first post. Still, you should subscribe. It's low traffic, and kinda fun.

In the Devil's drawing-room

Wednesday 21 November 2001, 21:01

It is a place of thick red carpets and elaborate plasterwork. The furniture shows centuries, if not millenia, of wear, but has stood up well on the whole both in physical and stylistic terms. You wouldn't be able to guess just when some damned hand first rubbed that varnish.

Note

Wednesday 21 November 2001, 14:32

[Identifying information removed. I was either sender or receiver of this email; guess which.]

You wrote an article, I sent you some comments, you sent me a reply. I have deleted your reply because its tone indicated that you did not value my comments already made and weren't looking for further comments from me. I believe you are an expert writer and would not create that impression accidentally. Nonetheless I am sending you this note in case it was unintentional, because in a similar situation with the roles reversed I'd appreciate a "heads up". I do not ask nor expect a reply to this note.

Safety first

Tuesday 20 November 2001, 22:05

New research from Iowa State University indicates that nepetalactone, the active chemical in catnip, is 10 times more effective as a mosquito repellant than the current state of the art, a chemical called DEET:

http://www.ag.iastate.edu/aginfo/news/catnip.html

Mosquito bites can be very dangerous. Between malaria, dengue, and West Nile fever, you just can't be too careful when you're travelling in Africa. So be sure you wear plenty of catnip oil every day during your lion safari.

Dice

Tuesday 20 November 2001, 00:10

To make best use of this posting, you should have a quantity of identical standard dice. Attempt to solve the questions for yourself before reading the answers. It is more fun to use real dice, but on the other hand, solving them in your head by visualizing the dice will almost certainly qualify you for membership in some pretentious organization.