Thursday, September 4, 2008

Non-Fiction

I've been keeping a list of books that I've read since November, to date I've read a lot. Just how much? That's classified for now, I have a list going that will be published on November 19th 2008. I know curiosity is just killing you all but as the old cliche goes "patience is a virtue". In any case, the majority of what I read falls under the Sci-fi/Fantasy realm with dashes of Mystery and Fiction. Very rarely do I read non-fiction stuff, in fact, I think there's only been one or two full books that I've read that's non-fiction just for fun. This brings me to the peculiar quandary I find myself in right now. So instead of doing my lovely philosophy homework I'm going to talk about reading.

When I started working at Borders back in November I began to realize just how much I read, I've always loved reading and, in fact, its the one thing I think I'm decent at. Actually aside from a certain person reading is about the only thing that makes me happy, I'm just lucky enough to have someone and not just my silly little books. So I started at Borders and naturally because its a bookstore my reading levels jumped! I now have access to millions more books and it definitely showed in my list. Perhaps I've always read a lot of books but it seemed to me that because I had more access to books suddenly I was reading even more, just how much will be shown come November. As I expected sci-fi/fantasy are the majority of my reads but I was surprised to see a few non-fictions creeping into my list. I'm thinking that because I'm now exposed to so many more non-fiction books I've slowly stopped thinking of them as super boring and lame and gradually began picking them up. I'm not sure where my bias came from exactly, but its been enough to keep me from reading a lot of excellent reads. Not only that, though, but I've actually learned a lot from the non-fictions I've read. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure everyone out there is thinking "no freaking duh Ry, they're based on reality" but come on my experience up til November was with text books.

In any case, I updated "what I'm reading" thing on a forum I participate on and to my surprise I'm reading not just one but two non-fiction books right now. This past year I've read non-fiction but its always been accompanied by a fiction of some sort. Now not only am I reading two, but they're fairly out of character for me. One of them is a fairly intense political book, alas not about either of our dear candidates or our current political situation cause those are all slander right now, and the other is a business-ish book. Indeed a mere two books ago I read another non-fiction book! This probably is rather boring to anyone that bothers to read this, but its rather fascinating to me. As a side note I just re-read this and good freaking god I'm not writing well at all! Oh well, this is far less formal than my usual stuff and because its not super controversial I don't have my usual flame. Another possible reason that I've come up with is rather weak: I've matured! Wow, it looks a whole hell of a lot worse in writing! I'm not gonna lie, I still love fantasy and space and not real stuff, but finally at almost twenty years old I can appreciate 'adult' things. Part of that is my own curiosity, I want to know more about the world around us. Once again I sound like an ass saying shit like that but oh well. There's actually a lot of really interesting stuff out there, you just gotta be able to find it I guess. It took me working at a bookstore to find some, but hell I know so many people that only read non-fiction which absolutely boggles my mind. I don't know about everyone else but one of the reasons I love to read is to escape and relax and give my head a break from the stresses of every day life non-fiction is a workout for the mind. It's nice every once and a while, but seriously? All the time? Nu-uh!

While I still don't think that non-fiction is worth more than the occasional read, it's nice to know there's some well written stuff out there. As for my reading list, like I said that'll be posted 12:01am November, 19th 2008 (thank you blogger for scheduled posting) if you're interested it should be kinda neat to see. Well Descartes calls.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

First Impressions of Chrome

So I downloaded Google Chrome as soon as I heard about it and after two days of messing around with it I have a couple thoughts I figured I'd share.

First off its a very pretty browser, I must say, neat layout and such. It'll take some time to get used to the tabs being at the very top of the page but I think I like it more than where the tabs are in FireFox. It was really nice to install it and have it import all my info, bookmarks, search history, and such, to Chrome and damn it's fast. I figured that it was just my computer that was rather slow on the net, or even my net connection but the first time I loaded up Chrome it was noticeably faster than both IE 7 and FF 3.0.1. It lags a bit, as is expected, when loading a new page, but when it gets the cookies its loads the pages lightning fast. I've also noticed that it doesn't use as much CPU as either IE or FF which, from what little I know, is really good. I haven't really run any other applications in the background other than aim so I haven't seen a noticeable difference in app speed as some people have. Also combining the search bar and the web-address bar is absolutely brilliant, even more so you can customize which search engine you want to use. I set it up for Wiki because I use it to reference a lot but there's tons of options which show that google isn't too much of a whore XD. Even with all its positives there's some annoyances I have with it.

First let me say this: I'm a complete FireFox whore. I admit it. I love the add-ons, themes, and all the customization FF provides. I have 4 different themes I switch out depending on my mood, addons like WeatherFox, FoxyTunes, YahooMailNotifier just make my life easier. If I only used those things though I wouldn't have such a problem with Chrome. I've been using FF now for 3 or 4 years and for pretty much the entire time I've had AdBlockPlus installed. I guess I didn't realize just how, hmm, pampered I am. I seriously cannot stand ads on pages anymore, it honestly bothers me! Just recently I installed NoScript as well, which got rid of some of the other annoying crap that AdBlock misses. Seriously though, I can't even check my email on Chrome because yahoo is an ad whore, some of my favorite sites have god awful ads that until I opened them in Chrome I didn't even know existed. It's quite depressing I must say. Perhaps I can reacquaint myself with the annoying ads IE users face every time they open the net but it'll be hard. I did some finger work (har har) and found out that most likely google will roll out add-ons in the future but not for a little while, seeing as they need to make a mac and linux Chrome. The other major issue I have with chrome is the scrolling. On my laptop there's a little scroll bar on the touch pad that you can go up and down with but Chrome only lets you go down. You don't realize just how much you use something until you can no longer use it. Honestly, I scroll on like every page and its infuriating going too far down but not being able to go up without actually clicking the bar thing. I can wait but Chrome will have to deal with not being my default browser for a while. I'm sure I'll use it more and more but yeah.. those will keep it from being my first choice for a while. I'm sure they'll fix the scroll problem soon enough and they'll add the extensions eventually til then I'll only play with it now and then. Maybe I'll post from here on it since blogger is clean of annoying adds and I like the speed for the blog.

If you use IE switch. Just do it, you'll only gain from doing it. If you use FireFox heavily give Chrome some time. Its definitely worth downloading and checking out though.


Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Questions of Colonization

I've been toying around with the idea of colonization for a while now and I think its high time for me to focus my thoughts and actually write something down. Granted I'm a mere second semester freshmen in a non-science major but someone needs to be thinking of it. The most likely reason, I think, that I'm so curious about space is from all my sci-fi reading. Yeah, yeah I know that many, if not all, of the ideas, designs, theories, and so forth are fantasy but that doesn't mean there's a real way to achieve some of this. Recently I've gotten into an author name Alastair Reynolds who writes something called hard science fiction which stresses scientific accuracy. Though Reynolds world is much more advanced and, like most sci-fi, set in the distant future he has some interesting views of how space is colonized. One of the planets in his books is a recently colonized planet which may shed some ideas on how we may be able to make that jump. One of his ideas is terraforming, which, by definition, is the modification of another celestial body to make it similar to earth. Its still hypothetical, of course, but in my opinion its definitely feasible.

Mainly this post is meant to organize some of my thoughts and help me critically look at the whole concept of colonization. I'm no expert but I know I'm not the only person out there that has questions about this sort of thing so by asking I have a basis to start my search. Obviously wikipedia is one of my favorite things to use but I'd like to expand from there and if I have narrower more specific questions that will help me look at more "credible" sites like NASA and such. Mars is going to be my focus but I realize that the more probable place to start out is our very own moon, seeing as I don't know shit about vacuums or gravity or any of the main problems with the moon I'm just gonna avoid it for now.

How much time and fuel would it take to transport a manned ship to Mars?

Do we have the technology to even make a manned trip to Mars?

Is a closed ecosystem a possibility on Mars?

How many people, if any, would it take to maintain a closed ecosystem on Mars?

How much water would be needed to create a closed ecosystem on Mars?

What kind of engineering problems are associated with creating domes?

How violent are the storms on Mars?

What kind of materials would be needed to create a dome capable of withstanding dust storms on Mars?

What is the soil made up of on Mars?

How much less sunlight does Mars receive than Earth?

What is the temperature on Mars?
Around the equator during the summer Mars can reach 20 degrees Celsius (70 degrees F)

Does Mars have an atmosphere?
"Mars has a very thin atmosphere composed mostly of the tiny amount of remaining carbon dioxide (95.3%) plus nitrogen (2.7%), argon (1.6%) and traces of oxygen (0.15%) and water (0.03%). The average pressure on the surface of Mars is only about 7 millibars (less than 1% of Earth's)..." (NinePlanets.org) 1013 millibars is 1 atmosphere so 7 millibars is roughly 0.006908463 atm. The altitude that one would experience such a low pressure is 159,013 ft. or 30 miles up, if you go that far up you'll enter the Mesosphere (ace).

What does low pressure do to the human body?

Is it possible to depressurize slowly and safely?

Is it possible to increase the pressure of a planet?
Essentially what needs to be done here is injecting large amounts of gases into the atmosphere. This will serve a duel role of both increasing the surface temperature on Mars as well as the pressure. This is one of the many goals of terraforming.

What is the gravity on Mars?
Mars has approximately .38 the gravity of Earth (NASA) Essentially I weighing 130 pounds would be 49.4 pounds there. This is a whole lot less than I thought, and reading the article sited above gave some interesting questions I didn't have before. I'm gonna keep a close eye on the Mars Mice since they'll be able to answer questions I won't even be able to look into myself.

Would a human be able to function normally on Mars?

What is the escape velocity for Oxygen on Mars?

Does Mars even have the gravity to even hold onto Oxygen?

Some of these are very simple to find with google but I just want to put them down on paper, well in writing rather, to organize my thoughts. I'll edit this post as I find answers to some of these, others which are more speculative I'll just write up another post and link to it here. One thing I've learned from my academic career is the more questions you answer the more emerge, I'll most likely add to this list as I learn things but the point is not to find a solid answer but to critically look into such a feat. It will be years before we will even visit Mars but who's to say we can't start working on colonization now? Stephen Hawking recently stated "The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years, If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before." He says that its possible to have a base on the moon in the next couple decades and a get to Mars by the middle of century (AIP). It's really great that we're just now trying to fix the climate but the climate isn't the only problem facing the future of humanity. Even if we completely clear up our massive carbon footprint there still remains the fact that we only have so much room, our population is growing exponentially. Nothing short of totalitarian rules on reproduction can we avoid outgrowing Earth in the next couple centuries, and still, eventually we'll grow out of it anyway. Of course, that is, if we don't all end up killing each other off. Nature may even do us that little favor by unleashing even more intense disasters and viruses . There's all sorts of horrible things that can happen that will kill off a couple billion people, but isn't that all the more reason we should spread out and increase our chances that much more? Lets face it, sooner or later some renegade asteroid will come along and not just prune our population but completely annihilate our species. Hop to it people, this is our future at stake.