The Tentacle Show

Sometimes, I just want to swim out in to the ocean and return myself to the sea.

So, apparently I have been missing out on the most adorable anime/manga series ever created ever.



I highly recommend watching it.

Some species of squid can fly

http://www.treehugger.com/files/20…

There are already limits on what a candidate can spend on an election in the U.S. The real problem is the SCOTUS decision that turned the U.S. political process over to the highest bidder. In essence, we've taken free speech and outsourced it.

So, more to the point, there should be limits on what can be spent on politics in general. I've always thought that each candidate for office should be provided with a stipend from the government with which to run their campaign and no donations, public or private, should be allowed.

Is it worth the billions? I've got a better question, why aren't we spending trillions? Space exploration, and by proxy I'm assuming space everything (manufacturing, mining, energy capture, colonization) is the most important thing we can be doing right now.

We're approaching a bottleneck in resource production on this planet. All of the easy to get stuff is rapidly being mined, pumped, and scooped out, and once we have to try reaching for the difficult stuff we'll be facing a cost/benefit situation that will make most durable goods impossible to afford.

Meanwhile, quintillions of tons of metal, water, volatile organics, and hydrocarbons are floating above our heads, just outside Earth orbit, not to mention limitless (for us, for now) supplies of free energy.

Imagine for just a moment, a world with no power plants. No coal stacks blasting radioactive soot in to the air. No nuclear plants with hot potato waste products that are ripe for conversion in to weapons. No oil or gas plants sucking up thousands of tons of oil a day. Instead, picture an open field full of widely spaced metal poles. Birds jump from pole to pole while a heard of cattle lazily graze and occasionally use the poles to scratch their flanks. Meanwhile, these poles are in the processing of converting microwaves beamed down from a satellite in to gigawatts of electrical power for the near-by neighborhood. (and possibly their time traveling Delorians)

Imagine a world with no factories or farms, just a narrow belt of glowing dots in the sky and the occasional glimpse of the sprawling green bubbles of a hydroponic space farm. The land would go back to green, the old hulks of mills and other assorted manufacturing places could be turned in to housing, shopping areas, parks, concert halls, or torn down and planted with trees, whatever the community desires. There would be no hunger because we're landing a thousand tons of fresh vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products and grains anywhere in the world, rain or shine, on 24 hours notice. Preservatives? Why? This beef was a cow walking around in a pasture yesterday. This apple was harvested by a young man at the L5 farm two days ago.

Imagine a world where unemployment is nearly unheard of. The average person can qualify for orbital rating with a few weeks training and there are always jobs in space. When you take away the want part of the human equation, we're suddenly free to do what we really want. Arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, all ready to be experienced by minds freed of the fear of deprivation.

We've got the technology to harvest near-Earth objects, in fact we've had it since the 60's. We've got the technology to capture solar power and beam it to Earth, we've had that since the 70's. We've been growing hydroponic plants since the 30's. The thing we're lacking is the drive and determination.

Doing your wife.

Dear Step-up 3D,

The robot? Really?

Since 1980 human computational capacity has undergone a revolution not seen in any other human engineering or technical endeavor, in essence doubling our capacity every 12 to 18 months. Add to that, the creation of highly fault-tolerant networks that now span the globe and allow access by nearly anyone, nearly anywhere, to nearly any data they could possibly want, and people are STILL DANCING THE FUCKING ROBOT?!?!

It wouldn't have been so bad if it had been a Daft Punk song or something else along those lines, but some weird dub step song and only one guy was popping and locking? No. Fucking kids these days, I swear.

One of the most amazing things to do these days is reading.

Reading reading reading reading reading.

On the list today was some good ole Thomas Paine.

Didjaknow(tm)

Thomas Paine wrote extensively on the natural rights of men and had all sorts of crazy ideas like paying people after a certain age so they wouldn't have to work, and crediting people tax money who had children.

Shocking.

It looks like Bonnie will make landfall as a tropical storm, or possibly a very very weak hurricane between Lake Charles and the Alabama boarder. Wide swath, but this is pretty typical for storms as they near a coast.

Houston and Louisiana folks,

Right around 11:00pm central time, TD 22 is going to be upgraded to a named storm. All of the current model tracks have it coming to Houston, but they are released with a below average confidence value.

Estimate time of arrival would be Sunday evening for tropical storm force winds. The storm is expected to be moderate cat 1, possibly light cat2.

There probably isn't any need for evacuation unless you live in a low-lying costal area that is prone to flooding.

If you need to stock up on water, non-perishable food items, and gasoline, do it today. Otherwise, relax, check your margarita supplies and maybe get ready for a Rain Out day off on Monday.