226

Other topics / Re: Art

« on: March 22, 2016, 05:35:44 AM »

Thought you might like to see some other CGI that is fairly easy and nearly anyone can do it.

If you would like to take a try at this yourself, go here and download the program and try it for yourself. It's not very complicated to use at all. You should be up, running, and doing your own in a half hour or less.

227

UFO / Re: The Communication Problem With Contacting An Alien Race

« on: March 22, 2016, 05:10:06 AM »

One of the advantages of new tech is almost always it allows you to do things never before possible. The applications that nanorobotics could open up are still on the drawing board. Until the technology matures, there is no telling where this will take us.

One of the tin foil hat groups will tell you of the fear of the grey goo. Basically technology gone berserk and without control.

One the other side, medical techniques such as have always been considered impossible because of that lack. Remember the movie, Fantastic Voyage? Instead of reducing an entire submarine crew along with the machine, what say we just do away with the crew and the machine. Instead you use nanotech to do the job. Or say cancer, where you have a vaccine that is only used if it is needed and exactly where it is needed as opposed to sending it everywhere through the body just to get those few offending cells. Many of the complications resulting in toxic type materials used in such vaccines would no longer be needed to be filtered out by the kidneys, removing putting those organs at risk.

Another foreseeable possible, is something akin to a Von Neumann machice. When you send a population to Mars, they don't have to bring any construction equipment with them, because when they arrive, the things they would have build for living quarters, machine shops, excavators, and the like have already been built and are waiting on them to just move in. Along with a store of water and oxygen.

The idea here isn't to send the equipment ahead of the arrival of the colonists. It's to send a very small package of self replicating bots in nanosize. At first the bots make copies of themselves which in turn make more copies, till there's literally a factory of nanobots. Then they start making specialized bots that do just one thing, and then more that do something else. At nano size or smaller, they could mine the planet without having a mine. Creating machines able to break down molecular compounds into elements to reuse to create other compounds needed for such construction. Some where in all this would be needed a master program or plan on what to build when, how much is enough, when to schedule the altering of replication into specialized nanobots for certain tasks and when to do it. But theoretically, what you could pack into a 5 gallon bucket would be enough to start it all, given time.

228

Other topics / Re: Art

« on: March 21, 2016, 01:03:50 PM »

...except the object in the hands of the android, because it's too 2D.

It's a valid critique. Had I changed the color of the object, or changed the lighting, and then presented it at an angle to show the printer as being an office printer, it would have looked much better than from the angle it is now. My problem with this one was the robot. In order to show his face, looking at you, I had to go for this particular angle. Too much to the rear or too much to the front and the robot's face is hidden from view. This problem is what makes the printer in the image look 2D. I should have altered the material of the printer, put it back, but you're looking at around 10 hours to produce this image once it was completed, in the rending process. So you kind of have to balance your time against is it worth the change. If I was getting paid for the image it would have been worth the time.

Much of what you see in these images, is just what I want you to see. Every thing is staged to fool the eye. Sometimes I pull it off, sometimes I don't. The very hardest thing in doing these is to see those mistakes yourself. Others spot them right away, such as yours but to the maker of it, you're sort of blind to these faults and it is very hard often to point at exactly what it is that disturbs the eye. This blindness to the faults is not just one of my own. All I know that do these sorts of images have the same problem.

229

Internet / Re: Strange pictures

« on: March 21, 2016, 12:42:40 PM »

230

Other topics / Re: What are you doing right now?

« on: March 21, 2016, 12:34:27 PM »

This year has been kinda of rough on my music heroes. People/bands whom I liked when I was younger are all passing away. Maybe it's just I've noticed it more but lately there seems to have been one after another. David Bowie, Glenn Frey, key boardist, vocalist, guitarist, for The Eagles died, followed by what The Beatles considered as the 5^th member of the band, George Martin. This just the latest in a whole string of people who made music professionally and have died at the end of the year or this year.

231

Food / Re: Crab Casserole

« on: March 21, 2016, 05:58:45 AM »

I've often stated that a recipe is not a 'must follow' blueprint. The idea that you don't have all the called for ingredients doesn't mean you can't make it. It's your taste buds, your wallet, and your time.

We always use recipes as a guideline, maybe we have that ingredient, maybe not. One of the disadvantages of a small town is you can't just up and run to the store that specializes in seafood or ethnic such as Asian to get those proper ingredients. it's a matter of being limited to what is available in one or two stores. So you do with what you have.

232

UFO / Re: The Communication Problem With Contacting An Alien Race

« on: March 21, 2016, 05:42:01 AM »

If he want me to change it with another link, just tell me.

Actually I had intended to link to that page. I'm still getting used to this new track ball mouse that replaced the old one. In particular, it seems my co-ordination only hits once every 5 seconds with it. I've had to change from drag to highlight to click, drag, click, in order to capture those links as a result. That takes some getting used to after all these years of doing it differently.

So thank you for covering my screw up, Internet!

233

Other topics / Re: Art

« on: March 21, 2016, 12:06:22 AM »

Got to admit that's rather unusual.

234

UFO / Re: The Communication Problem With Contacting An Alien Race

« on: March 20, 2016, 11:58:51 PM »

We don't really need the moon to provide light at night. The Town That Created Its Own Sunlight. We don't really need the moon to provide light as has been shown by this town.
I question whether the moon would actually help all that much. Mainly because of the Inverse square law would take much of the benefit away before it got to us. Still there would be enough on clear nights to provide a good illumination at night.

What would be the problem would be getting those clear nights in the winter especially in many parts of the globe. Another issue with that would be long term. Plants do a sort of hibernation over night to conserve their energy for when the sun comes up. Providing light while plants around the night time side of the Earth could well give us unexpected results. Like maybe the corn quits growing without a night of rest.

There are some indications that plants, animals, and other living creatures don't just evolve over long periods of time but also at times evolve rather quickly given changed enviroment.

235

UFO / Re: The Communication Problem With Contacting An Alien Race

« on: March 20, 2016, 06:03:31 AM »

I'm having a bit of a problem with understanding why we might want to cover the moon's surface with solar collectors. To me, it just doesn't make sense. What have I missed?

236

Food / Re: Crab Casserole

« on: March 20, 2016, 04:26:13 AM »

I looked at your excellent photo of the Cole Slaw earlier before you mentioned it. I had not made comment on it yet but did see it.

Here in the US, milk is processed. Much of the fat and cream is removed from the milk before it is sold, along with the homogenizing and pasteurization process to kill bacteria that could make you sick. So making cream is not possible from milk products bought in the store. You have to buy cream separately from the milk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_cream

Cream comes in several grades. Light cream, whipping cream, and heavy cream being a few of them.

237

UFO / Re: The Communication Problem With Contacting An Alien Race

« on: March 20, 2016, 03:59:38 AM »

Seems I left something out in my answer. I'd like to address the last part of your post. The reason why to push on this now and not later after the many problems we suffer from here on earth.

One reason is non-renewable resources. By definition, non-renewable means once they are gone, there is no more to be had. If we wait till we solve all the problems on Earth, we'll never be able to leave to do this. We'll run out of the ability to make the things needed to get us there. For another, we will never solve all the problems on Earth. Our past history tells us this, for we have never, ever, solved all the problems in any civilization that has ever existed on Earth. As soon as one problem is solved, there's another at the door.

Typically in history, mines here on Earth has at best gotten around 12% return on mining. That 12% being the material actually being gone after. All the rest has been the stuff you have to move out of the way to get to it or what can not be obtained by technology we don't have yet to economically do it.

In contrast, were we able to mine our asteroids and comets, the purity of the elements there runs in the 90% range. Meaning that very little smelting and other processes have to be used to get the material that here on earth is bound up in other combinations. This in addition to some materials are not available on earth without extensive extra processes.

But let's look at one other major unrealized benefit that almost no one takes unto account till it shows up. From NASA's drive to develop the technology needed to address various problems we have all benefited from. Spin offs happen that provide untold and unthought of benefits to everyone. Things that just make your life easier, more capable, or better. Some have not showed up yet with useful applications in your life but are still in the pipeline coming. Others are now part of everyday life. None of which would have existed without the space effort. There's no way to calculate these benefits and what they mean to us.

It's like comparing life before electricity to after in some of them. So altering that no one can envision life without it after having lived with it all their lives.

Freeze dried foods, space blankets, modern medical advances such as vascular bypass, memory foam, the aerodynamic suits for the Olympics, Tang, velcro, and teflon only to name just a few of the thousands of spin offs we see in everyday life. None of us think of where they came from, no one thinks of life without them. Yet none would have existed without the space effort.

I've not even talked about what weightless means to drug manufacturing or to phyisical properties in materials that can not be made here on Earth.

238

UFO / Re: The Communication Problem With Contacting An Alien Race

« on: March 20, 2016, 03:06:17 AM »

The reason for using the caveman as an example is everyone gets it right away. You don't have to explain that another culture isn't equipped because of religion or historical limitations. They understand on the spot about the caveman without further explanations.

Yes, there is nothing in this that is really revealing, only some it never occurs to. Either from lack of interest in the topic or it has to be laid out in a logical sequence to be seen and grasped for it's essence.

The rarity of life, not intelligent life, just life seems to be a step that is jumped over when people go to speculating about there being alien life in the universe elsewhere. Usually the first objection to intelligent life and we being alone is numbers. That's been partially covered in another previous post.

The new generation telescope is already on the distant horizon. Not in being made but the how to do. On a smaller scale we already do astronomical observations in the same manner on Earth today. The key here is the size of the aperture. How much gathering ability you have to observe with. One telescope (be that radio, visual, infrared, etc.) is limited by the size of it's collector. To increase the size, several points on the earth in different locations, with the same types of observatories, hook up to computers to balance the varying differences in time, etc and come out with a collector the size of the Earth in essence.

To increase this size means going into space with them. Picture two, three, or four, at different places across the solar system, spaced in opposition. More than enough to spot an Earth sized planet in a system. The biggest problem at this point isn't being able to gather the observing data, it's the glare of the star in the system being observed, which tends to blank everything else out in a globe of visual light, magnetic field, and the output of the star in the varying frequencies used to observe. Software and hardware has helped a lot in this providing a black spot to take out the interference provided by the star in the system being observed.

239

Food / Crab Casserole

« on: March 20, 2016, 02:48:52 AM »

Crab Casserole

Ingredients

1/2 c celery, fine chop
1/2 lg green pepper, chopped
1/2 c green onion, chopped
1 tsp parsley, dried
1 lb crab meat
1 1/4 crackers, crushed to crumbs
1/3 tsp dry mustard
some dashes of Tabasco
1/4 c heavy cream
1/4 c butter, melted

Directions

Divide cracker crumbs in half. Mix one part of crumbs with ingredients in large bowl. Butter baking dish and pour mixture into dish. Cover with remaining crumbs. Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes.

240

Other topics / Re: What are you doing right now?

« on: March 19, 2016, 06:30:05 AM »

The actual term it is known by isn't MKV but rather KVM switch. Long ago, I used to have one but that was before USB came into play. The KVM stands for Keyboard, Video, Mouse switch. This allows one keyboard, one monitor, and one mouse to work on two different computers, instead of having one of each for each computer. You hit the switch and your accessories as well as the monitor change computers, with the press of one button.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVM_switch