“I’ll take ‘Barely Surviving’ for $100, Alec.”
This is the prompt that never ends…
February 13, 2024
That’s no (stealth ocean) moon…oh, wait…
February 12, 2024
Mimas, the smallest and innermost of Saturn‘s major moons, is believed to generate the right amount of heat to support a subsurface ocean of liquid water
https://www.space.com/saturn-moon-mimas-stealth-ocean-world
Unfortunately the “stealth ocean” is only a few million years old, not nearly enough to harbor life.
But it demonstrates the fact that water may in fact be common in space, opening the possibility of finding life on celestial bodies with older (much older) water sources.
(FYI: Mimas orbits Saturn once every 22 hours, and is affected by tidal forces from Saturn that appear to have melted part of its icy surface.)
My latest attempt to troll as many fanbases as possible…
February 9, 2024
Did I miss anyone? 😆👽🤖👾
Easy question. Easy answer.
February 7, 2024
LIfe.
I need a break from life.
Just let me hide in a cabin in the mountains with coffee and WIFI and a laptop for writing.
That’s it.
A writing prompt that almost answers itself
February 4, 2024
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
I would say “yes.”
How?
Failure influences my perspective on life.
Successes influence my perspective on life.
Deaths influence my perspective on life.
Births influence my perspective on life.
Travel influences my perspective on life.
I would list the above five as “significant events” in life. But “the passage of time” is a little more vague.
Four years doesn’t seem like a long time to me now, but it sure did when I was 18.
Even six years doesn’t seem all that long now. But to my daughter who graduates from elementary school this March, six years is half her life.
My perspective on this question is that it’s the people in my life that have changed my perspective.
Even my daughter gets this. She wants to visit Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the US again because, as she put it, “a little piece of me is still there.”
But that’s just her perspective. Or is it?
From C64 to Mac Plus – All Hail the ’80s PC Geeks!
February 1, 2024
My father got a Commodore 64 (“C64”) in the early ’80s and I learned how to type on it. Not sure exactly when, but at some point in probably 1986 or 1987 I had saved up enough to get one of my own.
Green monitor. No color. The only computer wherein the disc drive would argue with the CPU (bc the disc drive also had a CPU of sorts). 5 1/4″ floppies. Constantly switching discs in and out to load programs.
I created music (a maximum of four different sounds at a time). Learned BASIC and “machine language” and created very simple programs by copying endless pages of code from a magazine my father subscribed to (he also joined Commodore Users Group, or CUG, and got software to teach us how to type, how to write prose, and how to create family newsletters, all of which led me to eventually run my college newspaper in the early ’90s).
I played endless hours of Bard’s Tale, “Summer/Winter/World Olympic Games” (so old that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page for this series), “Sid Meier’s Pirates!,” and Strat-o-Matic baseball games (I had played the 1983 season with my father on paper, then got the 1985 season and input all the data by hand into the C64 program).
Having used my mom’s (and grandfather’s) manual typewriter for junior high school essays, I found it much easier to use the C64 to typed all my high school essays, which were printed out on my dad’s dot-matrix printer with the connected paper sheets. (I had a lot of fun separating the sheets and tearing off the hole feed strips on either side of the papers.)
I later got a C128 in college before borrowing a friend’s Mac Plus to write my senior project (our version of an undergraduate thesis).
And of course wasted hours and hours on the first version of Civilization (any Civ fans out there?).
See, back then, people like me were endlessly mocked as “computer nerds” and “geeks.”
And now you all have a tiny handheld computer that you carry around and play with 24/7.
Welcome, fellow nerds! We took over the world! Hah!
Well, *that* was interesting!
February 1, 2024
OK, so my post about a big ole spider got the most likes of any post in ten years of blogging about science.
I have so not got the zeitgeist of the 2024 blogosphere lol – anyway, thanks, all, for the “likes”! Although one person used AI to write a very meaningless comment about arachnophobia. What’s the point, man?
By the way, back to science and space stuff. I forgot to post about the Europa Clipper project back in October.
So here you go. (It’s too late to add a message, but the project obviously is going to take some time arriving there, and you can supposedly hear US Poet Laureate Ada Limón read her poem online, although I’ve had trouble with the audio lately:
“Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.”
This
January 31, 2024
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
No. Way.
I have arachnophobia in the first place and can’t even stand those little spiders that jump all around.
I came in the house once after working in the garden and realized a spider had gotten stuck in my hair (probably from weeding under the tomato plants).
I feel freaked out just writing about it.
Just.
No. You couldn’t pay me enough to do this.
SLIM pickings! Back to work…
January 31, 2024
The craft is at a very awkward angle. A picture, captured by the small baseball-sized robot called Sora-Q – which was ejected from Slim moments before touchdown – showed the lander face-down on the lunar surface.
That left its solar panels facing away from the sunlight and unable to generate power. The decision was taken to put the lander into sleep mode – and conserve what power remained – less than three hours after it landed.
That tactic appears to have worked. A change in the direction of the sunlight has now “awoken” the craft.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68131105
As previously reported, JAXA did achieve its goal of a “precision landing” — as some put it, a “pinpoint” touchdown within 100 meters of the intended target — within 55 meters, although if all had gone as planned, it would have been within 10 meters.
That’s far, far closer than previous Moon landings.
Too bad SLIM is essentially standing on its nose. But at least this is a beginning. Japan has now become the fifth country (US, USSR, China, India) to successfully “soft land” an object on the Moon.
And the robots it brought with it are pretty amazing. And tiny.
”Bringer of Light” entering final proofing stage…
January 26, 2024
Now that I’ve got the manuscript completed, it’s time to search for typos!
Yup. Found some already. Oops.
I figure to rearrange and combine some of the later chapters as well. Look for a publication online in late March!
It’s taken nearly 9 years. Hm. Only 11 years fewer than Adam’s Stepsons.
Fortunately, I have outlined book two and started writing the opening chapters already. Hopefully it won’t take another 9 years to see the continuation of the Bringer of Light story!
M Thomas Apple Author Page 