Warren Ellis's Blog, page 54

CLOSEDOWN: Datsyuk

Some proper nighted, chilly dreampop to shut down with.  G’night.

PUZZLES BY Datsyuk by Datsyuk

Sailing To Jupiter In Three Weeks

Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams has been thinking about solar sails for space travel.  Specifically, pointing a solar-sail vessel inwards, towards the sun, to get a massive solar thrust effect:

…the numbers on a sail one mile in diameter moving to within nine million miles of the Sun. They find that a sail of this class could achieve a Solar System exit velocity of 250 miles per second. Johnson talks about all this in miles per second but let’s switch to kilometers, which is my normal practice here. 250 miles per second works out to about 400 kilometers per second, which we can usefully compare to Voyager 1’s 17 km/sec, as Johnson does:

And here he quotes:

A craft traveling this fast would pass the Earth in four days, Jupiter in twenty-one days and reach the Alpha Centauri system in just over three thousand years. By comparison, the fastest rocket we’ve ever sent into space won’t cover the distance to the Alpha Centauri system for another seventy-four thousand years! By increasing the sail size and keeping the payload mass the same, we can see an engineering path to building a sail that could cover this immense distance in about a thousand years.

Mr Gilster gets very excited about these numbers.  But I got left behind, a bit.  I stopped at “Jupiter in twenty-one days.”  Wait.  You send a probe screaming around the sun to develop a speed that’d probably have it pass Pluto in a month… and you point it out into interstellar space?  Explain to me now how you’ve just put the outer solar system into commuting distance and don’t do anything with that first?  Jettison the goddamn sail and coast in.  Point a laser at a deceleration sail.  Unload probes as you pass.  Or, the hell with it, just fire a sensor-loaded penetrator at Europa.  Even if it takes a year to perform the sundive manoeuvre, even if it takes three, it’d still get there before a conventional probe launch.

Chucking sun-powered smart missiles all over the solar system sounds like fun to me.

Bookmarks for 2012-06-10

Few Brown Dwarfs Close to Home
@Exoplanetology: New class of stars called Y Dwarfs — very cool Brown dwarfs http://t.co/WkjWRHYW http://twitter.com/Exoplanetology/sta...
(tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )

LONDON, June 26, speaking at Greg Palast’s VULTURE’S PICN...

LONDON, June 26, speaking at Greg Palast’s VULTURE’S PICNIC book launch – details

EINDHOVEN, June 16/17, Under Tomorrow’s Sky public thinkt...

EINDHOVEN, June 16/17, Under Tomorrow’s Sky public thinktank – details
LONDON, June 26, speaking at Greg Palast’s VULTURE’S PICNIC book launch – details

SF MAGAZINES: Clarkesworld And The Numbers

I’m not getting back on this old hobby horse per se, but last night I tripped over some data provided by online sf magazine CLARKESWORLD.

In 2009, ANALOG was the best-selling print sf magazine, at around 25K, probably bolstered to the tune of around 3K by ebook-version sales.  It habitually posts a year-on-year decline of between 2 and 6 percent.

So Neil Clarke, who owns and operates digital-only CLARKESWORLD magazine, posted a bunch of data. Including:

The solid line in this chart indicates unique readers per issue and the dotted line is a cumulative six-month average that influences how I determine our monthly readership.

While these are almost certainly all free readers – and the one datum Clarke doesn’t give up is how many paid readers he has – compare the reach to what I just told you about ANALOG.  CLARKESWORLD is now a place that’ll bring a writer of science fiction more readers than will the most popular sf short-fiction magazine in English.

Obviously, individual blogs and special platforms have been bringing people more readers than that for a long time.  But I think it’s worth noting that a place that specifically defines itself as a science fiction magazine has crested over the top of the remaining print magazines and remains on an upward curve.  I wish Neil and his team continued success.

STATION IDENT: Katelan Foisy

(Kat)

Bookmarks for 2012-06-09

Pruned: Graffiti as Tactical Urban Wireless Network
"A Utah-based startup company called Chamtech Operations is claiming that its Spray On Antenna Kit can turn any surface into a high-powered antenna."
(tags:comms cities )
Carles Viñas – The skinheads as a rennovating element of the Spanish extreme right | Re-public: re-imagining democracy – english version
"…the neo-fascist skinheads far from forming a supplement to the old extreme right, became its principal renovating element. A homologous phenomenon soon spread throughout Europe, liquidating the nostalgic character of the former extreme right. Its innovative character was made visible in its iconography (closer to neo-Nazism rather than to Francoist symbols) characterized by the profusion of emblems that were not extensively used till then, like the Celtic cross or the runes taken from the Norse Mythology such as the one adopted by the South African Afrikaner Resistance Movement; in its publications (fanzines of a comics aesthetic called skinzines, which were bound in photocopies); in their modes of expansion, as in the sphere of sports as well as in music (football and neo-Nazi Rock also known as RAC)[5] and in their racist ideology (keeping a distance from the Catholicism that the extreme right previously advocated and that heralded the equality of all people and adopting a supremacist and xenophobic message that the Spanish extreme rightist skinheads were paradoxically trumpeting when the number of immigrants in Spain was not yet significant)."
(tags:pol )
Pages – The 4th AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy
@justinpickard: Gutted to miss this. 'Computing, Philosophy and the Question of Bio-Machine Hybrids': http://t.co/xsiPon2K (July 2-6; Birmingham, UK) http://twitter.com/justinpickard/stat...
(tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
Quick Spain thoughts — Marginal Revolution
@tomkeene: this is dead, dead on. watch +finland http://t.co/9Gvien4W http://twitter.com/tomkeene/status/21...
(tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )

Sun Boxes at East Prospect by stewartbremner

stewartbremner

via Flickr -

Bookmarks for 2012-06-09

Untitled
@justinmcguirk: Very excited to see Strelka Press launching today. http://t.co/o98KchWO @StrelkaPress http://twitter.com/justinmcguirk/stat...
(tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
End of Days by LIGHT ASYLUM on SoundCloud – Create, record and share your sounds for free
End of Days Written, produced, recorded, performed by LIGHT ASYLUM 2010 LIGHT, ASYLUM
(tags:music ifttt soundcloud )