Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The Wednesday Junkdrawer

Didn't I have 151 Friends yesterday?
I noticed earlier than my friend count on Goodreads is 150.  I swear I had 151 friends yesterday.  After I checked on the 15-20 people whose reviews I always read, I brushed it aside and went about my business, posting about whether or not any good movies have prominently features monkeys and so forth.  But the thought kept nagging at me.  After ten minutes of compulsively checking, I cannot identify the person who either unfriended me or deleted their Goodreads account.  It's obviously someone I haven't had much interaction with but it's still annoying not to know.  Or I imagined that I had 151 friends and wasted all that time.

While I dislike my job sometimes, the coworkers make up for it:
Friday, Jake asked me about whether or not a planet could have one hemisphere always facing the sun and if it would rotate on its other axis and what that would do to the weather.  Yesterday, I returned the favor with speculation on how you could simulate a day/night cycle inside a Dyson Sphere and what that would do to the weather, as well as the possibility a space elevator inside the sphere.  Yeah, we're geeks.  It was more intellectually stimulating than the daily bacon conversations, though.

Things I want to include in Towers of the Sun once it leaves the speculation stage:
  1. A Dyson Sphere
  2. A space elevator
  3. An ancient artifical intellegence leftover from the culture that conscructed the sphere
  4. A monorail
  5. Nanites (though I like the word Nanodroids better)
  6. Old tech masquerading as magic
  7. flechette guns
  8. A setting remniscent of both the Old West and feudal Japan
  9. An orbiting arcology that's been overrun by jungle since the tending robots started breaking down
  10. Animal oddities - thylacines, giant sloths, desert (Tasmanian) devils, domesticated foxes (yeah, it's strangely mundane after the other 9)
And now, the burning question:
Which armadillo-inspired creature is more interesting?:
  1. Megadillo - an armadillo the size of a volkswagen
  2. Armadillopede - a many-legged armadillo four feet tall and thirty feet long

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