Cancer

Re: The Last Word Nope, we're not paying for the neutering; the shelter covers that. We just have to keep them while they recover. I don't think we'll be keeping momcat. I hope she finds a place. She seems to be an excellent cat with people, but might not get along with other cats in the same house. Siegfried & Felix have squatting rights at our place. It'd be ideal if her original owners were to track her down and get her back, but that seems pretty unlikely.

Re: Help me make a Casino based Super Villain group Don't forget Bouncer, a brick of the most classic sort.

Re: The Last Word Changing subject entirely, the kittens we're fostering go in next Monday to get fixed. That happens at 2 pounds body weight. One of them was below that, and only barely. They'll come home to recover for a week or two, and then they go back to the shelter. AFAICT, none of them have clicked well enough with any of us to stay. Momcat is a pretty grey and a sweetie and hasn't a mean bone in her body where people are concerned, but she shows signs of being unable to get along with the older boys, the prior residents.

Re: Answers & Questions Q: What do you make of it, sir? Station 3W is oddly round, and it looks split down the middle.... A: You, sir, remain most tiresomely predictable.

Re: Answers & Questions

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Send them all self-help DVDs titled "How to live a better life, simply". NT: The most worthless article of clothing you can imaging being received as a gift.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Birds, snakes, frogs and toads, small mammals (I've had cats that went for large grasshoppers), ...

Re: The Last Word No dreams that I've remembered for quite some time now. There have been some that I recall when I wake up, but that fades away over the course of the morning. The last dream I specifically recall now was over a decade ago.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER The one we caught was tan also, but given the climate and surroundings where we caught it, a green one would have been spotted and eaten approximately immediately.

Re: 10 Best Spacewalks in History Y'know, reading that page, I have the impression the real answer is "All of them."

Re: "Neat" Pictures Wow. The bicolor bird looks chimeraic.

Re: Musings on Random Musings So the perfect magical meal would combine all four elements ... easiest to do with fire-water (beer) and air-earth (popcorn, perhaps)?

Re: One Small Step for Man... As one astronaut I know has said, the physical requirements now aren't all that tough. (They were much tougher back in the 1960's; my childhood heart murmur was by itself enough to disqualify me back then, so I never thought about being one.) The tough part is the personal stuff. To a considerable degree, the astronaut corps selects new ones. They have to, since when they're up there, their lives are in each others' hands. "Cowboys" ... people who are overconfident and will try risky things ... need not apply.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER The only reason you might lose her out of your yard is if you have some pesticide residue that you've forgotten about. We kept ours indoors, partly because my daughter really liked her, and because I've had to spray a couple of wasp nests around the place, and insecticide builds up pretty fast in the predatory bugs like mantids.

Re: In need of help If you have a map, then I'd think you're golden for a genuinely introductory adventure. Two low-powered supers as PCs plus half a dozen vanilla zero-point norms with handguns doing a bank stickup ... for Children's First Adventure, it'll work, especially considering what their attention span is likely to be. I did exactly this sort of thing last summer with 10-11 year olds: family friend's kids were visiting, learned that I GM'ed HERO system (including Champions), and I had about 6 hours to whip up a sample fight for them so they could get the feel.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Pulp Hero Resources Another shipping spam from the eastern Mediterranean. A modestly useful detail that something of those dimensions (which I assume are meters for length/width/draft and metric tons for the weights etc.) could come down the Danube (no other way for something built in Austria in 1971).

Re: Surviving fall from orbit I think LS: self-contained breathing & safe in low pressure, plus an exceedingly difficult (I'm thinking 19- here: absolutely impossible without the right equipment and an immense amount of skill & planning) Gliding Skill roll, plus the right TF (TF: hyper-advanced parachuting? TF: Personal re-entry non-vehicles ?) would be enough, under the right conditions. Going to RL now. A planned re-entry from a decaying orbit can be managed. Aerobraking, a technique first used for the Magellan mission to Venus in 1990, is now the preferred method for circularizing the orbits of interplanetary spacecraft. This means choosing the apopoint of the orbit to be in the very high atmosphere, so in each orbit you get an interval with some drag to bleed off the orbiter energy, but not so much the mechanical and thermal stresses damage the spacecraft. You have to get the trajectory right or lose everything, of course, and it takes quite a while: lots of orbits, several weeks of time. Now, circularizing the orbit is by no means the same as landing, but it gets the point across: if you are in control of the re-entry trajectory, and you have time both to plan and to execute the plan, it can be survived. Most stuff burns up or gets broken apart on re-entry because it isn't on a trajectory that's surviveable, and it doesn't have a shape that lets it manage the stresses of re-entry. I recall a paper from about 1998 discussing just this topic in the context of meteorite entries ... non-aerodynamic objects coming in at 10 km/s build up not just a lot of heat, but a huge pressure gradient across them from the shock wave on their leading surface to vacuum on the trailing surface. That pressure gradient, combined with some rotation, will make for drastic stresses on the object, far in excess of their breaking strength. For a broad range of size & composition for macroscopic objects, you expect them to break up in the atmosphere (dissipating a lot of its kinetic energy this way) as they come down. I'll see if I can track down that paper and if I do, I'll edit this and add the link. EDIT: Here is the paper, PDF format. Turns out it's from '93, not '98. Technical journal article, but you gotta love anything titled "The Fragmentation of Small Asteroids in the Atmosphere". Just the abstract is fun, too: there's some useful numbers for what destructive power you get from what size asteroid, not from the crater it makes (which is none), but from its airburst. You avoid that problem, even with a relatively weak object (something as strong as your armored steel sphere has no problem in this context) with a properly selected trajectory and a carefully engineered shape. So the question is: when you're asking about surviving entry from low orbit, is this a one-time long-planned thing for injecting a few agents into a planet from space, or are we talking about the losers of low-orbit space dogfights ejecting and making it safely after being shot down? The former is quite manageable, I think, with today's tech. The latter is some time away.

Re: The Last Word Well, I attribute occasional lapses in common sense to the subconscious deathwish kicking in. Treachery by omission rather than commission is far more common, and is mildly subtler.

Re: The Last Word I only get worried when I don't notice that it's obvious.

Re: The Last Word You trust your brain not to be insidious and make those attempts obvious? I wish I was that ... carefree.

Re: A "Vintage" plot Here I thought there'd be an adventure revolving around a mind control potion produced at a winery and distributed widely to the public as a decent, inexpensive red wine. Earlier vintages would have been made before the mind control stuff came out, so vintage matters in this case. Hm. May have to file that idea for later use.

Re: The Last Word It's not like I had a choice.

Re: The Last Word Eventually. It took three or four years. That "iron snowflake" series went away when spring came, which had nothing to do with my efforts, of course.

Re: The Last Word The recurrent nightmares I had came when I was 6: we moved from the Bay Area in California (and that was the north limit on where I'd lived so far in my life) to West Berlin in mid-December 1962, which at the time was the hardest winter since WW2. A kid who'd seen snow fall once, and when we got there, there was 17 cm of ice on Tegler See (a lake in the city). That winter I had that series. There were iron snowflakes the size of a school bus up in the clouds (sometimes you could see them), just waiting to fall on people who ventured out from cover. And every night, I ventured out from under cover (for a different reason every night), and was crushed. I worked on suppressing dreams starting then.