austenandrews

Re: How to get swords on your starship

Re: Astrogator's Handbook As a writer my first instinct is to say "Life can't exist out there, except where it does." But the GHZ is a reasonable basis for extrapolating where Earth-like life is most likely to be concentrated.

Re: NASA Predicts Non-Green Plants on Other Planets Interesting work. Of course it's unlikely that another planet would evolve something quite the same as Earth's plants, so the simplified premise is a bit misleading. But some sort of photosynthesis is more likely than not, I would think, and it's fun to speculate what color it might be (or if a world might be fairly bland to human eyes due to absorption of the full visible spectrum).

Re: Concept Cars The Phantom Corsair is the ultimate Golden Age car.

Re: "Neat" Pictures My son had eyes like that when he was a few weeks old. What? I never told you about little Lucifuge?

Re: Future by Design Nice design work. Very retro-futuristic. How long till some of his ideas are built in Dubai?

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Doing research for my HeroCentral game, I found out a lot about how the Muppets are operated. It's pretty impressive. The mind boggles to imagine the sardine-tight crowds under some of those group scenes. I guess good oral hygeine is pretty high on the list of required traits for a Muppeteer.

Re: How to get swords on your starship The penalties could also be high. If gun crime = automatic death penalty, melee weapons are going to look a lot more appealing.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Just be glad you don't see the appendages controlling those puppets these days.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares

Re: Stalin's Army of Dog-Men! "It shall be the greatest army of robot zombie men IN THE WORLD!"

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares the Muppets meet Lovecraft Oh wait.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Sum area of the rings, I suspect.

Re: To catch a clone Does the cloning process itself produce identifying evidence?

Re: "Neat" Pictures These are what 21st century skyscrapers are supposed to look like! I approve.

Re: Retrocausality Experiment And it highlights the question, how is the retrocausality experiment fundamentally different from what we already know about FTL transmissions via entanglement? Long Known: 1) Entangle photons A & B 2) Send transmission from A 3) B displays gobbledegook 4) STL info from A reveals it wasn't gobbledegook but an FTL signal Retrocausality Experiment: 1) Entangle photons A & B 2) B displays gobbledegook 3) Send transmission from A 4) Info from A reveals it wasn't gobbledegook but a signal from the future Relativity says that FTL and time travel are the same thing, so the order of 2 & 3 are irrelevant. Doesn't the experiment just demonstrate that? If we skip step 3 - sending the transmission into the past - there's no paradox because B always displays gobbledegook. This is just another facet of the long-known "spooky action," right?

Re: Retrocausality Experiment I confess, I'm unclear how the experiment works. If you measure the near photon, doesn't entanglement force the far photon into the corresponding state? Why is there any belief that it wouldn't?

Re: Retrocausality Experiment

Re: Retrocausality Experiment I have a feeling this will turn out to be another interesting-but-useless factoid about quantum entanglement. If one receives signals from the future, what happens if you do not then send the signal? Answer: probably nothing, which will invigorate SF and theoretical physics to no end, but will have no meaningful technological application. I've got a spoof story on the backburner positing that information can be sent FTL, but the net amount of information must remain STL. In other words if you receive data FTL, an equal or greater amount of your existing information is destroyed. Which doesn't bode well when they launch an interstellar probe that sends back data via quantum entanglement.

Re: Crystal Caves of the Mole-Men! Holy cow. That's insane! And insanely cool!

Re: Japanese unmanned rescue robots The camera needs a little samurai helmet, to complete the horror.

Re: Dextor The Dynamically Balanced Walking Bobot Running is easier than walking, as I understand it.

Re: Dextor The Dynamically Balanced Walking Bobot The wannabe-engineer in me keeps saying there's some simple way to make a walking machine (dynamically-balanced, to use their term).

Re: Swimming, snake-like robot That thing looks effing wicked! Other robot vids (some old): Awesome quadruped: Kinda creepy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYIzGjLNIyI&mode=related&search= Even more creepy: Our New Cockroach Overlords: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZD59Ic9T8&mode=related&search= Our New Robot Batting Champ: It totally watched him mix it up: Okay, now they're just getting silly:

Re: "Neat" Pictures I thought you said "Lightning is everything" which works just as well.