Father's day

June 17th is father's day in the United States, so I would like to take a moment to discuss my own father.

Ron the Ruthless was born shortly after World War II to my grandparents, a pilot and a school principal. He was an excellent scholar, quickly working his way through a fully funded scholarship at the Univerity of California, Berkley. While his major was officially Literature, he also studied nuclear physics, programming, civil engineering, and underwater basket-weaving to become generally the world's most ultimate scholar. After graduating, he met my mother, and they got married. He had two children with my mother. At the time of my birth, he was working as a school teacher in Chula Vista school district. He was also taking night classes in psychology, until he obtained a Master's degree about the time that I started elementary school.

He was quickly promoted to district psychologist, which he worked for 20 years. He then retired, and about five years after my brother left the family home, he moved to the South pacific with my mother to achieve his new life's goal, world conquest as overlord of the planet. He now daily wages war against his archrival, the overlord Sinister Steve.

His hobbies now include electronics, debate, reading, prank calling Kim Jong-un, war (usually against Steve), managing his current empire of currently five islands, choir, underwater basket-weaving, guitar, cello, spending time with his wife of 32 years (who is my mother) and opera.

Some aspects of this biography may be slightly inaccurate. Intentionally. Because it's funny, that's why.

I'd like to thank him for raising me to study hard, work hard, and encouraging me through my scientific endeavors through even the hardest of times. Happy father's day, dad.

To my readers, can you discuss your own fathers, and what makes them special?

More Automated Farming

I love the idea of automated farming. An ever growing population requires an ever increasing amount of food, and I can easily see the day that sunlit space is at a premium. So when a reader of Hack a day produced a small closet, lit with electric lights, watered by drip, and controlled to optimal conditions by an Arduino, I was all in favor. Specifically, our traditional farming is labor intensive, powered solely by the sun, and we're rapidly running out of arable space. Uncontrollable events like weather, wild animals (both of the mammal and insect varieties), and soil conditions can make or break a farm. If there's no rain, well, no more plants. If insects or deer eat up the crops, then, well, the farmer is starving this year. Or, alternatively, if insects pollinate the plants, then fertility is improved. Worms can aerate soil, mix fertility chemicals into much needed positions, and distribute bacteria. Lightning could burn the crops down...or fix the nitrogen that the soil badly needs. With this closet, everything is under control and certain. It may use more energy and be extra complex to set up, but I'm convinced that projects to produce unmeterably cheap energy are just around the corner, and increasing automation will make this project grow cheaper over time. By the time we need it, the distant descendant of this product will be ensuring that the teaming trillions of hungry humans can still afford food.

Promoted

I got promoted at work today. Yaaaaaaay. Tired.

Water Cloud Jovian

According to astronomers, one of the more commonly discovered planets that we've seen in the universe is the Water cloud Jovian -- imagine Jupiter, but in the earth's orbit. Under higher temperatures, the brown and orange stained ammonia clouds evaporate, and are replaced with fluffy white clouds, the kind seen in the earth's sky. The planet enjoys earth-like temperatures (based on radiation calculations), and if you could somehow visit one, you'd see sky above, and sky below, ending in a blue void. Artists have drawn, from the scientist's description of the conditions, what one would look like from the view of an air vehicle flying through the upper atmosphere, and it is remarkably beautiful.

Jovian planets would also be useful industrially. Although this beautiful air would choke you to death, plants could live in this environment without difficulty, and the strong magnetic field allows light in while shutting out much of the more harmful radiation of a star. A farm in such an environment would be a very useful thing, if you could get it on a floating, balloon hoisted platform. With effectively ten earths of space, you could grow quite a bit of stuff. The planet is also rich in chemicals like methane and ammonia, and hydrocarbon synthesis would also prove valuable as industries. Much of a Jovian planet's hydrogen is actually in the form of pure H₂, which is quite chemically valuable (as well as dangerously explosive, so it would have to be kept separate from the breathable air.)

These industries would be able to bootstrap from small balloon-hoisted platforms into larger platforms, into connecting the platforms. While getting the end-products out of the immense gravity well would prove challenging, a successful farm would also be a good place to start a colony -- independence and cheap food would prove a draw to quite a lot of people. The plants would, over time, terraform the planet and increase the industrial usability of the planet's remaining hydrocarbons. Although metal would be in short supply, there being effectively none other than what the colonists bring with them when they arrive, all the plastic you want could be synthesized out of, effectively the planetary air, farming will be super easy, Earth can't attack you, and you can never, ever leave. Anarco-primitivists would love it, as would the more agricultural sectors of French society.

Over time, I think these floating platforms would expand to cover the planet, with each new immigrant group bringing another platform, and extensions being woven from wood and plastic. In a few strategic spots, a hole is deliberately left for the view, but elsewhere, cities spring up, farms grow enough food to literally cover the entire surface of the earth, and people live their lives.

It'd be awesome. Also, impractically distant, as the closest known water cloud Jovian planet is about 41 light-years away, not to mention the usual preposterous costs of any space travel at all.

The Trolling Tax

According to Slashdot, there's a new game coming out. Depending on how you play, it could be free. Or it could be $60, plus another $100 for the ability to speak to other player with a microphone. This fee depends on if you're a nice guy who helps other players, or a shameless troll. The article doesn't explain the exact mechanics, but I assume that there'll be a fee for the game as usual, but players who are well behaved will collect refunds until they have all their money back.

Left unmoderated, the average Internet community quickly declines in quality, as trolls and other attention seekers make the area significantly more annoying to be around. The attention seekers will go to any length of effort to be the center of attention, and the trolls just like pissing people off for the sake of being obnoxious. This is bad for business, as you now have a community of people who annoy the crap out of you pretty much for the sake of annoying the crap out of you. And players who get insulted, harassed, or intimidated too often will stop playing. There's not enough funds from these obnoxious jerks to pay for the server alone, so clearly they must be punished.

The helpful players, however, tend to encourage additional sales. A community of useful and helpful people is fun to be around, to the point where you'd pay money to stay. And this is what the company is banking on.

Most other games just charge everyone the same price, and then ban players who become excessively obnoxious. And even then, the bar is set rather high, as a banned troll will stop paying on the spot. I'm quite familiar with this model, as my own job revolves around removing the unproductive customers that pay $19.99...and then cost the company $10,000 in bad behavior.

The parent company, Valve, is now quite famous for their unusual payment plans. They recently made one of their games, Team Fortress 2, completely free to play, but made customization options available for extra cash. These customization are super popular, as it differentiates your character from the teaming masses, and players are gleefully paying out the nose for the chance to show some personality.

This is not the first time the Internet confronted these issues either. Cracked's David Wong wrote an article several years ago about the radical moves that would be required to prevent trolls from destroying the Internet. Why? Because people want to make money, and obnoxious people are threatening to ruin that. And if there's one thing I've noticed about America, it's that threatening people's income never goes well.

Crows Vs. Falcons

In Tokyo, feral crows have become a serious problem. They clog traffic with dropped nuts. They poop on practically everything. They steal food from street vendors. They literally snatch candy from small children, then fly away. The city of Tokyo decided that they might fight back.

While most people would have gone on a crow hunt with firearms, or laid elaborate baited traps, Japan's famous for its odd solutions. In this case, they found a teenage falconry expert and had her pet falcon go hunting.

This has been more effective than expected. The falcon killed a bunch of crows, and the vast majority ran away in terror, deciding that if the humans can call up predators like that, they're probably not worth dealing with. Problem, crows?

Cooling Fountains

Fountains are a common civic decoration, in front of buildings, in parks, and in all sorts of locations because we humans just can't get enough of that flowing water. Both the visual element of water spraying into the air, and the sound it makes as it trickles back to its source evoke some very pleasant instincts for us. Unfortunately, fountains are surprisingly expensive. The water must be pushed against gravity for a surprisingly high energy cost. The water will quickly grow full of slime and clog the machines unless regular cleaning is involved, or poisonous water. However, fountains give me an interesting idea. Cars and computers are often cooled by a flowing liquid. This is an old technology. The liquid flows through the hot areas, taking heat with it. The liquid then flows through a radiator, which has a much larger surface area and can disperse far more heat. The liquid is then cool, and can be sent back to the hot areas. Hence my next idea. In my idea, a large radiator is replaced with a fountain, which spews hot water out of the ground using a pump, producing a fancy geyser. The hot water cools significantly in contact with air, until it hits the small "lake in the fountain, and is sucked back into the system to cool the machinery again. Algae and mildew can't build up in this system, as the water is routinely heated by well over 50C, and potentially up to boiling temperature. Even if it could withstand the hot end of the scale, the repeated heating and cooling would kill any living thing by thermal shock alone. The fountain is pretty, and the machine is using a house-sized piece of atmosphere as a radiator. It's sort of efficient...and artistic!