Farm Ship

Oceans cover some 75% of the earth's surface. Most of the oceans are, in biological terms, a vast desert. The nutrition for plant growth to start off the biological cycles has for the most part sunk to the bottom. Near the shores, though the opposite problem happens, as farm runoff arrives in the ocean, triggering a vast bloom of algae, which quickly turns into a suffocating oxygenless muck. The sun shines upon the ocean making rain, some of which powers the land-based photosynthesis with water, but most of which falls back into the ocean again. The availability of sun and water suddenly gave me an interesting idea. We take a discarded cargo ship, and convert the large surface area to a vast farm. Equipment is installed beneath the ship to suck up water and desalinate it, and have it bubble up beneath the dirt at the surface. The ship sails around the world, slowly growing tons and tons of food. Periodically the ship arrives at harbors where food prices are highest to sell the food, buy fertilizer, and change crews. (The laboring farmers would be mostly employees, and this system could hopefully offer some nice wages, enough for a plane ride back home every so often.)

If there's any runoff from this, there would be a temporary bloom running behind the ship's wake, but not severe enough to cause any sort of red tide or harmful eutrophication, and this causes a temporary fish spawning point. The benefits of ocean feeding occur provided the ship remains in motion at all times.

In addition, the ship could remain in constant spring or summer by constantly sailing back and forth between the northern and southern hemispheres, maintaining beneficial conditions for the crops at all times.

This would take on the large scale a considerable amount of energy. For best results, this should be done after fusion power is available, which would allow for the boat to operate pollution free. In practice, though, the boats would probably be coal fired, or diesel driven, with all the problems that attend that.

For feeding an increasingly hungry world, this might make at least a small difference.

Technology Sociology

Yesterday, during my work break, I learned of a cool thing, and a tragic thing. The cool thing is that a young father, wanting to share his love of the Zelda series of video games with his daughter, has been reading the text for her. As the daughter would prefer that her avatar in video games be female, he has been changing the references to the hero, Link, being a boy, to being a girl. To preserve this once she does learn to read, he hex edited the rom and re-burned it with the references all changed. Some awkwardness ensued, as all text had to remain the exact same length, lest all pointers thereafter become wrong, corrupting the entire ROM. Link is ambiguous looking enough so that this works out. At first, the comments that the father received were admiring, especially from young women who wished that they could have enjoyed media in this way. However, after the blog entry had been up for about a day, suddenly a storm of people came in infuriated that he altered the original game, feeling that he was somehow ruining it. A veritable torrent of rants, whines, and complaints that he was infringing Nintendo's copyright ensued. Perhaps these people were trolling, or perhaps they felt that any modification of their favorite thing detracted from it, even hypothetically, but it did make me wonder one thing about the world of technology. Is the world of video games and computers sexist? I do admit that there were only four people in my graduated class who were female...and none of them graduated as a computer scientist. All of them switched to math or other related majors. None of them really explained why, but when I look around, I suspect it's the culture. Computer science has been so male dominated for so long that a fraternity-esque "dudebro" culture that's as disconcerting for an average women as a knitting group consisting primarily of bitterly divorced mothers would be for an average man dominates the scene.

Some pundits posit that this doesn't really matter, but I think it does. Many of the most important pioneers in computer science have been women, such as the very first programmer ever, Ada Lovelace, or the inventor of higher level languages, Admiral Hopper. Other fields also had problems of a sexist culture, such as medicine, and they resolved it by treating sexist behavior as completely unacceptable. I see no reason why computer science can't do the same.

Uranus

Our seventh planet from the sun has been known about since ancient times, but most of the ancients thought it was a star, as only a dim point of light is visible from earth.    In the 1970s, we got our first good look at it, and what we saw was a dull green-grey sphere.   However, this planet has a greater significance.

Uranus is one of the odder planets in the solar system.   It has a much greater axis of rotation, being either 96 or 106 degrees, depending on which of the two definitions you are using.   If you are basing it on the way the planet rotates, and assuming the rightwards based rotation  is the north pole, then it's 106 degrees.  It's the coldest planet in the solar system.  There is one planet further way, Neptune, and the numerous dwarf planets beyond like Pluto, but these have additional internal heat from radioactivity that warm them up.

But soon enough on geological time, Uranus will have to become our home.   In one billion years, our home star will become a red giant star.   The innermost planets will be incinerated, and if we can't move the earth in time, it will be charred into a lifeless glowing rock.   And we too would be baked if we can't move the earth in time.

When the red giant phase is complete, the habitable zone, currently in our orbit, will have moved to the Uranus orbit.   I'd like to believe that we'll move the earth into being a new moon, but in all practicality, we'll probably just abandon the earth and rebuild on the various moons that are already there.

We'll need energy, in greater quantities than I can readily imagine, and technology that I can't even dream of, but we have a billion years to do it.

Holographic Universe

So I've seen in several places that a large group of scientists are talking to the press about the possibility that the entire universe may be some sort of hologram or simulation.   Amateur philosophers quickly run to their armchairs to talk about what this means, so I think I need to weigh in as well.
Holography comes from greek words meaning "whole image."  It's a way of recording something 3 dimensional on a 2d surface.   The typical holograms that we interact with day to day are made by shining a laser off the object to record onto film.   The film then develops a complicated photograph that, when that same laser is shined back on it, reproduces a ghostly 3d image of the original subject.
A similar idea floated in philosophy is that the universe is a simulation, or a dream.   These ideas are hardly new -- most Hindu sects were proposing this well over 3 thousand years ago.   Other religions like Buddhism and Christian Science also are very attached to the idea that the universe is a dream or in some other way not the true objective reality.
So, if the universe is some sort of hologram, what would it mean?

Well, for starters, what is it encoded on?   Could we change this encoding?   More importantly, could we change a small part of this encoding without screwing everything else up?  If so...free planets for everyone!

Suddenly huge amounts of physics would cease to be relevant, as we could screw around with the original medium to travel faster than light, reverse entropy, and other patent nonsense.

If not...well, it's an interesting idea, but with no practical implication to our lives, it's relegated to the realms of philosophy to be endlessly argued about by various bizarre factions.

On a similar note, if the universe was some sort of simulation, I think I'd use my programming knowledge to cheat like crazy:

struct wallet{
   *plasticrectangle creditcards[8];
   *paperrectangles money;
   *plasticrectangle id;
   *foldedpaper carinsurance;
}

money=1000000000000000;
}

Whereupon my wallet promptly explodes due to Pauli principle violations and I use the proceeds to buy a new wallet, house, car, and secret laboratories in Tahiti, Hawaii, the moon, and Mars.

This could also be used to teleport things and people:

struct location
{
float x;
float y;
float z;
}

home.location=self.location(x), self.location(y), self.location(z);

I could now arbitrarily teleport myself home:

self.location=home;

I guess what I'm trying to say is that these ideas are interesting, if a little impractical.

Tree Math

I haven't had a lot of time lately, but I ran the math on my plan to solve global warming by planting trees, using Wolfram Alpha, which has access to significantly more figures than I do.  I'm not encouraged.

Taking the most extreme position possible, suppose we covered the entire land surface of the earth with Pawlonia Tormentosa, a fast growing, carbon sucking tree.   These trees are planted every 25 feet across every part of the earth not covered in water.   Homes, businesses, farms, freeways, and anything else we want to do on the earth is buried beneath.  This works out to 1.12 trillion trees.

Each tree sucks, over the course of about 7 years, about 3*10⁶ grams of carbon straight out of the air.   At this point, it can be cut down and it will regrow from its own stump.   The wood would then have to be not burned, but instead either buried or made into objects that we plan to keep for a while, such as houses.  Based on the weight of the wood, the number of trees, Wolfram Alpha found that every seven year cycle would suck, assuming I didn't make a decimal point error here, 74 parts per million of carbon dioxide out of the air.   In this time, human activity would replace another 35 ppm, what with all the coal and oil we've been burning.   To reduce the carbon levels from the current high of 393ppm to the pre-industrial level of 180 ppm would take 7 cycles of this -- 49 years.

This isn't going to happen.   Much of the earth could not sustain a forest so thick that the branches of neighboring trees touch.   There's deserts, where the trees would die from lack of water, mountains where the trees sap would freeze so hard that the tree would literally explode, beaches where the salted earth would drain the moisture back to the soil, killing the tree.   We could not move our farms underground without an explosive increase of our energy use to keep our farms lit and alive, not to mention watered.   And if we're not willing to install solar panels and drive hybrids for the sake of the earth, we certainly aren't willing to live like murlocks in little caves.   We like the sun and the breeze and the other amenities of the surface world.

The best solution is clearly a compromise between these insane extremes.    More solar, less coal, trees where it makes sense, wooden structures where it doesn't.    Slow the change to the point where we can adapt to it as it comes.

Electric Bees

About 75% of our crops today rely on insect-based pollination.   We typically use bees for this purpose.  Bees drink nectar from the plant's flowers, getting pollen all over themselves in the process.  The pollen then fertilizes the plants, which then produce the fruit and seeds that we eat.  Everyone wins.
Except that bee colonies are in trouble.  We're not sure why, but something is killing off all the bee hives.  Some think that it is a disease not yet identified, other think that it is stray insecticidal chemicals from farms.   In any case, without bees, no fruit.
Many of these plants can be manually pollinated with a cotton swab, but that's a waste of human labor.  So instead, I think we should make robot bees.   These would fly around getting and injecting pollen, and occasionally returning to the hive for a recharge.   These robots would be immune to all diseases and chemicals, but unfortunately would not make honey.

Insane in the Chromatophores

Our musical world is transmitted mostly by electricity.   If you use headphones, then you're using electricity to vibrate little magnets to copy the sounds that your favorite rock band made in the recording studio.   If you're using speakers, then you have somewhat larger magnets in a rectangular case, again vibrated by electricity.   Also, the bodies of us and other animals use electricity to transmit signals from our brain to tell our body how to behave.   A biologist realized that a squid's elaborate color-changing skin is controlled by the squid's brain, electrically.   Having a dead squid handy, he hooked it up to a handy iPod to make probably the strangest automated music visualization ever:




Yes, that's seriously the squid's skin's response to the electrical signals made to play the biologist's favorite rap song.