Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Antimatter Annihilation Engine
Closer than ever to reality! Recent reports have indicated that scientists have succeeded in trapping antihydrogen in strong magnetic fields. Although the time of storage was very minimal (mere milliseconds), it's a positive step towards being able to store antimatter for longer periods of time, an important design consideration for a practical antimatter annihilation based engine. In addition to the storage requirement, methods of economical mass production of antimatter need to be developed. But this might simply accomplished by putting more energy into production (ie powering a particle accelerator with solar power transmission). The actual annihilation part is easy...
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Protostar CODAC
An interesting project I launched during my first lonely semester at Penn State. http://www.mfbb.net/codac/
Monday, May 24, 2010
Asia's "Wildest Dreams"
4:40 to 5:00 on Asia's "Wildest Dreams:" I love that minor thematic element with the guitar and the synthesizer backing. Awesome!
New Domain
So I'm trying dot.tk's free domain redirect service and I am really liking it. The only catch is that I have to receive at least 25 visitors a month to maintain an active domain otherwise I lose it. So if you are visiting this blog from the blogspot domain or another domain, please redirect your browser to http://www.garryspost.tk. Thanks!
Short Story Starts I
One of my millions of short story starts laying around my desktop. It's bad...seems like I always get writer's block shortly after starting. To paraphrase Stephen Coonts, it's like Tom Clancy ate a bad pizza one night and couldn't sleep. I think I wrote this one a few years ago. This post marks the beginning of an occasional series entitled "Short Story Starts." Feel free to contribute your own addition in the comments. This posting is "open source" in that it may be used freely in any aspect so long as NOT for profit and that the original core (this posting) be credited to me, the author of Garry's Post, with a link to this blog.
Deprived of any temporal context, Johnson knew not where he was in time and space. He only knew of his past and of the near future stretching bleak and static, a testament to loneliness and despair. Regrets were a part of his daily contemplation; wraiths of self loathing and vast regrets of a life that could have been.
Johnson hadn't meant to get caught up in this war. But who really meant to get caught up in any shit like this? Not the people of the ravaged planet he found himself on, for sure. Not the young soldiers who invaded it or defended as the case might be. Johnson knew almost nothing about the current status of the conflict. Not since the spaceliner he had piloted for Interstellar was snatched from the sky by the near invisible hands of advanced weaponry. He wondered, no obsessed about constantly the events that followed the unfortunate incident, events of which he had no knowledge. One minute he was in his Captain's chair plotting an approach to Revolutionary City, the next he was aware of darkness, briefly of voices, but then endless, unknowing darkness. He wondered what became of his passengers, his crew.
He was aware of minor things, like the unyielding, cold floor, the stench of his wastes and filthy body, of the feeding tube in his abdomen, of the cold chains that bound him, of the electric shocks that stimulated his muscles periodically. Obviously his captors cared something about his well being, perhaps for some yet unknown political maneuvering. Or perhaps one day a gas would seep into his cell and without knowing it, he would breathe his last, a unused but worthless pawn in some great international game of which he had no desire to participate in.
Johnson had been in the Army, first an infantryman, later an officer and a transport pilot. The conflict was not necessarily a completely unknown variable to him. It was your run of the mill affair; idealistic intellectual cum wannabe revolutionaries turned ruthless guerrillas versus an entrenched, unscrupulous, lumbering dinosaur of an imperialistic power. The conflict was one that had been repeated so many times in history that if one believed in it, they might think Fate had a bad case of amnesia, or perhaps writer's block. Johnson had allowed himself to laugh bitterly at this analogy all the while wondering if he was losing his mind to the darkness and the despair. The players were not new, indeed they were forces that had clashed many times before.
In the 22nd Century, humans, like so many predicted, spread from their original home on Earth, the result of momentous leaps in technology at the end of the 21st Century. The shifting politics of this turbulent, spontaneous expansion which much resembled American expansion West of the Mississippi in the 19th Century, redefined some nations and emboldened others. The African Union rose as a force to be reckoned with on the force of South Africa's advances in space flight technology. The European Union, rather than strengthening as the post World War II ideal had been, split from within as conservatives in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany questioned the effect of pan nationalism on national sovereignty. China's economic momentum disappeared some time in the middle of the 21st and with it, its Communist party, national unity, and global power.
Deprived of any temporal context, Johnson knew not where he was in time and space. He only knew of his past and of the near future stretching bleak and static, a testament to loneliness and despair. Regrets were a part of his daily contemplation; wraiths of self loathing and vast regrets of a life that could have been.
Johnson hadn't meant to get caught up in this war. But who really meant to get caught up in any shit like this? Not the people of the ravaged planet he found himself on, for sure. Not the young soldiers who invaded it or defended as the case might be. Johnson knew almost nothing about the current status of the conflict. Not since the spaceliner he had piloted for Interstellar was snatched from the sky by the near invisible hands of advanced weaponry. He wondered, no obsessed about constantly the events that followed the unfortunate incident, events of which he had no knowledge. One minute he was in his Captain's chair plotting an approach to Revolutionary City, the next he was aware of darkness, briefly of voices, but then endless, unknowing darkness. He wondered what became of his passengers, his crew.
He was aware of minor things, like the unyielding, cold floor, the stench of his wastes and filthy body, of the feeding tube in his abdomen, of the cold chains that bound him, of the electric shocks that stimulated his muscles periodically. Obviously his captors cared something about his well being, perhaps for some yet unknown political maneuvering. Or perhaps one day a gas would seep into his cell and without knowing it, he would breathe his last, a unused but worthless pawn in some great international game of which he had no desire to participate in.
Johnson had been in the Army, first an infantryman, later an officer and a transport pilot. The conflict was not necessarily a completely unknown variable to him. It was your run of the mill affair; idealistic intellectual cum wannabe revolutionaries turned ruthless guerrillas versus an entrenched, unscrupulous, lumbering dinosaur of an imperialistic power. The conflict was one that had been repeated so many times in history that if one believed in it, they might think Fate had a bad case of amnesia, or perhaps writer's block. Johnson had allowed himself to laugh bitterly at this analogy all the while wondering if he was losing his mind to the darkness and the despair. The players were not new, indeed they were forces that had clashed many times before.
In the 22nd Century, humans, like so many predicted, spread from their original home on Earth, the result of momentous leaps in technology at the end of the 21st Century. The shifting politics of this turbulent, spontaneous expansion which much resembled American expansion West of the Mississippi in the 19th Century, redefined some nations and emboldened others. The African Union rose as a force to be reckoned with on the force of South Africa's advances in space flight technology. The European Union, rather than strengthening as the post World War II ideal had been, split from within as conservatives in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany questioned the effect of pan nationalism on national sovereignty. China's economic momentum disappeared some time in the middle of the 21st and with it, its Communist party, national unity, and global power.
So I graduated college...
Now what? I guess I'm going to do some flight training, hopefully find a job, maybe start on my Master's degree...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)