It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Tuesday, March 27
One of the features I've built in to Minx is BBCode support. You can use this in both posts and comments. At least, you should be able to use it in comments. We'll soon see.
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:07 PM
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Monday, March 26
Bugger.
I knew that Niven-style Ringworlds required materials with impossible tensile strengths (beyond anything known by quite a few orders of magnitude), but I wasn't sure about Banks-style orbitals. Orbitals, as well as being much smaller, have the attraction that they are in orbit about their sun and don't exhibit the dynamic instability of ringworlds.
So how big can we build an orbital? The answer is, not very.
Micro-scale samples of carbon nanotubes have apparently been tested with a tensile strength of 62GPa. That means they can withstand a tensile force of 62GN/m2* before breaking.
The density of said carbon nanotubes is 1.34g/cm3. Assuming we want an acceleration of 1G - let's round it up to 10m/s2 for simplicity - this gives us a maximum circumference of 62GPa / 13.4kN/m3 = 4600km.**
The theoretical maximum tensile strength for carbon nanotubes is 300GPa, which would give us 23,000km. But I'd want to have a safety factor of 5, which would eat that gain, or reduce our circumference to about 900km for current materials.
That last figure also means that you couldn't rely on gravity to hold your atmosphere in; for any reasonable atomosphere retention you'd need walls rising pretty much the radius of the structure. So it would have to be a sealed environment.
An orbital that size*** with a population density of, say, The Netherlands, would support 18 million people. Its mass is kind of arbitrary, but if we make it 100m thick, we get about 6 trillion tons. The asteroid 10 Hygiea†would provide enough materials to build 10,000 of these, giving us room for 180 billion people.****
Just in case you were looking for an investment property...
* Hey, I have super/subscript in the comments editor, but not in the post editor. I really need to fix that!
** I think I got the units right there. I'm pretty sure I at least got the scalar quantities right.
*** Let's give it a width of 50km for the sake of getting a number here.
**** If we had theoretical-limit materials and scaled everything up linearly - including the thickness - we'd get 80 habitats capable of holding 450 million people each.
†A test of my new Wikipedia linky tags, [wp] and [wikipedia]. It's a generalised bit of code that will allow me to extend it to making easy links to any site. It doesn't have the smarts I added for the [youtube] tag, though; that one can take the video ID itself, but given a full Youtube URL it will extract the ID before putting it into the template.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:14 PM
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Post contains 435 words, total size 3 kb.
Invader Zim slash fanfic?
Eww.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:30 AM
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Sunday, March 25
In the meantime, here's a video I found at LGF:
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:29 PM
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Saturday, March 24
Secret message:
Spoiler for any random anime series:
This message brought to you by the tags [hide], [spoiler] and [nsfw].
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:31 PM
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Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.
Sorry, I just added a [youtube] tag to Minx, and now I have to test it.
So:
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:11 PM
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I don't know how many of these there are out there, so here are a couple that I thought were good.
World of Warcraft version:
Disney version:
Scribbly cartoon version:
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:05 AM
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Wednesday, March 21
Got my first piece of spam since I moved across to mee.nu. Took a look at the automated spam filter, and the cupboard was bare.
Minx uses two spam filters: A conventional URL/IP filter fed from a honeypot system, and the statistical system called Snark that I wrote late in 2005 to deal with trackback spam at munu. Snark worked really well, getting rid of 99.8% of trackback spam with almost no false positives, until I accidentally clobbered its data files during the DDoS attacks. New Snark uses MySQL, of course, making it less likely for me to accidentally clobber it.
Unfortunately, (a) the honeypot isn't catching any flies and (b) one spam isn't enough to feed a statistical anti-spam engine.
I think, first, I need to fix the honeypot, and second, I need to fix the comment moderation screen. A Pixy's work is never done. Particularly when said Pixy embarks on major web development projects...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:22 PM
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Post contains 159 words, total size 1 kb.
Friday, March 16
Coming soon to a cinemaaa near you.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:39 PM
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When we wake up one day to find that our computers have taken over the world, it won't be a top-secret military project behind it.
It will be a spam filter.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:37 PM
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Post contains 34 words, total size 1 kb.
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