Zeitgeist

This week I have been mostly thinking about Hypothetical Megastructures, as most of my Facebook friends are probably already aware because I've been spamming them mercilessly.

My other obsession is sniggering when I ever I see or hear news about the Liberal party. Sucked in.
Way to implode.

This is like, totally all about the science, I am sorry ... I've been hoarding.

Megastructure
"A megastructure, in science fiction and speculative (or exploratory) engineering, is an enormous self-supporting artificial construct.[citation needed] The definition is often informal and varies from source to source, but generally requires at least one dimension to be in the hundreds of kilometers.[citation needed] Other criteria such as rigidity or contiguousness are sometimes also applied, so large clusters of associated smaller structures may or may not qualify.[citation needed] The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures."

Matrioshka Brain
"A matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems. This structure has clear structural analogies to Russian Matrioshka dolls, from which the concept derives its name."

Matrioshka Brain is also an AWESOME band name.

Dyson Sphere
"A Dyson sphere (or shell as it appeared in the original paper) is a hypothetical megastructure that was originally described by Freeman Dyson as a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture its entire energy output. Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the long-term survival of technological civilizations, and proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the detection of advanced intelligent extraterrestrial life."

Stellar Engine
"Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use a star's radiation to create usable energy. Some variants use this energy to produce thrust, and thus accelerate a star, and anything orbiting it, in a given direction. The creation of such a system would make its builders a Type-II civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Kardashev Scale
"The Kardashev scale is a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is, first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. It had three categories, based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal and increasing logarithmically"

The Decline and Fall of the Animal Kingdom
"The animal kingdom's decline came in the form of a three-page paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its lead author, Carl Woese, had spent the previous few years trying to find a way to figure out the relationship of all living things, including microbes. A taxonomist can classify a giraffe, a bat and a human as mammals simply by looking at them. They have hair, for example, and they nurse. But microbes are harder to make sense of. They might simply look like a rod or a sphere."

E8 Polytope
"The E8 polytope is a semiregular polytope, the highest finite (and nonprismatic) semiregular figure. It was discovered by Thorold Gosset, who described it in his 1900 paper as an 8-ic semi-regular figure, with "semiregular" meaning that all of its facets are regular polytopes: 2,160 7-orthotopes and 17,280 7-simplices."

Nuke to the Future
Discussions about building what is essentially a nuclear battery. Insane.


Anyway, I am off to continue testing my Mongrel cluster for capacity. Two instances can handle about 30 requests a second. Cool.