Centauri's Thoughts

Flux has been a busy world this past August!

Not only have some of the RPG areas been hooked in, and new weapons made available (Battle Ax), But a lot of little things have been fixed which were not working correctly (Fruit bearing trees and bushes, Hidden rooms 'Wall of Fame').

The Bank has been changed to allow customers to make their own accounts. Suzette the Sexy Barmaid has been added to FluxBarOne.

Flight Operations gained the long awaited Flight Ops and a control tower above it with views in 8 directions.

The entire 'Outback' has been implemented (some 30 rooms).

The Main Beach in the Outback has an interactive FirePit, which you can feed fuel to keep the fire burning.

The Glass Walkway (from Level 3 to Condo Ave) can now view the people in the Main Promenade.

The Chess Set is now more complete.

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All in all, a busy month of programming. The experience should be MUCH better than before, and helpful suggestions by a few new(ish) users makes it better.

I have no idea *why* August tends to be the month of all months for FluxWorld Development, but over 4 years, this has been proven to be the case.

40 years ago today, man set foot on another world. Even though it was only a quarter million miles away (compared to say, the asteroid belt or Mars) it was the furthest we had gone and under the most severe conditions at the time.

I was in grade school at that time, and the way things were going, I thought sure we'd ALL have the opportunity to live and work in space if we chose to. Well, that certainly didn't happen. Those who get to work in space these days are few indeed.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do out there, but I know I wanted to be involved. I studied as many things about the sciences as I could, and especially anything that could be useful for space. This started with chemistry, physics, electronics, and progressed later into the math involved for calculating orbits and masses, and finally the jump into astronomy. about that time the web took off and I was in heaven (In my own way). I could study ALL of these subjects as much as I wanted (and I did).

Sadly, we are still no closer for the “the common man” to go live and work in space, and by the time it DOES happen, I'll be too old!

We are exploring some robotically, and through space telescopes we are seeing even more, but our human presence in space is a mere 250 miles away.

I'd love to know that we have colonies in space and on other worlds, and have even had a hand (mentally) at designing such structures, although I haven't yet posted that.

I can only hope we do better in the NEXT 40 years!

This is potentially great news. A laptop battery with 2 hours of life could have 20, and an electric car with a 100 mile range could have 1,000. It will be interesting to see how all this develops.

Reference: NewScientist

I came across an interesting article in New Scientist today, and its something I have pondered for a while, specifically the trapping. A charged particle (electron, proton, positron, or anti-proton) can all be trapped magnetically, but an atom of anti-hydrogen is neutral.

It's a problem ATRAP and ALPHA are still working on. "Capturing antihydrogen atoms is the current frontier, and it's a challenge," says Rolf Landua, a physicist at CERN who advised on the Angels and Demons movie and is rumoured to be the inspiration for Leonardo Vetra, an antimatter scientist in the original story. "So far nobody has managed to do it, but I'm pretty sure we will." Still, encasing a smouldering chunk of antimatter in a portable antihydrogen trap as happens in the book is a quite a way off, he says.

See the entire article here

I spent another long day learning some graphics tricks for web design. The biggest lesson I learned is that graphics are really fluff, and that content matters more. Not only does content matter, but HOW it is constructed and how concise it is matters too!

I found some awesome sites today, that show examples of good design without being complicated graphically.

Its comforting to know that we have moved beyond the flash and glitz, and that the content and wording itself is what matters.

I have so many links, that it is not practical to list them ALL here, but I will list a few:

for colors

tutorials and good info

web design, CSS, graphics, tutorials

GIMP tutorials

This is a bit like the #followfriday in that these are people I follow and my reasons:

This list is the merest hint into all that are out there!

For StarTrek:
@wilw (Wil Wheaton) because he is his own geek and knows it! (too cool!)

@levarBurton – Because he has a charm all his own.

Blogging:
@lizardoid (LittleGreenFootballs blog) – I've been following Charles Johnson for years.

Funny:
@theEllenShow (Ellen DeGeneres) - She cracks me up, but she has good things to say.

@KrisColvin – a web designer with a head for biz and other aspects of life.

Humor and science:
@badastronomer (Phil Plait) - I've been reading his stuff since the FoxTV moon hoax.

uplifting:
@tonyrobbins – Great Motivational speaker I first learned of in the movie “Shallow Hal”

B2Evolution supports a Twitter update plugin via leeturner

If it ends up too spammy, I may turn it off, but I tend to tweet most blog entries as it is, so this should save some effort.

Its now been almost 20 days since I opened a Twitter account. A lot has happened in this (somewhat short) timeframe.

In addition to some real time news about the ISS today (they had to stay in the Soyuz module, because of a possible space debris hit), there has been a LOT of chatter since Ellen DeGeneres has discovered twitter.
On Monday, Diddy explained it to her (sort of) on her show, and by today, she has an account set up and is trying for a million followers (She has more than 92,000 as of this post).

The clip of the show with Diddy got her interested and todays show said this.

There are a number of celebrities on twitter, but Ellen talking about it on her show and trying to get a million followers might make a huge increase in people very quickly. Not just for her, like most twitter users, they will begin to wonder “what else is out there?” and start exploring and finding things on their own.

In answer to that, I have been following some interesting tools to make using twitter more interesting, and a fair number of them come from Chris Pirillo

Chris lists a top 10, and 10 more, of those, I'll be listing the ones I find the most interesting plus a few I have found via other tweeters:

#1 Monitter
Hands down winner to me for real time. you have a default of 3 keywords to follow and that can be increased or decreased.

#2 twitscoop.com
An awesome way to see whats hot and trending, it even has graphs showing activity by the hour, (it showed todays spike about the space station)

#3 TweeTake
Allows you to make a local save of followers, friends, tweets, direct messages, or everything.

#4 twitpwr.com
Produces a tag cloud from the bio's of those you follow

For completeness, I include both of Chris Pirillo's lists

10 Twitterific tools

10 MORE must have twitter tools

Check them out, because we all have different uses for twitter, and what might not be of critical interest to me, might be just what you wanted!

Lithium Ion batteries can be made to charge MUCH faster by changing part of the process of how they are made

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

This is a factor of 18, so a laptop that takes 2 hours to charge now would only be 6.66 minutes. A large Lithium Ion battery (say for a hybrid or EV car) needing an 8 hours charge would be reduced to 26 minutes.

The whole article is here and another reference here.

Update: now up by factor of a 100

Now Kang and Ceder have found that coating each ball with a thin layer of lithium phosphate accelerates this process even further, perhaps because the coating is an excellent conductor of lithium ions, swiftly transporting them to and from the surface of the nanoballs.

If cellphone batteries can be made using the material, they could charge in 10 seconds flat, the researchers calculate (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07853). Bigger batteries for plug-in hybrid electric cars could charge in just 5 minutes - compared with about 8 hours for existing batteries - though this would require a very high-powered charger.

Reference: newscientist.com

I can barely believe its been only 10 days since I create a twitter account and jumped right in! In this span of time, I have found people, conversed, learned of special web sites and analytical tools all made specifically for twitter and to track tweets.

I now see all the various uses that can be applied, and how groups of people can interact. A very interesting thing indeed.

Its everything from the most practical: family members to track a caretaker, to random thoughts, to special interest area updates, and anything else one can imagine a broadcasting platform could carry, in addition to total interactivity in that group.

There are those people out there following and being followed by nearly 40,000 people. Managing this would take (in my mind) software other than the twitter interface, which shows all people you are following is strict chronological order.

Some special tools are being developed to watch for keywords, which might be better suited than following 1,000s of people who speak specifically to things of interest to you on occasion (along with everything else). I just cant imagine reading the tweets of 20,000 – 30,000 people and getting use of that. There are tweet aggregators which can make this process easier.

That being said, twitter is still a new and interesting new social app, and as such, you just never know where the social crowd will take it.