Notices by Brian Ó (blacksam@social.gibberfish.org), page 19

Not 100% sure I believe the guy, but the plumber said they're not supposed to look like that.

I had a surprise day off, so I figured I'd get fermenting again.

#homebrewing #fermentation #mead #wine #honey #chamomile

Thid most recent episode of WandaVision is the first where I can't identify which 90s sitcoms they're referencing. Drawing a complete blank.

#wandavision #marvel #mcu #disney

Banana wine and cherry mead, bottled.

#fermentation #homebrewing #wine #mead #booze #banana #cherry #honey

#theexpanse

wut?

wut?

The banana wine has finished fermenting and has cleared out a lot (it no longer looks like dishwater!) but there's still some haze to it. I bet if I let it sit another week it would get crystal clear, but I don't want to wait so I'm going to try cold crashing it in the fridge, and perhaps I'll be able to bottle it this weekend.

#bananas #wine #fermentation #homebrewing

My wines are all in secondary fermentation and I got bored so I decided to try something with a (hopefully) fast turnaround: ginger beer.

There's a local brewery that makes an alcoholic ginger beer that I really like so I figured I'd take a crack at it. Just brown sugar, ginger, and lemon. I'm going to let it ferment dry and then bottle carb it. 🤞

#fermentation #homebrewing #beer #ginger #gingerbeer

I'm aware I don't have a fast charger, but it's the only one I've got. I wish my phone would stop negging me.

So is the return of an MCU character on WandaVision as the version of the character that appeared in the X-Men universe just a gag, or is there some kind of deeper purpose?

#marvel #mcu #comics #wandavision

I cloned these shiitake from a supermarket specimen a long time ago, and this is the first time I've grown them out. I don't know what strain they are, but I'm already liking them better than the 3782 variety I usually grow, even though the yield seems to be a bit lower. They have very chonky stems, but also a nice meaty cap, and a beautiful smooth brown surface. I'm going to find out how they taste presently.

#mushrooms #fungi #mycology #food #diy

I gather from my recent post about sci-fi space combat that there are plenty of people here willing to have nerdy discussions about that kind of thing. There's something that's been at the back of my mind ever since I started reading the Expanse series that doesn't have an answer in the text, and I suspect probably never will, but I think it's interesting to thing about nonetheless. I'll try to describe things well enough that those unfamiliar with the series can still weigh in. WARNING: Some Expanse spoilers ahead, up to roughly book/season 3.

In the story, we're presented with artifacts from an extinct alien civilization that once colonized some portion of the galaxy using what appear to be stable wormholes. These wormholes link ~1300 star systems to a central nexus point, such that you can enter a wormhole in any one of those systems, traverse a small pocket dimension of some kind, and emerge through another wormhole in any one of the connected systems using conventional propulsion.

It appears that this massive wormhole network was built by sending advance probes to these star systems to construct a wormhole endpoint ("ring gate") locally which then phone home to the nexus point to establish a link. We don't have any direct evidence that these beings were capable of FTL travel outside of the use of wormholes, so I think it stands to reason that these probes were sent from their point of origin at sub-light speed. We also know that the probe which was sent to our system ended up getting stuck in orbit of Jupiter, so it was going fairly slow, at least by the time it got here.

I don't know what the average distance between stars is in the Milky Way (and it likely varies considerably by region) but I do know that our closest stellar neighbor is roughly 4 light years away. If we wanted to send a probe there (and have it stop rather than zoom past) then the absolute fastest possible sub-light journey would be about 8 years (assuming half the trip was spent slowing down), and likely much, much longer than that as getting the probe anywhere near light speed would be pretty hard. So, if these distances are at all typical (and ignoring that the average distance to a "habitable" planet is probably much further than merely the nearest star) then I'd expect that this 1300 star system wormhole network would have taken a LONG time to build out, at least in human terms.

We don't have a map of where these systems are in the galaxy, but I think it's a likely guess that they stretch out in a branching pattern from some origin point (i.e. the aliens pick a system that is a reasonable distance from several other desirable systems, then once linked up they send more probes out from there instead of from their home system). That would probably mean that the growth of the network would start slow but rapidly accelerate as more nodes came online. There would still be some pretty hefty wait times between iterations, I think.

The only other major clue about the aliens' technology that we have that I can think of readily is Eros. In the books, the alien technology was able to propel a large asteroid without any discernible means thrust, and those inside it felt no effects from the acceleration. There's no indication of what kind of speeds it might have been capable of, or how long it could sustain propulsion but the acceleration demonstrated was on the order of 20 Gs or so, IIRC.

Anything other details I'm forgetting?

So, how did they (the aliens) likely approach this? How long did it take? What tricks might they have used or what shortcuts might they have taken?

#theexpanse #scifi #physics #astronomy #spacetravel #propulsion #aliens #nerds

I've finally gotten around to watching the last few seasons of Silicon Valley, and it strikes me that the longer the series went on, the more nebulous and techno-babbly their technology got, to the point where by the end I honestly don't understand the service or services Pied Piper purports to provide. Just a lot of random buzzwords that seem to ping pong around with no meaning at all. The whole plot of the last two seasons is that their building a "decentralized internet" and by end end of season 6 they're writing payment processing apps for phones. What?

#siliconvalley #hbo #comedy

Ballistic weapons are so much more satisfying than lasers in space battles. You can keep your phasers and blasters. I'll take bullets and torpedos any day. I submit any fight scene from BSG or The Expanse as evidence. Star Wars/Trek can suck it. Fight me.

#scifi #spacecombat #weapons #battlestargalactica #theexpanse #startrek #starwars

The Expanse season 5 finale was great. I'm super happy with it. It's a little weird though, because they seem to be leaning in heavily to stuff that will only pay off in the books they're presumably not going to cover. I guess they didn't know that when they made this season. I guess we'll see.

#theexpanse #jamessacorey #scifi

Fresno chilis indoors under a $8 LED grow light. So far, so good. 💡🌶️

#chilis #plants #gardening #food #diy

I know the basic gist of machine learning, but almost nothing about the practical implementation. Let's say I wanted to being something that would feed in years of chat logs between two people and then try to simulate totally novel conversation based on it -- would that require an understanding of tools like TensorFlow and a fuckton of tinkering, or are there more "out of the box" applications available now?

#machinelearning #ai #computing

I've changed my display name to an emoji. Can people even @mention me anymore?

Woohoo! I successfully completed January without getting into any argumentd online (or offline, really). Is it hubris to try to make it all the way to March?