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July 16th, 2003

gfish: (Default)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2003 06:32 pm
With one week to go before flying to Houston, freefall is naturally on my mind a lot right now. And I was just thinking...

Assume a standard SF belter society. The gestation thing turns out to be a null issue, so people spend almost all their in freefall.

The question is, do they still juggle? This could only be done when under acceleration, or with excessively complicated little devices (not unlike our space robot, only much, much smaller) that would use thrusters to mimics motion under gravity. Either one is expensive. So I'm imagining juggling as a very elitist skill, something only done by rich jerks into conspicuous consumption or by people who spend a lot of time under acceleration. Old hands on the rare high-g ships would do it as a sign of their sub-culture, and to impress the passengers (most of whom would be afraid to even walk under real acceleration). At times, a fad would pass among rich jerks who would want to emulate the edgey coolness of the high-g hands. Sales of the ridiculously expensive juggling toys would spike, at which point the real high-g people would stop juggling to distance themselves from the poseur-jerks.

Maybe they'd take up hackey-sacks.
gfish: (Default)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2003 09:19 pm
It looks like people are finally asking who forged the Nigerian documents. About freaking time.

The entire stupid mess inspires me to explore the nascent art of geopolitical hacking/intelligence jamming. Start implicating North Korea (or Syria or Iran or whatever bad guy is in the news recently) with not-so-clever forgeries. A seris of self-contradictory documents of all kinds: order forms for various WMDs, plans for infiltrating American society, emails coordinating evil dictator sleep-overs, that kind of thing. All left in random places around Seattle, waiting for gullible intelligence agents to find them. It could be the next internet trend: DossierCrossing.com!