Outofambit - Out Of Ambit

You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?

I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet

It seems like the first rule of magic, or at least the first limitation mentioned, is usually ‘you can’t bring back the dead.’

And I know it makes sense from a writing standpoint, but I also wonder if it comes from somewhere else. If that’s just the first, most common human...

Happy Earth Day: Earthrise

One of the most famous aspects of the Apollo 8 flight was the Earthrise picture that was taken as they came around for their fourth orbit of the Moon. This was the first time that humans had taken such a picture whilst actually behind the camera, and it has been credited with a role in inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970. It was selected as the first of Life magazine’s ‘hundred photos that changed the world’.

Taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, showing the Earth seemingly rising above the lunar surface. Note that this phenomenon is only visible from someone in orbit around the Moon. Because of the Moon’s synchronous rotation about the Earth (i.e., the same side of the Moon is always facing the Earth), no Earthrise can be observed by a stationary observer on the surface of the Moon.

rebloging from my main blog.

This is the first place I ever found Young Wizards fandom

And I don’t want to lose you, cousins, so I’ve made us a Lifeboat, if you will.

https://discord.gg/83Fz8KM

I’ve never heard of us having a discord server, but if an established one already exists, please someone link me.

Galactic Poetry

The downfall of living in an urban center, is that all we get to see during the night are blankets of cloud (possibly smog), and if we’re lucky, a few stars. What artist Sanjeev Sivarulrasa is trying to show in his work, Night Light, is what we are missing out on; a magical world, swimming through space, with galaxies and nebulae bejeweling the cosmos.

It is visual poetry.

The artist uses astrophotography to capture the various forms and colours of the stars and planets outside of an observatory setting. According to journalist Becky Rynor, it is as if he is capturing the great masterpieces that our ancestors would see; a natural art. Space does not have to be sacred scientific ground; it can also be merely another aesthetic aspect of our lives, that inspires people to think about the greater world around us. The simple observer plays as big of a role, as the great scientist. When this right to observe is taken away from us, via artificial city lights, we have to make the effort to go to the sources such as countryside’s, forests, lakes, and mountains. We must go to the nature, to connect back to ancient ideas of aesthetic beauty, and renew the senses. Sanjeev’s astrophotographs are to be seen as meditative, bringing awareness to our daily surroundings, and that sometimes, we need to take a step back, and see the bigger picture.

Night Light is currently exhibited at Karsh-Masson Gallery, until the 5th of May, 2013, and there will be an artist talk on the 24th of March, 2013 -Anna Paluch

The Journey to Mars Begins Tomorrow

NASA is preparing for the first test flight of the Orion crew vehicle set for an unmanned launch on Dec. 4 at 7:05 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Orion spacecraft is designed to eventually take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations never explored by humans. It will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to distant planetary bodies, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel, and provide safe reentry from deep space.

This mission is the first of three trial runs that the Orion mission must overcome before NASA deems it safe enough for human space travel. 

The next test flights in 2018 and 2021 will use NASA’s Space Launch System rocket (SLS), which is currently in development. When it’s finished, SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built, boasting even more thrust than the Saturn V booster that blasted astronauts toward the moon in the Apollo era.  

The spacecraft will launch atop a Delta IV Heavy, a rocket built and operated by United Launch Alliance. While this launch vehicle will allow Orion to reach an altitude high enough to meet the objectives for this test, a much larger, human-rated rocket will be needed for the vast distances of future exploration missions.

Exploration Flight Test-1, will mark the farthest distance traveled by a human spaceflight vehicle since 1972 made by Apollo 17.

During its grueling four-and-half-hour test mission, NASA’s Orion space capsule must shoot 3,600 miles away from Earth (15 times higher than the International Space Station!), orbit the planet twice, and brave a thick belt of cosmic radiation. 

Upon re-entry it must deploy 11 parachutes to slow down from 20,000 miles per hour to 20 mph, while withstanding 4,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures before plunging into the Pacific Ocean. 

Check out these incredible photos from the development and testing of the spacecraft.

Countdown, launch and mission coverage will begin at 4:30 a.m. on NASA TV which is available on air and streaming at nasa.gov/nasatv

My boyfriend would like to know what a Godiva chocolate bar would run on the galactic market? I wasn't sure, given what you had said about Hershey bars, since I don't have a frame of reference.

Well, obviously there’s a lot of room for subjectivity about this. Some collectors (Galactic or otherwise) will feel differently. But generally speaking, I suspect the collectors’ opinions will roughly match mine.

Ranking gets complicated because old chocolate companies and brands keep getting bought by bigger companies / conglomerates, and the brands and the quality of their chocolate tend to suffer as a result. By and large, though, the best chocolate tends to be made by companies that do so-called “bean-to-bar” production. The longer the history of this, the better. In general, artisanal chocolate, especially single estate/single bean chocolate, and organic and free-trade chocolates, will also be preferred by the discerning intergalactic collector.

Ranking chocolate from worst to best: (and yes, for those who’re wondering, I’ve eaten all of these, normally on their home turf):

North American chocolate: Almost routinely no better than poor-to-middlin’ quality: the bigger the producer, routinely, the worse, as they keep trying to do it cheaply and good chocolate can’t be done cheaply. It’s too energy-intensive, especially as regards the time and energy required in the conching process that’s absolutely key in giving merely okay chocolate a chance to become great. Hershey’s is the worst of the lot because they’re purposely catering to that spoiled-milk taste that’s become traditional for them. …The exceptions to the poor-to-meh quality rule are invariably smaller producers like Ghirardelli. Meanwhile it should probably be no surprise that when the Lexington Avenue Local worldgate was resited following the refurbishment of Grand Central Terminal, it wound up behind Li-Lac Chocolate’s satellite branch in the food hall. One might suspect Carmela’s straightforward hand in this.

European-based chocolate generally: Significantly better. …Subdividing into:

British Isles chocolate: Pretty good most of the time. Many small classic brands (Fry’s, Rowntree) were subsumed into bigger British chocolate companies over time, with only slow degradation of general quality. Cadburys is probably at the top of the heap, despite what’s happened to the Creme Egg over the years. (mutter)  …And naturally I would be remiss in not mentioning, on the Irish side, Lir, Lily O’Brien’s, and Butlers. (When we go to visit friends in Switzerland, we bring them Lir.) Additionally, there are people who are vocal about their claims that Irish Cadburys is better than British Cadburys, due to local/regional differences in the mix. Myself, I refuse to get mixed up in local chocosectarian stuff. Life’s too short.

Italian and French chocolate: Perugina, Valrhona (as in “I’d rather be in Valrhona than Valhalla”), Callebaut, Agostoni, Amedei, and Bernachon stand out. There are many more smaller makers in the region worth looking out for: check this list for some.

Belgian chocolate: Almost always really good, even at the mass-produced end (Guylian); sometimes terrific (Leonidas) or more than terrific (Neuhaus, Galler, Dumon). This is where Godiva fits in. (I first had it when its initial New York store opened in 1972: it was far better then than it is now. Then again, having been owned by Campbell’s Soup can’t have been good for them.)

Swiss chocolate: Probably the best: certainly routinely seen as such (and collectors will be aware of the implications of this). Again, the smaller the producer the better. The great/old houses like Lindt and Sprüngli are being given a run for their money by newer competitors like Teuscher and Läderach (attn @petermorwood: Stengli!!).

…I’ll complete this later as I just splashed some tea on my keyboard and I seem to have a membrane problem. (sigh)

(Resuming after prying off all the keycaps and cleaning out what could have been the start of a small tool-using civilization if it was let go much longer:)

So anyway, we were attempting to tease out how Godiva would do on the Galactic chocolate collectors’ market.

It’s all so relative. But there are a number of different factors in play, so better to take them one by one.

(a) Provenance / authenticity. Real Chocolate From Earth (SM*) still has to be specified, these days, in some parts of the Galaxy: as with any unique collectible, there are always counterfeits out there. But none of them work perfectly, not even those produced by atom-by-atom matter duplication. There’s just something about genuine Earth-grown cocoa beans that cannot be duplicated. (If we pulled Dr. McCoy into this discussion he’d simply snort and say, “It’s soul. Why d’y’think I hate that damn transporter so much?”) And the bad fakes…  (shudder) Well. You know the correlation between flavors (and everything else) of chocolate versus carob? The comparison between real chocolate and bad fake chocolate is like that. But generally worse.

(b) Reputation and/or scarcity on planet of origin. Godiva is not hard to find, but its lower-end-of-high-midrange reputation would affect the going price. Many artisanals or single-estates would bring in much, much more on the collectors’ market. But Godiva still would not be cheap.

© Freshness and state of packaging. Fresh and perfectly packaged Godiva obtained before the first of the large corporate acquisitions via timeslide would bring a way higher price than the stuff available on the high street right now.

(d) The present state of cocoa futures. Believe me when I tell you that none of Earth’s financial markets are so closely scrutinized off-planet as the cocoa futures market. A serious ripple in the world’s cocoa production figures can send shockwaves through the collectibles and personal-chemical-enhancements markets galaxy wide (in the latter case, for those species who use chocolate as an aphrodisiac, mood-altering drug or hallucinogen). If anything was going to bring on the classic aliens-arrive-from-space-to-save-Earth-from-itself scenario, it would be news that we had fucked up our climate so totally that the cocoa bean was going to die out. The intervention wouldn’t happen because of any particular altruism, oh dear me no… but because with the death of Earth’s cocoa, many extremely currency-sensitive aspects of the Galactic economy would take a hit that would make the Earth’s recent nearly-worldwide-bank meltdown look like an insolvency involving a kid’s lemonade stand. 

Anyway, the state of the market pushes the day to day price of collectible chocolate up and down in unpredictable but interesting ways, and the smart investor keeps its ears (or legs or abdomen or whatever it listens with) to the ground to stay informed about what’s going on in Earth’s so-called “soft commodities” markets.

(e) Preparation. How much actual chocolate is in the confectionery and how has it been prepared? Plain solid chocolate is always preferable for collectors’ purposes. (The two-pound solid chocolate ingots that Kron Chocolatier in Manhattan used to sell back in the day would have been seen as very choice.) Dark chocolate is always preferable to milk: the milk is seen as an adulteration, as 18K gold is seen as inferior to 24K by precious-metal collectors. Some additives, if psychoactive or otherwise seen as valuable on their own, are viewed as positive (see the chocolate business with Nita and Kit at the Crossings here.)

(f) Demand. Is the product hot right now? Has some buzz about it in the collectors’ networks kicked the price up for some reason? 

…And there are other factors, but you get the general idea. So if you were offering a Godiva bar on the open market, say one of these, depending on where you planned to do your shopping afterwards you could probably exchange it for enough currency in one of the smaller spacefaring cultures that’s chocolate-using in one of the valuable ways (meaning as a recreational chemical) to get yourself a small private island on some planet where the climate suited you. Or a nice little space yacht. (Nothing really huge. After all, you need to pay for crew services too, and berthing, and… Never mind.)

Hope this helps. :)

*Service mark is the property of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC: for more information see here.

the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.

Still breathing hard from what she’d been through, Dairine turned away and walked back to the house, slowly, and went into her room and shut the door. And only then did she allow herself, somewhat later, the very smallest smile.