2020/4/2 space math

Assuming SpaceX hits their 100T to orbit goal, one relatively full load of steel plates at 6.36m² x 0.31cm thickness (and roughly 175,000 lbs) laid out in a square would be a flat surface of 484m². If you think about making a bigger ship where the surfaces are 484m², you can build a borg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg) cube style vehicle hull in a month… or a drake cat hull ( https://starcitizen.tools/Caterpillar) style vehicle of 5325m length in less than a year (assuming they can match current capabilities of weekly launches and not the multiple times daily that SpaceX has ambitions for).

As a visual reference: 484m² is roughly 210 shipping containers square and 5325m is roughly 978 shipping containers long. This type of vehicle could easily self-sustainably support a crew of 100+ very comfortably with current o2 tech. SpaceX and others will no doubt improve on and significantly advance the life support tech needed for larger sustainable space vehicles.

As with most estimates, all these numbers have rounding slippage at every level of the calculation, but this is actually a good thing given that the vehicle hauling things to orbit (Starship) is currently in prototype form and having extra wiggle room on volume and weight is a good thing.

April 1, 2021: Quick Links

Commentary from Flula on NFT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3TQ8yR-erg and Crypto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUB9jgMuC7U

Bell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8T-6OvWpo from the same animation studio that did Wolf Children

Coinbase is putting their stock on the public market https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-announces-effectiveness-of-registration-statement-and-anticipated-listing-date-of-its-1509b281f760

Hunt for Red October is still amazing.

Argo: https://blog.argoproj.io

Origin 404: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18064-404#skus and accompanying video: https://youtu.be/nF7NR8ffOqM


Lumber dislocatio: not a joke, both futures and in-person, if you can find it in stock (and they let you buy it), the prices have multiplied significantly.

Closing Cat Tax

Three

FOOD AND SUCH
A Sabbath day fast followed by an evening meal of home-made slow cooked chili. 

WRITING
My wife and I have been writing in a family journal on a monthly basis. It’s been an interesting challenge to step back and try to see the forest for the trees. 

Two

01/02/2021

TECH

The issue of the Linux kernel freezing continued even after removing docker. What I did to resolve it was upgrade to the 5.10.x LTS line. Then I upgraded the nvidia driver to the latest compatible version that had been released in November [link], rebooted, and everything was working smoothly and at the correct resolution. 

FOOD AND SUCH

For late breakfast I had a green smoothie and a leftover donut. Lunch was leftover steak and spinach quiche. Dinner was porkloin slices on a spinach salad topped with roasted cherry tomatoes and garlic. Dessert was tortilla chips with homemade salsa, and the last leftover donut. I also ate a few fiber bars as snacks during the day.

I ordered some magnesium supplement to help get into a better sleep cycle. 

One

01/01/2021

WRITING:

In an effort for building consistency, I am writing daily. I write this entry on the first of the year, with the effort to start publishing these entries consistently tomorrow and thereafter. 

GAMES:
We played Pepper with Melissa’s grandparents. The wikipedia explanation was extremely confusing, but after reading the rules on a few other sites I now have a much better understanding of how the game works. https://pepperrules.blogspot.com https://bicyclecards.com/how-to-play/pepper/ 

FOOD AND SUCH:

As it is the first of the year, I bought Krispie Kreme donuts per our delicious donuts rule.  https://www.krispykreme.com The rule of delicious donuts is that they can only be bought nor eaten on special occasions due to their irresistible nature. The exception to the rule is donuts that you make yourself do not count.

I ate a most delicious Taco Bell taco for lunch.
 
We ate dinner with Melissa’s grandparents. Her grandmother cooked a nice dinner of roast, mashed potatoes, apple-raisin-walnut fruit salad, and slaw.

Back home, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in researching new frying pans. I have a bit of a problem of scratching non-stick cooking surfaces with knifes, forks, and other such devices of inappropriate material for using on such surfaces. So I set out to find some new frying pans.

First I watched this video from Alex* where he went to Turkey to forge his own copper-silver pan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ddRK_jG6E


So then I went to the site of the company in Turkey that makes them, and thought about ordering one of their beautiful 30cm frying pans: https://www.soy.com.tr/product/9/frying-pans I didn’t order quite yet, because I am going to use this as a reward for future consistent progress in other goals. I also found a competing company making similarly copper-silver pans: https://duparquet.com/products/silver-lined-copper-cookware. I also found this Italian artist making pure silver pans: http://www.pan999sanlorenzo.it/eng/about/index.html http://www.pan999sanlorenzo.it/eng/gallery/index.html  I think a pure silver pan would be great for investment purposes but the copper and silver combination is very aesthetically pleasing. 


I ended up buying a temporary replacement of a stainless steel with aluminium base 14″ fry pan and some additional wooden utensils to help break the habits of just using whatever is available. 


*I also watched this video series from Alex where he reshaped and electrochemically etched and made a custom handle for his knife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk16UnauSfw, this video where he forged his own chef knife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuOLCzQJ24g, and this video where he had a knife sharpener expert give him some tips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC5mWYgiNlg. I also looked into sharpening knives with whetstones in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tahaaHxhbsA.

TECH:
In the middle of my day, I ran into an issue booting into linux. On restart, it would freeze or fail trying to shutdown the docker container engine. Since I dual boot windows and linux on separate drives with rEFInd*, the way around this was to use the BIOS boot menu to specifically pick the linux boot drive, and then select the previous linux kernel. I then purged the docker related packages. As of writing, I haven’t yet booted into the newer kernel to see if this resolves the issue, but I suspect that there is something incompatible between the new kernel and that docker-ce or docker-cli install. More on this item tomorrow.

LINKS:
Public Domain Day: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2021/
Google Books Catalog of 1925 Copyright Entries: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/sRkhAQAAIAAJ?hl=en
See’s Candies Centennial: https://www.sees.com/about-us/sees-family/  and their family motto: “Quality Without Compromise”

October-ish 2020

MUSIC:

Fastball came out with an album last year titled ‘The Help Machine’. https://music.amazon.com/albums/B07V5QW878 and their previous album before that, Step Into Light, https://music.amazon.com/albums/B06WWH3DDZ  was pretty good as well:

Incredible tribute to Neil Peart in the form of this new music video from Rush for The Spirit of the Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_QtO0Rhp0w

This recording of Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2, with Evgeny Kissin, piano child prodigy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Kissin)
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France 

Conductor: Myung-Whun Chung

Salle Pleyel, Paris, 19 September, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zkc7KEvYM


LANGUAGE:

Praxis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_(process)


the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. “Praxis” may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas.
….

The philosopher Aristotle held that there were three basic activities of humans: theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing). Corresponding to these activities were three types of knowledge: theoretical, the end goal being truth; poietical, the end goal being production; and practical, the end goal being action.[1] Aristotle further divided the knowledge derived from praxis into ethics, economics, and politics. He also distinguished between eupraxia (εὐπραξία, “good praxis”)[2] and dyspraxia (δυσπραξία, “bad praxis, misfortune”)


Matthew Fox explained it this way:
Wisdom is always taste—in both Latin and Hebrew, the word for wisdom comes from the word for taste—so it’s something to taste, not something to theorize about. “Taste and see that God is good“, the psalm says; and that’s wisdom: tasting life. No one can do it for us. The mystical tradition is very much a Sophia tradition. It is about tasting and trusting experience, before institution or dogma.


“According to Strong’s Hebrew dictionary, the Hebrew word, ta‛am, is; properly a taste, that is, (figuratively) perception; by implication intelligence; transitively a mandate: advice, behaviour, decree, discretion, judgment, reason, taste, understanding.”

Also on language: In this discussion thread about Riot.IM deciding to rename themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23611863

“I hear a lot of “my email”, as in “I opened up my email” or “where’s my email?” Sure they could mean their email inbox, but they also mean the email client with that phrase, and don’t differentiate the two at all. Much like how a web browser is still, to many (most?) people, “the Internet” (or “my Internet”, as in “I clicked on my Internet”).

ON ART:
Mina S of the inspiring SSSSComic.com fame speed paints here and talks about what she calls “the self-Fanart trap or eternal-worldbuilding-limbo that a lot of artists get stuck in when starting their first comic”. While her spoken message is important, you can learn a ton from watching her paint and translate that to methodology in creation of anything. Worth watching in many aspects.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK2rVkLPhDw

GAMES:
Bungie’s Destiny 2: Here’s to year 4 will be more fun than year 3. I haven’t played Destiny 2 in a while because I’ve been playing Star Citizen.

STAR CITIZEN:
Lots of ink spilled about the company behind the most ambitious space simulator ever hitting the $300 Million mark in terms of funds raised directly as pledges, but the game is a ton of fun. Anxiously awaiting the next quarterly patch. 

Quick Code Notes

In the process of setting up this site on Digital Ocean, I accidentally tripped the fail2ban trigger and had my own IP banned. Fortunately, I had connected to the server by ssh.

If this happens to you, you can add your IP temporarily with these lines of code.

iptables -I INPUT -s <allowed_ip> -j ACCEPT 
ufw allow from <allowed_ip> 

Dual Boot: Linux and Windows

This weekend I did a few things to put my home computer setup in order:

Backup
First, I took the first steps towards having a robust backup system. I now have two 10TB SATA drives in RAID1 (mirroring each other), that are used as the backup location of a regularly run rsync command that backs up the primary drives. In the future, I will add a third drive to this RAID mirror for additional redundancy.

I plan on setting up a narrower encrypted cloud backup, and trading encrypted physical off-site backups with friends in order to spread the physical location risk.

Dual Boot
With my drives backed up, I set up my tower to dual boot into Linux and Windows 10. My primary home computer OS has been Ubuntu Mate (running 18.x at the moment), but I want Windows available for playing a few games. I played quite a bit of Bungie’s Destiny and Destiny 2 on Xbox, but I am looking forward to playing on my computer going forward. Since Bungie announced the ability to transfer your game progress from one system to the others (after Activision and Bungie parted ways), I won’t have to start from scratch and can make switch easily.

Here is how it works: I have Ubuntu Mate installed on one SSD. I have Window 10 installed on another. The boot record partition is on the same SSD as Windows. I used rEFInd in order to have a working boot loader, and this theme from Evan Purkhiser to make the boot selection screen look nice. I switched out the background for one of my favorite wallpapers, but the theme worked without any other modifications.

While there are many guides going about this different ways and can throw you off track such that you are wondering if you have all details of this process correct, the way that worked for me was having my working Linux installed on one SSD, then booting from a Windows 10 install USB drive, and completing a clean install of Windows on the other SSD. Then I booted back into Linux to install rEFInd and configure the custom theme.

The end result is a nice selection screen that allows me to pick Windows or Linux as my computer starts up.