@clarfonthey ...and of course the amounts of testosterone in any given "man" or "woman" varies a great deal; the ranges overlap.
[gender isn't real, we've all been played for absolute fools etc.]
@artemis The mom of a friend who lived down the street would incorporate twigs and bark into her weaving. That definitely got me thinking about found-materials art.
(added) It probably was somewhere in my thinking process when I decided I wanted to use bits of interesting random recorded real-world sounds in my musical production.
@artemis This is in line with the messaging I got from parents -- you have to get really good (and graduate with high marks from an appropriate institution of higher art-learning) before anyone will even consider taking your work seriously.
That, folks, is elitism.
@clarfonthey Also, people tend to take statements about statistical tendencies and interpret them as absolute verities -- and then, feeling proud of themselves for being so thoughtful, go on to turn those verities into social requirements.
...because, you know, it makes people uncomfortable if you break their expectations, and that's just rude.
I will no longer be taking criticisms about 2 dimensional villains and on-the-nose metaphors. I did not choose these times, I'm only tasked with fighting through them.
Soy sauce generated salt crystals sitting on an iPhone torchlight.
@bok This is kinda why the idea of Seasteading appealed to me at first... and I guess there's still nothing inherently impossible about it; it's just that the people who were pushing it are anti-human twits who want to build a wealth-stratified society (and have switched to doing that via political means).
I've often thought that right-wingers are a lot like LLMs -- placing form and narrative over accuracy, mimicking the language of compassion in support of brutality...
@bok I might even have read that, if it was first published in Analog; the title seems familiar.
It's just a little harder to visualize, you know? ...and also somehow less viscerally satisfying... and I'd expect technically more difficult, too.
...but in terms of habitation, yes, it's theoretically doable, and possibly a useful place to be depending on goals.
@amenonsen @EveHasWords Perl 6 finally becoming actually a thing makes me think of "At Last the 1948 Show".
(
This random association of no particular usefulness is brought to you by Woozle's Brainâ„¢.
Woozle's Brain: for all your not-particularly-useful needs. Try one today, they're soft and squishy! [/sponsored content]
)
@RosaTheWitch It takes a true genius patriot president to think of decorating your new presidential plane in the colors of your country's flag. (Such original, very artist, so taste. Wow.)
@Researchbuzz I'll take "People Who Are Terrified of Diversity and Nonconformity" for 500, Alex.
Alright. Here is a request. If you, reading this, just happen to be on a Windows 10 or Windows 11 machine. Could you download this and run artist_windows.bat and tell me if it boots or fails to boot. IF it works, you should see this.
https://data.runhello.com/j/artist/3/ARTIST.zip
If it crashes or otherwise fails, please tell me what version of Windows (10 or 11) you are running. If it works, you don't need to tell me. It works on my machine. I'm trying to discover machines it doesn't work on (if any remain)
@mcc Yeah, their spam-classification methodology is just... omfg.
Messages I send from my regular email to my Gmail are often (and arbitrarily) classed as spam, even though I've un-spammed them before and that other address is in my Gmail address book. #NotThinkingItThrough
I think it is actually covered by an ocean? It's just, like, the pressure at the surface of that ocean is (tentatively; I haven't done the math) many times more than at the deepest spot in one of Earth's oceans. ...so not very hospitable.
On top of that (literally), the thickness of the atmosphere would, shall we say, pose challenges for getting into and out of it.
Well, here's the thing: the planet rotates very slowly (about half an Earth-year per day), so one side actually gets very cold.
...and although obviously the other side is busy getting very hot at the same time, the situation is very different from Venus because of the lack of any real atmosphere. In a vacuum, there is no "air temperature"; it all depends on how much EM radiation is being absorbed.
So you could, for example, build a habitat with a light-shield, and all you'd have to deal with (during the day) would be the radiative heat from the surrounding rock -- which you could presumably shield against as well.
It might be useful to know what the temperature is underground -- on Earth, it stays at a constant temperature year-round, so I'd think it might be similar on Mercury (at sufficient depth, anyway).
Even without a hypothetical habitable temperature underground, however, you'd have all that free solar energy to work with during the day -- so you could have super-powerful heat-pumps to keep the habitat cool.
That might be difficult at the equator, but near the poles the temperature apparently barely gets above boiling-point (on the surface, with no shield).
What's especially interesting is if we imagine building, say, a giant track around the pole, wide enough for the entire habitat, so that it can just stay within the habitable zone between day and night sides the whole time.
As the population expands, it could easily become worthwhile to build another ring outside that... and then another...
(The habitat itself could be more linear than wide, perhaps, and vigorously circulate air internally to exchange the slightly-too-hot air from the sunny-end with the slightly-too-cold air from the dark end.)
This seems like a pretty rich vein for some interesting #SciFi stories, I should think, if that hasn't already been done.
