Submission + - Space X use Culture ship names
If that's a trend there are a lot to choose from.
Cars made of memory metals will spoil that one, too. Heat the wreckage to the right temperature, and have it spring back into a car.
Hmmmm.... I wonder how far The Culture is from Roddenberry's ideals? In some ways, The Culture seems to me to be a far more realistic post-Singularity type of civilization than the Federation. The trappings are far more fantastic, (GSVs, anyone?) but TOS tended to underestimate many things. As one example, the communicators were basically phones, and other than communicating with an orbiting starship instead of a local tower, they only do a fraction of what today's smartphones do.
Plus even The Culture gets to have explosions. I'm currently re-reading "Surface States". The first time I read it, I particularly liked one Ship giving a fairly complex blow-by-blow account of a space battle that was only something like 15 microseconds long.
I was rather amused by the titles of the Tanya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan newsgroups, though to be honest I don't remember the titles any more and never read them. I just remember ".whack.whack.whack" being the tail end of one.
I actually did follow and post to technical newsgroups.
So is your desk a standing-only desk, or one of those that moves up and down? My wife has been looking at one of the latter.
However in Europe you've been warned. In the US we walked (or sat?) way too far down this path before discovering how bad it is. Now that we all know better, you can change your path before getting where we are.
OTOH, my wife are generally stupified looking at twenty-somethings smoking. Our parents didn't know better, and in fact during WWII the Army included cigarettes with meal rations. During our generation (I'm a later Boomer.) we sort-of knew better, but the cigarette companies didn't actually admit they were lying until well into my adulthood. For this generation there's no doubt about how bad cigarettes are, but if anything smoking seems to be on the rise.
I wonder if Hari Seldon would have said that masses of people are stupid, as well as predictable.
I wonder how much a standing desk would really help. Absent the standing desk, I would suspect that normally standing implies some other measure of activity besides just not-sitting. I would suspect just-standing as you would at a standing desk is better than sitting, if only because of micro-movements involved in remaing standing. But I'm guessing that simply moving to standing desks won't fully erase the bad effects of too much sitting, it'll lessen them to the bad effects of too much just-standing.
Movement is a spectrum, the question here is where is just-standing on that spectrum between sitting and the known-good brisk walk. Also, how do you fit onto that spectrum the known-good and known-bad thresholds?
The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.
All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.
By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear.
As we describe in a recent paper, using what’s already known about planets and life, it is now possible to create a broad program for modeling co-evolving “trajectories” for technological species and their planets. Depending on initial conditions and choices made by the species (such as the mode of energy harvesting), some trajectories will lead to an unrecoverable sustainability crisis and eventual population collapse. Others, however, may lead to long-lived, sustainable civilizations.
Subject says it all.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman