Interesting Links for 22-03-2012

[andrewducker]

• We finally understand what electroconvulsive therapy does
  (tags: psychology brain ect depression )
• Symbian smartphone share drops below Winows Phone. Less than 5% in total.
  (tags: mobile_phones epicfail nokia microsoft )
• Who wants to go into space in a Star Tram?
  (tags: Startram technology space )
• Are you a smoker pissed off by the tax increase

Comments

[bart_calendar]

I think you guys should put Alan Moore on a tenner just to piss him off.

[andrewducker]

I plan to buy Before Watchmen, just to piss him off:-)

[bart_calendar]

Hey, did you notice that a Hellmouth is opening up in a Wisconsin town?

Space Trams

[danieldwilliam]

$60 billion is a lot of money until…

… you remember that by 2050 there will be some 10 billion people living on Earth and at least half of them will have a standard of living equal to or more than the per capita GDP of the USA when it built the Space Shuttle (or failing that Apollo(2))

And that if 1 person in 100 of the those 10 billion spent just 1% of their per capita GDP on stuff that happens in space(3) that is about $21bn per annum on space stuff

And this thing should last 100 years.

$60bn to drop the cost of cost of getting stuff up there by a factor of 200 for a hundred years.

Basically, building a Space Tram is pocket change…

…until…

… you ask an Edinburgh cabby about trams.

Time to put SpaceTram on kickstarter.

(1) $26k in 2005 US$
(2) $21k in 2005 US$
(3) be that GPS sats, com sats, spy sats, medical research, charitable or state giving to pure research, Big Brother in Space entertainment.

[autopope]

The star tram idea lost me at the "if we have a superconducting cable carrying 200 million amperes" point.

It's a bit like saying "if we have a working He3 aneutronic fusion reactor" -- theoretically possible, but oy are there some minor engineering problems in the way!

[andrewducker]

There are also some great comments pointing out that building things in the polar regions is not at all easy.

[danieldwilliam]

I thought there were significant advantages of launching things near the equator.

I was thinking the Northern Territory would be a better location.

[danieldwilliam]

Did any of those comments include the difficulty of wielding a spanner in minus 50 degrees C?

Or the corrosive power of penguin crap?

[skreidle]

Dangit, you linked to page 2 at "Introducing a non-gamer to roleplaying. I really liked this." :P

[andrewducker]

Oops. Bit late for me to change it now, sadly!

[skreidle]

I've been catching up on old links -- most of them your daily linkdumps. :D