aeschylean's New Writeups

far (how-to)

2012-09-14T21:31:11Z

The nearest star to our sun (Sol) is Proxima Centauri. It takes a photon of light from it 4.3 years to reach Earth, a distance of 5.88 million million miles. Imagine you decide to walk to it. The average human walks at 3.1 miles per hour. Assume for the sake of this thought experiment that time stops, all motion in the universe ceases. A bridge stretches between a station in our solar system and a station in the Alpha Centauri star system. The bridge has artificial gravity and is enclosed, pressurized, and filled with Earth-type atmosphere.

1 light year is approximately 5.88 million million miles.

There are 24 hours per day, 365.2425 days per year.

Distance to Proxima Ã· walking speed Ã· hours per day Ã· days per year = number of years.

4.3 Ã (5.88 Ã 10¹²) Ã· 3.1 Ã· 24 Ã· 365.2425 ≈ 930.5 million years, nonstop.

If you walk for only about 16 hours per day, taking breaks to eat and sleep, it takes 3/2…

The Raven (review)

2012-08-10T11:38:14Z

A short, spoiler-ridden and possibly inaccurate synopsis and short review of The Raven (2012 film), a mainstream multiplex movie, a period film, murder mystery pitting Edgar Allan Poe as the protagonist enlisted by Detective Emmett Fields (not a Poe invention) of the Maryland police department to catch a serial killer who models his crimes on Poe's horror stories including: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Mask of the Red Death", and "A Casque of Amantillado".

* * *

At the start of the story, Poe is broke, cannot afford a drink nor trade on his fame as a writer for one. He is furious with the local newspaper editor who has opted to publish a poem by Longfellow rather than Poe's own work. The editor encourages him to write another gory horror story.

Despite a stagnant career due to writer's block and unchecked alcoholism Poe hopes to…

Filmstrip (thing)

2012-08-09T20:32:22Z

A series of images on a strip of 35 mm film, just like you would use in a camera, uncut negatives. It worked like a slide film projector, lit by a bright bulb from behind, projecting the positive color image through a lens onto a surface, either a retractable classroom wall screen or the back of the viewscreen of a viewer. Some filmstrips came with a cassette or phonograph record that would beep when it was time for the operator to advance to the next image. Some viewers could advance the film automatically. Filmstrip topics ranged from culture and government to UFOs and crytopzoology. A student could view a filmstrip at a desktop viewer, similar to a microfilm reader, or a filmstrip could be projected on a screen in a classroom.

A craving for content (idea)

2012-07-12T15:34:57Z

An anthropologist may tell you that holding a stone in your hand allows you to recover the ancient memory of an ancestor who once held a stone like this one. Is a stone a piece of content? A modern domesticated, urbanized human may pass many moons without picking up a stone. The memory is never lost, but it sleeps.

But the craving for content persists. Many modern humans consume synthetic, prefabricated content - music, television and film, games. They come to think of prefab as the only kind of content. They forget about earth, fire, water, air. The use of a client device, or vehicle, is almost always needed to consume media: a television, mp3 player, a game platform. I'm just spinning my wheels here. There are things we consume which might be called media - food, live music, sports - that require only eyes, ears, and mouths. It will be useful here to say a dining table with plates and forks is a client or vehicle for…

A woman of her times (fiction)

2012-07-09T09:52:34Z

A woman of her times walks along a road.Â She approaches a car parked on the side of the road.Â A hand-lettered note taped to the window tells her its price and the seller's phone number.Â She walks back along the road to a payphone and dials the number.Â She waits for the owner to arrive, watching little fluffy white clouds in the sky over a sun-drenched field of spinach and high-tension powerlines.Â The owner arrives in another car, and the woman of her times pays him the agreed amount and takes the key.Â She finds an empty gas can in the trunk, which she carries back along the road to a gas station where she fills the can, then she returns to the car and pours the fuel in.Â She drives away from the spinach farm into the future.Â The dust stirred up by her wheels settles slowly back into the road.

* * *

Times have changed.Â The spinach is gone, the powerlines are gone, grass has grown…

word processor (thing)

2011-11-22T12:09:12Z

Word Processor (human) or typist, a person hired to type or re-type documents using a business machine such as a typewriter.Â Kurt Vonnegut typed his first drafts, marked them up, and sent them to a typist who lived nearby to be retyped (A Man Without a Country, 2005)
Word Processor (software) an application for editing text-based documents. Early word processor apps could be run batchwise on microcomputers. Later, apps were created for interactive usage on command line terminals. With the advent of ubiquitous personal computing devices, word processors often have GUI interfaces and can integrate elaborate style and formatting elements and embedded media such as images, animation, audio, and other documents.Â Completed documents may be published and distributed digitally, or physically published with a peripherally connected printer.
Word Processor (standalone device) a business machine…