Dome, Dome on the Range

Jeff Wilson · 13 Jan 2011, 18:49 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 12:49:29 -0600
Subject: (urth) Dome, Dome on the Range
In-Reply-To: <430DCB16D8604E4483F358EC46969D06@jill>
References: <850030.91086.qm at web84105.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<261903.11019.qm at web161805.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>	<980429.72652.qm at smtp820.mail.ird.yahoo.com>	<4D2EEA53.7030002 at verizon.net>	<4D2F1B2B.1010702 at io.com><4D2F20C9.9030809 at verizon.net>	<4D2F2C6E.2000907 at io.com>
	<430DCB16D8604E4483F358EC46969D06@jill>
Message-ID: <4D2F4939.3010108 at io.com>

On 1/13/2011 12:21 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>
> From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>
>> The moon's axial inclination wrt the sun of 5 degrees is usually held
>> to provide very mild seasonal variation. The poles will still be
>> cooler, and the small overall size is still a puzzler, but the most
>> extreme weather making factor would be the month-long local day. This
>> will tend to make the prevailing winds blow across the terminator from
>> dark to light, with increasing mediation in the direction of rotation
>> nearing the equator. You may get some concentric convection cells,
>> making the overall weather patterns resemble an archery target.
>
> Of course, if humans could accelerate the Whorl to relativistic speeds,
> they could also have spun up the Moon to have a shorter day-night cycle,
> more suited to plant growth. If they felt it was necessary.
>
> (They could also have replaced the lost heat and light from the Sun, but
> we should probably ignore that.)

Maybe not. Typhon was working with the dregs of a culture that once 
spanned galaxies and may have had to fit the hubristic project to what 
he could salvage; a single surplus engine suitable for pushing along the 
axis of an asteroids couldn't be counterbalanced well for spinning up 
the moon.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net