Alright, I've long been stuck on the idea that people on spacecraft won't be sucked (or more accurately, blown) out of an airlock nearly as dramatically as Hollywood would make us believe.

(For the curious, from the time the hatch opens? You'll probably die within 30 seconds, but with most airlocks that humans design, it might be a few weeks before your body makes its way out the hatch...)

Anyways, I think I might have a new topic to mull over when it comes to crewed spaceflight: Chains.

In the short term, a link in a chain in motion will continue to follow the path that previous links had traveled.

Links in a chain have very little friction between them, so where a rope will tend to stick out straight, chains will instead orient themselves along gravity gradients.

And, evidently the behavior of chains in null G are absolutely hell for people to predict. (This might be an interesting point in a story.) Our intuition when it comes to removing energy from a chain is to stretch it out... but elastic potential energy (even from a metal chain) will quickly prove that intuition wrong.

Whelp, the ISS has helped to do experiments with chains in null G, thanks to some random Youtuber (Poe's Law warning: I'm fully aware that Steve Mould is more widely known that the astronauts he talks about), the planning done by my favorite astronaut of this era, Samantha Cristoforetti who commanded the ISS for expedition 42, and the playfulness and curiosity of astronaut Don Pettit. And, well... here's the highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtZaP8VMv0c

I'm going to CC @nyrath , since he's a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.

@nyrath

Re: Space hotels/Starfleet vessels.

The last few episodes of Star Trek: Picard have me thinking about carpeting... Specifically the quote: "It wasn't until this moment, reunited with all of you, I realize what I miss most. The carpet."

Looking at the walls of the Enterprise 1701-D makes me think that the walls look somewhat padded as well.

In the spirit of good improv—saying "Yes, and..."—I'm re-examining the possibility that the extra padding makes sense in universe.

With how often the crew of various Starfleet vessels are thrown out of their seats, perhaps carpets DO make sense. People don't break hips as often on carpet as they do on tile floors.

@JessTheUnstill

Canon: Stardate is affected by how far away a ship is from the central beacon along subspace. Subspace is faster than light, but still has twists which means a ship might warp somewhere and have to change their clocks to the local stardate.

Meta: Writers were given a stardate for their scripts at the beginning of the season. Some scripts were out of order when airing them, usually due to episodes being filmed and aired later than expected, so they came up with a "wibbly wobbly" explanation when fans noticed that stardates weren't consistent.

@lazarusholic

It looks like your account is a bot. Which is fine, but it's violating one of the rules of this instance:

https://infosec.exchange/about
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13: Automated posting: - accounts that post >50% using automation must be labeled as a “bot” in the user profile to help provide a visual indicator to visitors - automated posts must be limited to one post per hour/24 per day with post visibility set to “public”. There is no limit on “unlisted” posts.
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I just watched several of your posts show up in the Local Timeline feed over the course of a couple second, which is faster than most people can copy/paste, so I'd consider that automated posting.

I scrolled through your feed and didn't see a single post that isn't a blurb, hashtags, and a link.

I'm not going to report your profile, since I like bots that provide feeds on specific topics... but I do suggest that you edit the profile's description to make it clear that it's a bot, and change the visibility on posts from "Public" to "Quiet public" (which used to be called "unlisted", and might still be called that in the bot's settings or the fediverse API), or change the bot's posting frequency to only once per hour.

You might also want to check the language settings. Several of your posts that are in English are saying that they're Korean.

Took a quick social media break... wasn't worth it.

I'm going back to reconciling the differences between Winsock and Berkeley sockets, and fighting with both poll() and std::vector. That's at least frustration that I know I can do something about.

Yes, I write my nazi sympathizing senators and rep. Yes, I point out that I'm a veteran and that they're making themselves threats to the document that I swore to protect. But if they were able to listen, they would have by now.

All I can do is be available in case anyone needs refuge, and tear out my hair over all these segfaults.