Jotsam and Fletsom

Still more stuff to share! I am a sharing machine lately. What can I say, the Internet is full of wonderful things and I just feel compelled to share them with you wonderful people.

Plus, not a heck of a lot happening in my life to talk about, and honestly, I am pretty sick of the emotional emesis racket for now anyhow.

I have total faith that I will come back to introspection and gazing at my own entrails soon enough. Until then, let’s just keep those solid gold hits coming.

Besides, my browser is all cluttered again. How does that keep happening?

First off, let’s talk about the mystery of magenta.

No, not this one :

I ask for nothink!

I ask for nothink!

It’s this one :

Or as its friends call it, Purple.

Or as its friends call it, Purple.

You might thing “What’s the big deal? It’s just another color.” But as it turns out, it’s quite special!

Because you see, it doesn’t exist.

I will let this fellow explain.

So there you have it. Purple does not actually exist in the world. There are no purple objects in the world, only ones we see as being purple because our brains decide to slap a label called “purple” onto what is actually a side-effect of knowing something has blue and red but no green in it.

And that, to me, is pretty fucking cool. It immediately makes me wonder if we somehow know this on a deep, deep level, and that is why purple has been the color of royalty for centuries. The usual explanation is that royal purple came about because purple was the most expensive kind of dye and therefore you had to be very wealthy, like a member of the aristocracy, to be able to afford anything purple.

And I am sure that is true. But there might well have been other ways to make clothes very expensive and unique looking. And maybe purple dye was only so expensive because rich people bid up the price.

So maybe purple became a royal color at least in part because it registers in our minds as something very unique and distinct. Something that is not found in the rainbow, something that some part of our mind recognizes, in a primitive way, as not quite entirely real.

And the whole point of royal wardrobe is to make the ruling class look different from everyone else in a powerful and impressive way.

So if you are looking to really make an impression, you might want to start wearing purple.

But be warned, there might be side effects…

Next up we have an intriguing idea to ponder : using airships to deliver cargo to cities up north.

By up north, I mean Northern Canada, of course. All that frozen tundra north of the 40th meridian, the Great White North, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunuvit.

The problem with communities up there is that they are few and far between, and have a low population even where they exist, and so supplying them is very expensive, and the cost of living there is very high.

And that is how it is right now. Right now, what does make it up there gets there via truck along ice roads, which as the name implies are plowed out of the ice and can only bear traffic while things stay good and frozen.

That means, incidentally, that counterintuitively, northern communities face the most hardship during their short summers, when the ice roads turn into nothing but mud.

But what happens in the future, when global warming makes those summers longer and the winters warmer? If the ice roads fail, those communities will be devastated.

Solution : blimps! They ignore terrain completely, can carry a lot of cargo, and modern ones run on very little energy (and that, they can get from solar and wind) and even pilot themselves.

It is an intriguing proposition. The main problem with airships like blimps and so forth is that they are somewhat at the mercy of the winds. But that can be overcome by simply building a certain amount of flexibility into your shipping system.

Getting cargo from point A to point B eventually is a lot easier than trying to get there at a fixed date and time. My guess would be that airship deliveries could be done with a two or three day window. And with modern GPS tracking, you would always know where your cargo was located.

Theoretically, you could even send people to go get it if the blimp gets in trouble.

And if you can build a system like that for northern climes, you might well be able to expand it to work everywhere. Imagine buildings everywhere with little docking stations for robotic blimps on their roofs.

Lastly, I am looking into these Chromebooks that Google is hawking.

They are cheap, effective laptops that run the Chrome OS (which is supposedly blazing fast) and they seem like the sort of thing I want.

Just something to support a web browser, basically. Practically everything you can imagine can be done through your browser. All the games I play are browser games, all the blogging I do is via the browser. The Web is where everything happens.

I am sure I could get used to web mail if I had a reason to do so.

Now obviously, I won’t be getting one any time soon. All my cash will be sucked up by Vancoufur for the near future, including the lion’s share of my next GST cheque. So I will not exactly be coming up with $199 or $250 for a laptop any time soon.

But it is nice to know that there are people making products for people like me, with very low demands of their portable computer.

Just run a web browser that fully supports Flash, and I am good to go.

And I already know the Chrome browser fits the bill.

After all, I’m using it right now!

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