Force Fields?

Future Manned Spacecraft Could Be Protected By Magnetic Forcefields

In its experimental set-up, the [Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL)] team simulated the solar wind in the laboratory and used magnetic fields to isolate an area inside the plasma, deflecting particles around the "hole".

It was not initially clear the idea would work, said Ruth Bamford, who led the research.

"There was a belief that you couldn't make a little hole in the solar wind small enough to do this at all," Dr Bamford, from RAL, told BBC News.

"It was believed that you had to have something very large, approaching planetary scale, to work in this way."

The team has had to take into account the physics of plasmas at the comparatively tiny human scale. To create its metre-sized trial, the team used a plasma jet and a simple $20 magnet.

"The first time we switched it on, it worked," said Dr Bamford.

What is more, the trial field seems to adjust itself automatically. "It does have the capacity to be somewhat self-regulating, just like the Earth's magnetosphere is," Dr Bamford explained.

"When it gets a strong push from the solar wind, the bubble gets smaller. The video shows us increasing the pressure of the solar wind, and the shield gets smaller but brighter."

X-posted to startrek and mtdigest.

Strange Feeling

I was feeling a strange and inexplicable sense of deja vu about this whole American election campaign.

And then it dawned on me.

It feels like we're enacting the closing scenes of First Lensman by E E "Doc" Smith. Obama may have his flaws, but he carries that same damned look of fucking eagles I ever imagined Lensmen to have.

I haven't read the Lensman books for more than twenty years, even though they've never left my bookshelf - and they moved with me to my flat. LOLOL I seriously doubt they'd have me as a Lensman, though. They need people who are thoroughly incorruptible ... and I went so far as to make a new year's resolution to invent an eighth deadly sin, so that's me well out of the running.

Also, I swear.

Though ... heh ... Lensmen smoked, IIRC. So maybe ... 0:)

Otherwise sorry, Mentor. Even if they were handing out free tickets to Arisia on the corner of King Street tonight, I guess I wouldn't make the grade. Although fuck Gharlane sideways with a lead pipe, for giving us the likes of Bush, Cheney, McCain and Palin. Just because I'm possibly not Lensman material doesn't make me a fucking Zwilnik either.

QX. Gotta go, boys. Tempus is fugiting. Clear Ether.

And yes, Nige ... I was thinking about you when I posted this. :D

Last Night's Dream

I had a dream about walking along a beach on the North West coast of the UK. Specifically, one of those beaches on Liverpool Bay, only on the Wirral Peninsula.

There was this sort of hotel there, with a large glass pavilion with a restaurant. I was wandering along with a friend, who happened to be some sort of Changeling. Her Mask was perfectly normal to everyone, but I could see her fae mien as a delicate, graceful, innocent, faun-like creature underneath.

Anyway, we were wandering along the sand dunes, and we came across some sort of ex-soldier type, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Daniel Craig for some reason unknown to me.

Nearby, nestled in a kind of a box valley sandwiched between high dunes covered in beach scrub, with its open end facing the sea, was an abandoned cottage of some sort with no roof, doors, windows or rear wall ... and some sort of an antiquated electrical box mounted on a pole. This electrical box was clearly visible through the largest aperture in the cottage - what was clearly its main window at one time. Almost as if the cottage was set up as some sort of watching post, where people were stationed whose only job was to monitor the status of the box on this pole.

It turned out that the ex-soldier's last assignment had been to monitor the box, and that his last action should have been to physically decommission it before leaving the Service. Only, he never did: and the box was still active ... and unlocked.

Inside it was a large pull-down electrical master switch, and beside it two chunky circuit breaker fusebox style switches. Flipping them both on caused little orange lights to come on above them, and a weird humming noise which persisted only until the switches were turned off and the master switch reset.

I had a funny feeling that this box did something pretty damned drastic, like turn off all of Britain's early warning systems or switch off its entire National Grid. Something only a Bond villain would set up. And I, being fucking stupid, had only gone and switched off Great Britain, or set off an alert of an impending nuclear strike or something.

Anyway, I told my faun friend to go ahead of me. In all innocence, that is what she did, with instructions that if I missed her at the hotel I'd meet her at the railway station for the train's departure at 16:30 hours. So the last I saw of her was of her graceful, slender back as she literally skipped away from me.

Then I turned to the ex-soldier, who explained that he'd failed to decommission this box, but he'd reported that he had - and ever since then, he'd stayed close to the box, just in case he'd needed to protect it. And the reason why he'd failed to decommission it? He'd lost the key to the box. All this time, he'd no idea the damned thing was already unlocked.

I looked at him and said "Well, by now my meddling has probably got every CCTV in the area pointing at us, and the spy satellites will be coming to bear on our position as we speak. I've sent that girl ahead of me because she is innocent. But you and I? Forty two days, my friend. Forty two days."

And then I woke up.

X-posted to dreamarchetypes.

Off To Bed Early

All the best to every Usarian on my f'list! Hope you get the one you vote for!