; Heinlein gave us Future History, but Isaac Asimov invented Big Data!  The  Psychohistory of the Foundation series utilizes, "the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment." (Foundation. P-19) That's right, kids! Asimov makes statistics a  cool all galaxy spanning superpower! How's that for Geek chic? We don't need Jedi : we have Statisticians to save galactic civilization! 

It would be inappropriate for me (a Canadian) to sign any petition on whitehouse.gov, but that doesn't mean I can't point them out to people who can sign them. Here's one I think is worthy - please at least tell others about it even if you don't sign it.

http://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petiti ... m/XMjbTltM
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Is Denmark big enough? Because http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2014 ... _11_scale/]the Danes have digitized the entire country, and it's downloadable until October 23.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Posted here to keep the forum turning over.

It doesn't even need to be a Fenspace story, you probably could replace Jet and Ford with anyone.

------------

"This is one back from the Race to 400. If you don't know what that was, it was when myself, Ford and the Highway Star went up against Ben Rhode's Lunatic Fringe at Bonneville. We filmed a lot of it, so most of the interesting stuff's on the internet…but that's not everything. Because most of it was boring. And other things, well....

We arrived in San Diego, and promptly got delayed by customs and immigration for a few hours, then spend another few hours getting the bike released. I go off to buy a truck to haul all our gear while Ford's dealing with the paperwork. Having a TSAB stamp on the bike doesn't mean a thing to San Diego Port. Now, what Ford thinks of as a truck-and-trailer and what I think of as a truck-and-trailer were two completely different things. And while our budget might've bought a decent enough F-150 and a simple two-axle tow-trailer, what I bought was a smoking old Peterbuilt good for the scrapheap. The frame was being held together by paint and rust alone.

It broke down twice on the drive out of California. Which meant driving straight through the night to make it up to Bonneville on time. It didn't help that we had to cross the top of Arizona before turning North to Bonneville in Utah. Our truck wasn't allowed in Nevada because of all the leaded fuel we had in the trailer.

It was getting well beyond midnight local time and the Peterbuilt seemed to be behaving itself at long last. Ford had dozed off and I was driving it. The radio was on and, despite it being cold and dark outside, it was still warm and cozy in the cab.

Until I start hearing something scratching behind the cab. It's like claws or something. A big fat rat wiggling it's way out from a rust-hole somewhere. I glance in the mirror beside me, to see a shadow dart back behind the cab.

I have just enough time to wonder if I really saw it before there's this big rush of escaping air, and all the truck's brakes lock solid on.

She just looks at me and says "What'd you do?"

"Wasn't me," I say. "It lost air pressure."

Fucking piece of shit truck.

Both of us get out, and sure enough we see one of the lines between cab and trailer has come loose. Only, it hadn't come loose. It'd been cut, right in the middle - like someone had come up to it with a knife.

The obvious answer is a sharp stone or something thrown up by the wheel, even though they were both. We're both two tired to car.

Ford ties the remains off so the actual tractor will still have air, while I head back towards the end of the trailer to pull the locked air-brakes off.

And it's dark back there. It feels like I walk forever, like I could've walked to Mars. Ford's back in the cab and she might as well be on another planet, while I'm passing by feeble orange running lights. The stars are hiding themselves behind the clouds, a thick blanket closing down over the desert. The darkness seems to swallow the truck's own lights, pushing me in towards the trailer.

It's unnerving. It feels like I'm being watched, from somewhere beyond the red-glow of the trailer's back lights. It feels almost like we're islanded in a closed off sea of darkness, the universe ending only meters from the truck. It'd a profound, cloaking black, like staring into the bottom of the ocean.

Swallowing a sense of Claustrophobia, I crawl under the trailer, pushing back against the brakes before locking them off. It's hot under there, hot and dry. A smell begins to prickle inside my nose, one that sets my heart racing and has my skin crawling.

And I have no skin to crawl.

It's a reminder of a screaming death. It carries an echo of terror, of horror, of shameless pity and what amounted to a mercy killing. It carries tears to me eyes even as I fight back against it

It's the smell of burned body. I can pick it out immediately, even though I wish I couldn't. It's a dry, acrid smell - worse than scorched pork and hair - that seems to crawl down the back of my throat and suck all the moisture right out of my body and it's just hanging in the still night air, mingling with warm rubber tyres and hot metal.

I was under the truck, on my hands and knees, unable to move, paralysed in the moment. I can feel the heat from the flames on my face and all I can think about is that I don't want to die like that too, that inside my armour I might live long enough to feel my face melt off before I start to roast. All I could do was ball up and hope it passed over…

The truck's horn blows deep and loud and it shocks me right out of it. If not that then the wallop of my head hitting steel. Even for me, that hurt.

It's then that I realised I'd long finished what I was doing. The brake-parts were sitting in the road. And in my chest, my heart was racing, a shot of adrenaline fizzing through my veins. I scrambled out from underneath, scratching up my knees and palms.

Out in the still night air, the darkness pressed in, taking the breath from my throat. I could feel something lingering over my shoulder before it vanished. It felt more like a rat skittering away, just outside the reach of my senses. The fog of fear began to ease, leaving a faint nausea in the pit of my stomach and powder-dry taste on my mouth.

Even as I jogged back to the cab, I began to write it off.

I still near rip the door open to get inside. When I drop into the driver's seat Ford asks me what kept me.

I tell her that I got a little hung up but I still don't want to hang around. It's a relief that the big Detroit Diesel engine manages to start on the first try, for the first time, even if it's only running on eleven cylinders, one turbo and some of it's own piston rings.

I just dump out of there trailing thick clouds of soot, while Ford's insisting that something's spooked me.

I admit it's a minor panic.

Which is right when the same rat- scratching starts all over again behind us. It makes the hair on the back of my neck bristle. I check both mirrors and see nothing but a flickering shadow that's gone before I'm even certain it was there.

Maybe it was just paranoia.

Ford's half awake beside me, looking in the passenger mirror.

"Something came off the back of the truck." she says, and I look at her for an explanation.

"I just saw something bounce off the road into the desert. A red-reflector or something." She shrugs her shoulders. No big deal. Nothing unsafe.

And that's when things start to make sense. Loose truck part for the scratching. A one-in-a-million bounce from a Stone-chip for the air-line, or the same loose part flapping around. Hot brake dust mingles with fatigue and a lack of tea to cause a mild flashback.

All in my stupid head.

I actually start laughing. She tells me to shut up because some people still require sleep.

We make it to Bonneville on time and it's not even worth a 'no-shit-there-I-was', just another pain-in-the-arse episode from a jallopy-truck. It isn't until I think to check for what fell off that I'm given pause for thought.

I compare mental images to be certain and sure enough, everything's that's supposed to be attached is still fitted. No missing reflectors… nothing. All I find are some scratch marks in the dirt behind the cab that could've been made by Ford fixing the air-hose.

There's a logical explanation for it all…enough to make me feel foolish… but thinking about that night still makes me shiver a little inside.

The morning we were due to drive back to SD to ship the bike home a car was found abandoned on the same road by a State Trooper. It was a complete Marie Celeste. Someone had stopped to change a flat tyre and instead just walked off somewhere, leaving their tools on the road, along with the spare tyre. The car's ignition was still on, though the battery had drained.

They just vanished. The four-state search turned up nothing. Swallowed by the desert night.

And I still have to wonder how exactly a stone managed to not only make it up between the trailer and cab, but fly in at just the right angle to cut a heavy-duty air-line clean through. If it was a loose part that cut the line, why was nothing missing?

And then, what exactly did Ford see coming off the back of the truck?

---------
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

For when Doug needs to coordinate any arbitrarily sized group:

Effects:1. Removes any and all possible penalties to teamwork.2. Engenders a mood of high optimism and excitement in all team members.3. Team members work in perfect coordination towards the completion of the designated task.4. Doug chooses the task to coordinate on at the start of the song.
5. Doug designates the team members at the start of the song*, and non-team members who wish to join in may do so.5. Team members who do not desire to work towards the task do not have to (but see 2.)
*Basic willingness towards  doing the task or listening to Doug is required (maybe? not sure about this)
I think that captures the song quite well.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

Broadcasting to you from the semi-high (7- 8000 ft or so) mountains of Southeastern New Mexico.
The net situation here is not so dire as I thought it would be. Mom's actually got a pretty decent rig. It's no T1 pipeline, but it'll let me get on and game with little or no lag. The only dicey part came in the setup. I'm alllllll the way at the other end of the house from the router and mom wasn't enthusiastic about me stringing 100 ft of network cable to the router (though I think she'd have let me if it came to no other option). But apparently that lightning strike from about a year and a half ago that fried my power supply and video card ALSO fried any way to get online wirelessly via the usual wireless method of an attachment directly to the motherboard via PCI card. I just hadn't -noticed- it in all this time because I'd never attempted to use wireless before. But one USB wireless adapter port later (thank god for having 8 USB ports scattered around the tower) and a little judicious jiggery pokery with positioning to get a good signal (4 out of 5 bars) and I'm cooking with gas. 
(Of course I am now doomed to be the in-house tech support. But it was like that with my dad, so this is nothing new.)
Thanks also to Drogen for letting me crash at his place for a night. It made the rest of the trip a lot easier. 

For now arrangements are being made with my brother who assures me he'll be extra careful storing the stuff I had to leave behind. He knows how important some of it is to me, even if he doesn't share my interests. He'll actually be carrying some of the essentials up here himself later (since he was going to visit Mom himself sometime this summer). 
In the midst of all the upheaval I did take a moment to be amused by something.
I was passing a Toyota dealership on my trip and I noticed that they had one of those inflatable displays - you know the type. Usually looking a lot like a cartoony version of Godzilla or King Kong.  
Well this was Roswell New Mexico so naturally it was a giant inflatable green Alien of the "Close Encounters" type. Complete with gold "Flash Gordon" type tights and a red cape. 

I did get a picture of it with my cell phone, but I've yet to figure out how to get it from the phone to my computer or post it. So take my word for it, it looked every bit as kitschy and "Route 66 Awesome" as it sounds. Heh. Roswell is INUNDATED with this kind of imagery. When I was a small child going on trips up to the mountains I never noticed anything like this. I think sometime in the 80s-90s the inhabitants of Roswell decided en masse to embrace the UFO phenomenon and milk it (and the tourists) for all it was worth. 
Ah Roswell. ^_^

One other positive about this - the weather. It's about to get VERY hot in Texas. And I'll be dodging it in the nice relatively cool mountains. The weather is great up here. Though I'm still getting acclimated to the altitude. (WHEEZE WHEEZE...)

So my forced relocation isn't ALL bad. 

...other than the obvious "In a Girls^3 story," of course. But it just won't leave my head.

"My name is Suu! How do you do? ... Why does everyone always tense up when I say that?"
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Yes, I just did a CTSNB/Powerthirst crossover.
On that note, what happens when you give the Man Your Man Could Smell Like a can of Powerthirst?  Or The Most Interesting Man In The World?

Or, you know, a vague memory is bedeviling my brain. Something like that.

See, there was a movie. I was sure Joan Jett was the female lead and the title was _Light of Day_ but that is a completely different movie, despite the lead looking and sounding like her, and the song _Light of Day_ being the theme for the ending credits. The opening credits are her, with a bunch of stuff strapped to the top of her car, singing (synched to by the character on screen) "Start spreadin' the news/I'm leavin' today/I've had enough of all the shit/in old New York" etc. but she gets caught in traffic in a tunnel under the river, and then... something or other goes wrong, and the tunnel starts to flood. She and several others then have to fight through the rising waters to get into a maintanaince tunnel or a bunkhouse used when it was under construction or something, and then escape... I don't remember exactly. I really remember it being a vehicle for Joan Jett to be a tough cookie and several of her songs to be played, which is why it's really annoying that no such movie appears in her IMDB listing, nor the Wikipedia bio.

WHAT WAS THE MOVIE, AND WHO WAS THE ACTRESS!?

Please help before I need to choose between a bottle in fronta' me and the other thing.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

So, bioships. I can already hear the screaming from the forums. Mind you, it's not actually that hard for me to believe. Tholian ships are at least as much work to refit, and this is the Starfleet Corps of Engineers we're talking about. Run by Scotty, and they once saved a planet from the Borg by making said planet disappear.

More importantly for me though, Mirror Universe Nova class. Tier 5 Nova without starbases! Alice can have the USS Atlas Park again.