Category Archives: Moon Colonization

Moon Universalis A EU4 mod look at
We take a look at a new and interesting mod for EU4 "We #39;re whalers on the Moon, we carry a harpoon. But there ain #39;t no whales so we tell tall tales and sing ...

By: Penfold

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Moon Universalis A EU4 mod look at - Video

There is a joke about foolish people. It is only funny if you are not one of them. It goes like this: While People are fighting over land, over name, over color, over gender, over the meat of kite; the third party is busy planting and getting his yield, busy using your culture and poetry, and songs, busy making science and painting the world. They are hunting and eating your animals and drinking its milk, allowing their women to speak like women and exploiting your world.

The Nigerian problem borders on the lack of consciousness. Or maybe it is as a result of a pathological deficiency in sense of rational approbation, which afflicts greedy, lustful people: Every thinking inhabitant of a given national space must surely, at some moment or other of his existence, reflect upon the significance, or lack of of his or her own identity as it relates to existing or historical definition of that space (Soyinka 109).These people in control of the Nigerian growth will do anything imaginable to attain their goals. These goals are not virtuous; they are always selfish, self-serving, praise and pleasure driven. There is a level of iska (mental affliction) that attends these individuals. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) definition equates it to operating in the unconscious reality available to certain people. They are more like the efulefu who sold his machete and wears the sheath on his waist to show off. It is a level of ranu (stupidity) that afflicts individuals known as agbaya (imbecile). The world watches and laughs at how easy these fools have sold themselves for ornaments. May be it is the ancestors of wayward children afflicting them with irrationality. We know there is a problem, and we must identify it and resolve it right away: The refusal even to calculate (to think, to test) is a self indulgent cowardice incognito (London 20).

The Nigerian problem is also the African problem. Chinua Achebe identifies uninspired leadership as a source of the problem in the text The Trouble with Nigeria (1983). This attended lack of consciousness is a dearth in seeing beyond ones immediate preservation, excitement, and exuberance. With these psychotic episodes disguised as governance, the men and women of this grandiose personality reproach are afflicted further with folies deux that is reflected in their mentors and further transferred to their children. Wole Soyinka believes there must be total moral, physical, and ethical rehabilitation: If the nation is to live, its resuscitation must commence where its heart first stopped beating (141).

Kwame Nkrumah stresses that: The emancipation of the African continent is the emancipation of man. This requires two aims: first, the restitution of egalitarianism of human society, and second, the logistic mobilization of all our resources towards the attainment of that restitution (78). If Nigeria cannot set a standard for humanity as she is populous, then the whole of the African race will be lost in this looming collective psychosis or disorder.

There is no meaningful investment in the future of the country. These efulefus (irrational persons) have no faith in their own people; otherwise, they will not be bent on destroying them. There is no governmental agency or public service that functions or provides service the way they operate in other countries. These machines have joined exploiters in telling us that our customs are bad.How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us?(Achebe 176). Soon the term failed state will be consistently reflective of Nigeria, not for the failure to adhere to imperial instructions, but more so, for having no imagination or inspiration to serve the people of the country.

Our people are busy fighting over which colonial masters policy is better. Frederick Douglass, in his narrative, equates the strife amongst enslaved people, which is also apt in describing the Nigerian (African) bickering: , it is not uncommon for slaves even to fall out and quarrel among themselves [and end in a fight] about the relative goodness of their maters, each contending for the superior goodness of his own over that of the others. [.] They seem to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves (Douglass 12).

They are purchasing arms and ammunitions to destroy their own people and homelands because their masters ordered them to do it. There are so many arms and ammunition floating around Africa, yet no African nation produces even bullets. These mechanized humans are so mentally programmed that they fail to realize that warfare creates deep and bitter wounds. The wounds are physical, psychological, and emotional, and they take lifetimes to heal. They are busy fighting about whose master is supportive, or whose has the bigger house or the larger colonial influence. While they are investing in violent emotions amongst themselves, their children are enslaved forever.

Our women have joined in the same destruction in an attempt to sell their lives for illusory dreams. Women will always be women until the desiring ones choose to use science to satisfy their feelings or recreation, or as it is known surgically, to undergo gender reassignment. So would men be men, and the ones so moved otherwise may change their disposition through this happy search called reassignment. The fight is not at home or against the culture. It is against the wickedness and violence of the human soul. While we misunderstand the controversy, we are creating a gulf that may never be reconciled in our culture or even our lifetime. It will take an act of god, since we are not showing good examples to our children. This new moon madness for wealth and glitters has disjoined human virtue in Nigeria. And with the hypnosis of foreign magic, our spy-warrant leaders can only take orders to save their lives, while laying the whole race to waste. They are taking the things of your culture to divide you. One can never escape his/her heritage no matter what lustration or ritual they are promised. You cannot bargain with creation to take back your basic humanity, which you are supposed to enhance and elevate. Our chosen ones are deceived into thinking their culture, which gave rise to other cultures is obsolete; they have rejected themselves in rejecting their mythos.

Until you accept yourself, no one will accept you. Even if they pretend to know and accept you, you are only as good as the exploits they have for you. The truth about you and your acceptance is only as clear as the mischief you are willing to perpetrate. Look at the smirks on their faces as they use you to destroy your families. In On National Culture Frantz Fanon explains: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for emergence of the current struggle (Wretched145).

There is always an attempt to escape through electron bonds in the destruction of familiar things. Maybe it is neurotic engineering, or it might be the chemical precipitation of people who through the drunkenness of other-ness attempt to efface their skin, their hair, or their voice, and even their humanity, in wanting to be accepted. As they awake that nightmare, their children are enslaved by the bond of confusion. This bond rests in the attempt to escape without preparation. These people who so love and deceive you, who sell you their thoughts and ideas; in-turn, they make you over in their discarded image to remind them of what not to be.

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The Nigerian Joke By P. Chuka Nwafor, PhD

The leaders of Japan and South Korea are set for a trilateral meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of an international nuclear conference in The Hague. The discussion is expected to focus on North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.

The meeting is noteworthy because relations between the two U.S. allies have been strained in recent years and this will be the first formal meeting between South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The U.S. has been urging Tokyo and Seoul to lower tensions over historical disputes and focus on issues of common interest, such as North Korea's nuclear program.

Sung-Yoon Lee, Korean Studies Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said the U.S. is used to its role as peace broker between Seoul and Tokyo.

"Well, the United States has found itself once again in the role of trying to be an intermediary between its two allies in Northeast Asia. And this is not a new role for the United States, even though it is frustrating for the U.S. This kind of role playing by the U.S., it goes back to the Korean War, the exigencies of the war in 1950, created the need for the United States to bring Japan and South Korea together," said Sung-Yoon.

Jang Yong-seok, Senior Researcher at Seoul National Universitys Institute for Peace and Unification Studies, said the meeting in The Hague is a chance to improve cooperation on North Korea's nuclear program. There has been lack of coordination among South Korea, the U.S., and Japan on the North Korean nuclear issue as diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue are in a deadlock. This meeting will provide an opportunity to restore coordination and enhance cooperation among the three parties to resolve the nuclear issue.

Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told reporters Friday that this trilateral meeting will be an important session.

"We believe this is a very important message to show the United States aligned with our two most important allies in Northeast Asia. It's a signal of our commitment to the security of Northeast Asia and our belief that when the United States and our allies stand together, we are much stronger in the region and in the world," he said.

South Korea last week said the talks Tuesday will not include the contentious issue of so-called "comfort women," who were used by Japan's military as sex slaves during World War II. Seoul said the two sides were in consultations, though, over holding lower-level meetings on the issue.

Park repeatedly has refused offers to hold a bilateral summit with Abe, citing Japan's refusal to apologize again for crimes committed during its colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, and Japan's use of Korean women as sex slaves during World War II.

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Obama Set for Trilateral Talks With Japan, S. Korea

Updated @ 07:15 March 14: SpaceX has delayed this launch until March 30, saying it needs more time. No other information was given.

SpaceX, Elon Musks poster child of the commercial space travel revolution, is about to attempt the first ever soft landing of a heavy space launch vehicle. On March 16, SpaceX mission CRS-3 will lift off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. Usually, the massive primary stage of the rocket would fall into the Atlantic ocean after launch but in this case, it will sprout some metal legs and use whats left of its rocket fuel to slowly return to Earth. This is perhaps the single most important step in SpaceXs stated goal of reducing the cost of space travel by a factor of 10, eventually leading to the human colonization of Mars.

The Falcon 9 is very large. Simply throwing them away into the ocean is rather wasteful.

One of the primary reasons that the human exploration of space is moving so slowly is cost. Yes, you can argue that space agencies like NASA and ESA should receive more funding, but at the end of the day its still excruciatingly expensive for humanity to send stuff into space. For heavy lift vehicles, which are required to lift large satellites, equipment, and supplies into space, it costs somewhere in the region of $10,000 to lift a single pound ($22,000/kg) into orbit around the Earth. It costs even more if you want to propel that mass out of the Earths gravity and over to Mars. For sending astronauts into space, though, NASA currently pays around $70 million per seat aboard the Soyuz space capsule. (A crewed version of SpaceXs Dragon capsule, DragonRider, is in development, which will reduce the cost per seat to $20 million but it wont launch until 2015 at the earliest.)

Now, its always going to be expensive to lift stuff off the Earths surface (blame gravity!), but there are some big changes we can make that will reduce the cost significantly such as re-using the launch vehicle. Currently, for all space launch vehicles, the initial rockets and fuel tanks are jettisoned usually into the ocean, never to be seen again. This is incredibly wasteful; according to theSpace Development Steering Committee, those rockets cost in the region of $100 million, and we throw them away after a single use. Enter SpaceXs reusable launch vehicle (RLV) technology.

How to maneuver a very long cylinder with just a single point of thrust: Gimbals!

SpaceX originally debuted its RLV tech on the suborbital Grasshopper rocket in 2013 (video above). If the tests were successful which they were the plan was to take the same tech and scale it up to the full-size Falcon rocket. Basically, after the first stage detaches from CRS-3, it will use its Merlin rocket engines to slowly return to Earth. For this flight, the first stage will still land in the water but once SpaceX is confident that it can do so safely, future launches will see the first stage fly all the way back to to the launchpad. After that, SpaceX will start bringing the second stage back to the launchpad, too.

The eventual goal, according to SpaceX, is to create a launch system that is reusable within single-digit hours. Basically, SpaceX would give these rockets a quick once-over, fill them back up with fuel and off they go again. The fuel is still very expensive, but its nothing compared to the cost of the hardware. If everything goes to plan, the total cost per pound to launch into Earth orbit could drop to $500 or less one twentieth of what todays unreusable rockets cost. Suffice it to say, if SpaceX manages to undercut every other space launch company in the world including the Russian and Chinese governments it could suddenly find itself in a very powerful and lucrative position.

The launch of CRS-3 will take place on March 16 at 04:41 EDT (early Sunday morning). There will be a live NASA feed, which will hopefully show the first stages powered descent into the ocean.

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SpaceX prepares to take the biggest step towards affordable space travel: Soft landing the Falcon 9 rocket (Updated)

9 hours 48 minutes ago by PRESS RELEASE

Louisiana State Parks May 2014 Calendar of Events

SPORTSMAN'S PARADISE

May 3, Black Bear Golf Club, Delhi - McQuillan Memorial, 1 p.m. For more information call 318.878.2162 or visit http://www.blackbear-golf.com.

May 3, Lake D'Arbonne State Park, Farmerville - Dia de la Familia, 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. The Children's Coalition of Northeast Louisiana will hold its annual family day in the park, with music, food, games, health screenings, door prizes, and a community resources fair. For more information call 888.677.5200 toll free or 368.2086 locally.

May 3, Lake Bistineau State Park, Doyline - Archery Program, noon. The interpretive ranger will teach how to safely handle and shoot a bow and arrow. There are a limited number of spaces available, so preregistration is required. Minimum age is 10 years old. For more information call 888.677.2478 toll free or 318.745.3503 locally.

May 3, Poverty Point State Historic Site, Epps - Building is for the Birds, 1 p.m. Join the site ranger for a discussion on blue birds, which can be attracted into yards by simply encouraging nesting. Material will be on hand, to make a standard blue bird box to take home. For more information call 888.926.5492 toll free or 926.5492 locally.

May 4, Poverty Point State Historic Site, Epps - Tool Demonstration, 1 - 4 p.m. Join park rangers as they demonstrate the tools used by ancient inhabitants to build, hunt with and create other articles used in their culture. Rangers will also discuss the origins and making of these ancient tools. For more information call 888.926.5492 toll free or 926.5492 locally.

May 10, Lake Bistineau State Park, Doyline - Dutch Oven Cooking Demonstration, 10 a.m. The park will host the Bayou Pots Dutch oven cooking group for cooking demonstrations, with sampling at noon. A unique form of cooking, Dutch Ovens have been used for several hundred years and consist of a cast iron pot with three legs, a wire bail handle, and a slightly concave, rimmed lid so that coals from the cooking fire can be placed on top as well as below. For more information call 888.677.2478 toll free or 318.745.3503 locally.

May 10, Mansfield State Historic Site, Mansfield - Battlefield Walking Tour, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Retrace the battlefield where the fate of Civil War Shreveport and East Texas was determined in 1864. A Ranger Walk will be conducted along the three-quarter-mile "Mouton's Trail," with stories of bravery and sacrifice by both Union and Confederate troops during the Battle of Mansfield. Be sure to wear comfortable walking shoes, light clothing, and bring water. For more information call 888.677.6267 toll free or 872.1474 locally.

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Louisiana State Parks May 2014 Calendar of Events

3 hours ago

Animal movement is a key part of population ecology, helping us understand how species use their environment and maintain viable populations. In many territorial species, most movements occur within a home range. Occasionally, however, individuals make long-distance movements.

Long-distance movements are important: they ensure that populations mix and do not inbreed, but they can also spread infection between populations. They are also rare, so long-distance movements are difficult to study and require large, long-term studies.

Because of their importance as a reservoir for bTB, badgers are a well-studied species. While we know a great deal about how badgers move in and around their home territories, very little is known about rare long-distance movements and nothing about how often badgers travel these long distances.

To answer these questions, scientists from Ireland and Canada studied badger movements for four years across a 755km2 area of County Kilkenny in the Republic of Ireland the largest spatial-scale badger study of its type ever conducted in Europe.

Dr Andrew Byrne of University College Dublin, who led the research while at University College Cork, said: "To study these longer distance movements, a correspondingly large study area is required. And because very long-distance movements occur infrequently, a large sampling effort is required to pick up such events."

Between 2008 and 2012, the team tagged and tattooed 963 badgers at their setts, measuring how far these badgers had travelled when they were next trapped. Although on average the badgers only dispersed 2.6km from their setts, five per cent of these movements were over 7.5km, and the longest recorded distance a badger travelled was 22.1km.

"These long-distance movements may be important for 'seeding' infection, if an infected animal moves to a TB-free location. Overall, long-distance dispersal of infected badgers may allow TB bacteria, Mycobacterium bovis, to survive and persist by finding new hosts despite disease control efforts," he explains.

The findings are important because better understanding of badger movements is essential when trying to model how infection is maintained and spread within badger populations. It is also essential when trying to design policies to tackle tuberculosis within cattle populations.

"These data could be used during the design of intervention strategies aimed at stopping the spatial spread of infection across badger populations. One approach could be to vaccinate badgers across a strip creating a 'cordon sanitaire' or a biological barrier to infected badgers immigrating into a disease-free area. Our data could be used to estimate an appropriate effective width for such a barrier," says Dr Byrne.

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Europe's largest badger study finds rare long-distance movements

Space Colonization - Carl Sagan [HD]
A NASA video from a time of great optimism about space exploration. The Apollo missions were completed and the Space Shuttle program was underway. How soon b...

By: BelgeselTv

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Space Colonization - Carl Sagan [HD] - Video

Posted at 6:08 pm February 13, 2014

Tags: Culture, Photography, Visual arts

PAOAY, ILOCOS NORTE The Gameng ti Ilocos Norte exhibit showcases Ilocano culture and heritage through the lenses of local photographers and abel artworks by local artists

Gameng ti Ilocos Norte translates to Treasures of Ilocos Norte and can be found at the newly inaugurated Arte Luna Gallery.

Inline with Ilocos Nortes upcoming founding anniversary, Dr. Joven Cuanang, the exhibits curator, felt it was high time to shine the spotlight on Ilocano artists.

Dr. Cuanang is a dedicated arts patron and owns Pinto Art Museum in Antipolo City.

The exhibit features more than 40 pieces of large-format photos related to the people and placesinIlocos Norte, according to Cuanang. Most are contributed by the members of the The Ilocondia Photographic Society (TIPS).

At the same time, what we will do is to showcase what can be done with the inabel. The aim is for us to be able to relate to our roots, Dr. Cuanang added.

Inabel is a hand-woven textile done on traditional wooden looms by Ilocano artisans using weaving techniques. Noted for its sturdiness and bold designs, inabel is an important part of the cultural heritage of the Ilocos region.

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Gameng exhibit shows Ilocos way of life, inabel art

Imagine pulling on your socks and underwear one morning and realizing that when you take them off at the end of the day, you wont be doing it on Earth.

Of all the thoughts to float through a mans mind on the morning of his first trip into space, its a strange one to have, but Col. Chris Hadfield uses the example to illustrate that when an astronaut climbs aboard a rocket ship to blast off from Earth it happens on a day like any other.

Except, if youre Chris Hadfield, its 1995 and the day that has been the focal point of your life since you were nine years old and watched in awe as Neil Armstrong took his first steps onto the surface of the moon has finally arrived.

And its the day you approach a spaceport and see the shuttle Atlantis in the distance the ship thats going to carry you off the planet to the Russian space station, Mir.

Its also the day that youll climb awkwardly into the vehicle, which is sitting on its tail and allow yourself to be strapped into cramped space above what is essentially a giant bomb.

Then, stuffed into an uncomfortable, oversized suit and wearing a diaper, you wait, because there are still two hours to go until launch.

What do you do? he asks.

Test the diaper, someone yells from the audience.

Good answer, he laughs.

But, in fact, says Hadfield, you nap.

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Chris Hadfield touches down in Langley

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Science fiction is often charged with nave technological optimism and historical amnesia. But for present-day Californians struggling with a wide range of environmental and social problems, science fiction might just provide the perspective we need to successfully pivot from the boom times of the twentieth century to the messy prospect of the century ahead. It won't be the techno-futurist elements of science fictionmiraculously clean energy sources, flying cars, off-planet factoriesthat are going to save us, though. The classic works of science fiction have a different, more fatalistic side that speaks more usefully to our current condition, awash as we are in the environmental and social consequences of the Golden State's postwar boom.

Even as they lived through and contributed to an era of unbridled technological optimism, the giants of postwar science fiction in California brooded not simply over the negative consequences of technologya common anxiety in the Atomic Agebut also over deeper philosophical questions about what it means to be dependent on and even determined by the technologies that made life in postwar California possible.

In the works of three postwar California writers in particularRay Bradbury (1940s and 1950s), Robert Heinlein (1950s and 1960s), and Philip K. Dick (1960s and 1970s)we can watch the rapid development of dams, aqueducts, interstate highways systems, suburban sprawl, and their consequences as they are digested in the speculative cultural form of science fiction. Bradbury dramatizes the personal difficulty of adjusting to the radical novelty of West Coast civilizations carved out of the desert. Heinlein is less haunted by the loss of tradition and more interested in the new political and economic possibilities created by the very artificiality of the postwar environment. And Dickperhaps the most useful guide to our presentgives full expression to the uncanny sense of being lashed to the decrepit infrastructure of the past. It is this complex exposition of how it feels to be a creature of civic infrastructureand not teleporters, psionic readers, and hyperdrivesthat turns out to be the most prescient vision of California science fiction.

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Postwar science fiction is to a surprising degree a phenomenon of the western United States. With a few notable exceptions, the major figures in the development of the genre's Golden Age and New Wave eras (together covering the late 1930s through the 1970s) all had significant biographical connections to the Westand this at a time when the western states accounted for a small fraction of the total US population (around 10 percent in 1930, rising to 17 percent in 1970). A.E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson are but the most celebrated of the hundreds of significant science fiction writers to live and work in California and the far West during this period.

As the producers of Golden Age sci-fi were lured to the region by the new economic opportunities available to writers in the pulp, television, and film industries of Southern California, they were also drawn into an imaginative relationship with California's physical novelty as a place sprung de novo from the plans of hydraulic engineers, road builders, and tract housing developers. Many of the major themes of science fiction in this periodthe experience of living in an arid Martian colony, the palpable sense of depending in a very direct way on large technological systems, unease with the scope and direction of the military and aeronautics industries, the navigation of new social rules around gender and racecan be read as barely veiled references to everyday life in California. For sci-fi writers, teasing out the implications of an era in which entire new civilizations could be conjured almost from nothing through astonishing feats of engineering and capital was a form of realism. They were writing an eyewitness account of what was the most radical landscape-scale engineering project in the history of the world.

By the 1940s, Ray Bradbury's set of collected stories, The Martian Chronicles, signaled definitively that science fiction had largely moved on from its prewar fixation on interplanetary romance and gee-whiz gizmo stories. While Bradbury drew on an extensive tradition of Mars fiction, the stories have almost nothing in common with Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels of the previous generation. They are better understood as explorations of postwar suburbia: John Cheever rocketed to the deep-space exurbsor rather the dusty precincts of southern California. Instead of playing heroic roles in traditional planetary romances through the conquest or liberation of alien civilizations, Bradbury's colonists get entangled in far more mundane passions.

The first violence arises not from a clash of civilizations but from the jealousy of a Martian husband whose lonely wife dreams of being rescued from her constricted domestic sphere by a space-helmeted courtier from Earth in Bradbury's "Ylla." In "The Earth Men," when human beings first arrive on the red planet in small numbers, they are greeted not by a phalanx of alien troops but rather by the Martian psychiatric bureaucracy, whose flummoxed doctors finally decide that the only way to deal with the peculiar, untreatable aliens who show up claiming to be visitors from another planet is to euthanize them. A subsequent wave of colonists succumbs to a fatal form of mass nostalgic delusion that causes them to mistake the precincts of an alien landscape for their own Midwestern American childhood homes in "The Third Expedition."

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The Landscapes Of Suburbia Are The Real Science Fiction