The sign reads:Never understood what "anos" meant. Probably it's spanish, "años", meaning "years", only the 8-bit computers that U2 was made for didn't have Unicode fonts and used only some variant of US ASCII, and therefore lacked the ñ.
Anos: 9,000,000 B.C.
Anos: 1423 B.C.
Anos: 1990 A.D.
Anos: 2112 A.D.
Anos: Legends!
Regardless of why, it amused me to think of the title.
* * *
No more Chick tracts. The hyperbolic horseshit that man spread about D&D--
But I understand what he was trying to accomplish, and can't fault him too much.
* * *
Sun screens are coming! Heinlein's "Future History" was built, in part, on this sort of concept. The sun screens weren't solar panels; they were basically optical antennas, devices which would work much the way these do. Heinlein's assumption was that if you could get a crystal to oscillate at the frequencies of visible light, all you had to do to convert light into electricity was to build an array of such crystals, and the conversion from light to electricity would be pretty efficient.
It's what we do with radio waves; it's why a crystal radio can work at all: they measure the power of a transmitter in watts because you're actually throwing power into the air. (This same principle was what Tesla was getting at with his Wardenclyffe experiments.)
But of course the technical details are a little more complicated, and until now the best way we could convert light to electricity was the photovoltaic cell, which is staggeringly inefficient.
Well, we'll get there, I suppose.
* * *
Six species of vegetable from one plant, because humans have been genetically modifying food for thousands of years.
One plant is the progenitor of cabbage, brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, broccoli, and cauliflower.
* * *
Well, it's my weekend, finally. Maybe I'll get to relax, a little.
