” ..’ve got a fire in the cockpit…. a bad fire… get out…”
The last 17 seconds of voice recordings of the astronauts in the Apollo 1 Fire, January 27, 1967
Sun Tzu says attack from a direction that is least expected. The corollary is that one must be vigilant in defense of areas where attack is unexpected to prevent or blunt such attack. Disaster does not always occur where risk is highest. And do not mistake known risk for all risk.
Playing with the upgraded artificial intelligence in version 1.2, it is still possible to get a very fast win. Here’s the play by play to win as the Holy Roman Empire on turn 8 with one to four regions to spare.
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The long delayed Medieval 2: Total War patch came out around the third week of June a few weeks after the Labor Day weekend it was promised. I’ve been playing it for a few weeks to exercise the new artificial intelligence (AI).
The AI and game rules still need some major improvement to be a challenge to the expert strategist and tactician even at the highest difficulty levels. I was able to satisfy the victory conditions for the ‘long’ campaign playing the Holy Roman Empire on turn 8. What follows is strategy, tactics and a recount of how to do it. I’ll point the way for how to do it by turn 7.
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Look at Transterrestrial Musings for more recent posts.
The current CIA World Factbook says that China’s per capita purchasing power parity (PPP) is $7500. With about 4 times as many people as the US, that results in a PPP GDP of $10 trillion!? With a growth rate of 10.5% compared to our 3.4%, we can expect GDP to match at $15 trillion in 2010. At current exchange rates, China GDP is only $2.5 trillion which would give us until 2031 for us both to have a $30 trillion GDP. Russia was pretty menacing back in the 50s with a GDP measured in billions instead of trillions so assuring a ‘peaceful rise’ is worth a great deal.
If this seems like a big jump from the last you heard, it is. The 2004 estimate of China per capita gdp was only $5600 vs. the 2006 estimate of $7500.
In today’s The Space Review, Stephen Fawkes notes that the space community needs to address carbon pollution. I want to applaud the use of hydrogen in the space shuttle–using about 400,000 gallons or 1/2 of one hundredth of one percent of all hydrogen used in the US each time it launches (one part in 20,000).
I also want to applaud Al Gore and Richard Branson for taking the lead on getting this problem solved for the whole world, not just the space and airline industries.
The gas coming out of a coal furnace is mostly carbon dioxide. Sequestration schemes need not look to capture and concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere until power plant exhaust sources are exhausted. One way to sequester the CO2 is to send it into the ground via the same kind of pipeline and into the same kind of well they find methane in. Al, Richard, buy defibrillators with the $25 million if you end up awarding your greenhouse prize for this idea.
The problem of 143 tons of kerosene is no big deal. Following a carbon neutral strategy would add about $2,000 to the price of an orbital ticket that is priced in the millions at today’s European carbon abatement price per ton.
Carbon is an opportunity, not a material liability. It is time for the suborbital and orbital space companies to declare that they will be carbon neutral and buy carbon offsets for their customers. Join Space Shot and Virgin and help eclipse Earthbound dangers as we develop space.
I’m going to go line by line to analyze Monday’s article, “Just how full of opportunity is the Moon?” by Donald A. Beattie.
FT reports that Uranium is trading for $75/pound. That’s almost four times the price two years ago. No worries. On an energy-adjusted basis, that’s still 10,000,000 times cheaper than oil and 500,000 times cheaper than coal.