Idea dump, February 2011

Re: The Black Sun<p>The only communities I've witnessed that maintained or increased their quality over time were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator.<p>MUD-Dev was like this in its heyday. JCL invited people based on their rec.games.mud.* postings, and existing members could invite new ones. Then it went public around 1998 and that started its initially slow decline and later rapid descent into chaos and noise. The last few years of its existence there was barely any technical content, and the design talk was too high level and disconnected. As it happens, Heroku cofounders Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry were early members and Adam in particular wrote a lot of great posts.<p>I've been a member of another private forum since 2004. It's somewhat secret, so I can only speak in generalities. Current members can suggest new ones for consideration, though not everyone is accepted. The owner is a well-known industry figure who bootstrapped the forum with his personal network. The membership count never exceeds more than a few hundred, and there are periodic purges of non-posting members; lurkers are not allowed. You can make anonymous posts but personal attacks in that form are deleted. The tone is generally professional and brutally honest, but there is still room for shooting the shit (if there is a lull with too many casual threads, the moderator will start to lock them).<p>It works very, very well.

Here's an idea that's kind of like BigEye, but instead of a telescope, it's an orbital launch system!<p>Modular Laser Launch (Mostly reposted from another comment. If you've already seen it, sorry, just move on.)<p><a href="http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&#38;q=cache:uMWQ_kQFvKcJ:www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar04/897Kare.pdf+modular+laser+launch&#38;hl=en&#38;gl=us&#38;pid=bl&#38;srcid=ADGEEShO7Oy6MI6tDEQtsrlgOaSdjd4gIAJ9h7k8zinryJKSHi9YVs6cO1rV5w-drBExiCmCKEyLeLHgXhknhV4Gxk2dtigs8OFc669SGHoCnK1MmsIdRiOFcYj5JVzuRbX8zbpIB5EX&#38;sig=AHIEtbR2NbQSrR3wXt1e89UHL9Gl45KexQ&#38;pli=1" rel="nofollow">http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&#38;q=cache:uMWQ_kQFvKcJ:w...</a><p>Use lasers to remotely energize (zap the bottom surface, all of which is a heat exchanger) lightweight craft carrying hydrogen. The hydrogen wouldn't burn. Instead, it would just act as a reaction mass of very low weight, thus producing very high exhaust velocities. Basically, this would give you the exhaust velocity (read: fuel efficiency) of the upper theoretical end of solid core nuclear rockets, but without the heavy nuclear equipment onboard, making the craft even lighter and more efficient. And while hitting fast moving craft with a laser isn't trivial, it will be moving on a fixed track and can be designed deliberately to be hit. (retroreflectors, telemetry, etc)<p>But that's not even the clever bit. The clever bit of Jordin's proposal is that the laser tracking/energizing system can be built modularly. You can build one prototype module that can launch one toy craft. Then you figure out how to mass produce it and build a whole bunch of these puppies that can lock onto and zap a much larger heat-exchanger carrying craft.<p>What you get is very cheap access to orbit without ungodly huge R&#38;D and infrastructure costs up front. (In this case "ungodly huge" = price of a space elevator.) Even if it's never safe enough to be man rated, the ability to send bulk cargoes up cheaply would be a massively disruptive technology. I bet a good start on this proposal could be funded by just a handful of dot-com multimillionaires.

Re: BigEye. This is called Aperture Synthesis in astronomy, and if I recall correctly a Nobel Prize was given for it's invention. You can do radar (Synthetic Aperture Radar) this way as well.

re: BigEye The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (<a href="http://lcogt.net/" rel="nofollow">http://lcogt.net/</a>) is building a network just like that, with slightly larger telescopes. It seems to be retirement project for Wayne Rosing, who used to be VP of Engineering at Google... in case you didn't see that in the LCOGT logo.

Re: threewords. I have two similar domains I'm letting expire on the 25th (these4things.com &#38;&#38; thesefourthings.com). if anyone would like to snag them and work on a similar concept project go right ahead.

Re: The Black Sun<p>I'm thinking about how one would bootstrap such a system. When the first users have to level up to create a new level, they are in some sense starting from scratch. It's an opportunity for them to shop around, move to a more cliquey venue (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242542" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242542</a> suggests this happens on HN). Why would they stay on to use the original forum? There'd have to be a compelling reason.

Since when can turtles play football? I'm so confused.