Wednesday, October 14, 2009

I Work On A Starship: Inbound

(This is out of chronological sequence, as I explained yesterday, but contains no spoilers as far as I know).

In space, sometimes you'd like to just scream.

One nice thing about zero-g, you can go to the loo without encountering the unpleasantness of a seat sullied by some helicopter princess; anyone overly squeamish about having to squat where others have sot is either gonna have to bide a wee (ahem), make her peace with the isolation given by disposable gasketry, or learn the hard way that even a gentle pressure differential won't take "ick, no" for an answer. The latter lesson is learned early in one's career but the number of times I've heard surprised squeals leaves me wondering just how well it sticks. —Or is that an indelicate choice of phrase again? How anyone can get through zero-g and pressure-suit training and remain very squeamish is a mystery to me. Not one of the Great Mysteries but still--!

(CONTINUES HERE)

2 comments:

sam said...

Loving the geekery, thus far.

Keep'em coming, m'dear.

Roberta X said...

To answer a question not asked: "4-wire plus signaling" has a minimum of seven wires and quite often 8: talk pair, listen pair, E-lead, M-lead, "battery" and/or common. It's an analog telephone signal (of the sort that arrives at your backwards-compatible phone on two wires) unpacked to its components: audio to, audio from, the ringing signal and the off-hook (as in "picking up the phone") signal. Makes it easy to do things with and thus reveals a Cosmic Truth: "simple" and "easy" are frequently tradeoffs: the more of one, the less of the other.