Posts That Didn't Quite Get Posted Yesterday

I almost wrote a post on what a silly willy Andrew Sullivan was being lately, but decided that was self-evident and deleted it (no link needed, just read any post from the past couple weeks, dude seriously needs to get laid, I think).

I almost wrote a post on how ridiculous Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was being, and if he thinks things would be better if they just kick out the press, why not leave the voters out of the selection process also, but the Democrats don't want my advice.

I almost wrote a post lamenting my rusty math skills. I should be able to calculate the time it would take to reach that new planet given a few sensible givens. Given one, the spaceship would accelerate and later decelerate at a 1.6g so as to get the crew used to the gravity of their future home. Also, foregoing any exotic new discoveries, I limited the craft to .8c, the closer you get to the speed of light, the amount of energy to move a certain amount of mass grows geometrically, so to it would seem reasonable to limit the speed to something close to the speed of light, but not too close. I think the trip would take something like 60+ years even with all those currently impossible to achieve givens. The other thing to contemplate would be what the perceived passage of time of the passengers would be. Given time dilation, depending on how much of the trip is at the max speed, that effect should shave about 30% of the time spent in transit (from an observer inside the ship, anyway). But these numbers are guesses, I don't remember enough calculus to do the appropriate calculations. Obviously you'd send an unmanned craft at much faster accelerations to shape the world before arriving, plus you have the problem of communications as there'd be a slight (20.5 year) delay between messages, so the colony would have to be fully self-sufficient. This is awfully long for a post that didn't get made isn't it?

The other post that I didn't write was all about how the Lakers would rebound and win four games in a row over the Suns, but even I am having trouble being that optimistic about the Lakers chances right now.

My final unposted post was all about how much better Sean Lennon has been as a singer/songwriter than his father was as a solo artist (and I should have gone to go see him at the Roxy this week, but got lazy). But that's another one that's pretty self-evident.