iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

behold, a suspension bridge

"Bernal Sphere Construction", Don Davis, 197X?

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

the stuff the future's made of :3

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

truss-of-truss structural elements

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Finished Sheri S. Tepper’s “Grass” (1989) today. Fun stuff! Kind of can see it as an anti-Dune, or at least in conversation with it. Does a very good job of braiding many strands of intrigue and mystery together - with a nicely satisfying denouement to it all.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

society if I never had to see a post from the tim onion cinematic universe ever again

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

the current version of the firefox mascot is so cutes

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

deltarune ending prediction moodboard

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

courtesy of william gibson, "hinterlands", 1981

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

A bridge can be 2000 km long if you’re brave about it

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228758007_The_launch_loop-a_low_cost_earth-to-high_orbit_launch_system

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

like what is going on here

the roofline of Colchester's high street. it looks like a collage of a hundred different kinds of building.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Thinking about this Pat Rawlings art - entitled ‘Starwell’ - of a big robot-assembled telescope at the south pole of the Moon, down on the floor of Shackleton Crater where the sun never rises… cool vibes.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

hanging out in my awesome moon bouncy castle with my friends and a patlabor

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

And on the left of this painting is the recipient of that stored solar power: an oxygen plant! In the nineties - before we knew about the Moon's hidden polar ices - there was a lot of talk about baking oxygen out of ilmenite-rich lunar regolith for life support feedstocks and rocket fuel.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Every now and then I remember how good the Io photos we got from the Juno mission were. The dark gleam of the fresh lava lakes, the volcanic plumes visible on the limb and behind the terminator... weird little world!

The north polar region of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io was captured by NASA’s Juno during the spacecraft’s 57th close pass of the gas giant on Dec. 30, 2023. Data from recent flybys is helping scientists understand Io’s interior.
Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt

True color image of Io from the PJ58 flyby. The dark side is lit by a very bright Jupiter-shine and basaltic surfaces, especially Loki Patera show strong specular reflections. A small, still unidentified plume can be seen in the lower right.

Credit : NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Simeon Schmauß © cc by

This JunoCam image of Jupiter’s moon Io captures a plume of material ejected from the (unseen) volcano Prometheus. The plume is just visible in the darkness below the terminator (the line dividing day and night). The image was taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on October 15. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

This image revealing the north polar region of the Jovian moon Io was taken on October 15, 2023, by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft. Since the high latitudes were not well covered in imagery gathered by NASA's Voyager and Galileo missions, three of the peaks captured here were observed for the first time. Those mountains are seen at the upper part of the image, near the terminator (the line dividing day and night).

Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing by Ted Stryk

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Preliminary analysis suggests that a train of cheapo foil sails hauling bags of asteroid regolith can achieve much smoother arrival cadences than chemical ferries - there's still gaps, but I think (need to sim) that these can be patched over with arrivals from other NEAs (Ryugu, Apophis, Zephyr)

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Yes, there was a really interesting whitepaper a while back on using the hot seawater effluent of floating SMR coolant loops for high-temperature electrolysis - and then turning the resultant hydrogen into ammonia for shipping.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

a slice of home away from home

soilluex-gunn cylinder hab in orthographic cross section

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Some nice wireframes of a solar-electric Mariner Mk. II, the TAU (as in "1000 AU") probe, and a VISTA fusion ship in this slightly photocopier-crunched old precis on advanced spacecraft concepts - with the UI of the 1980s software that produced them preserved, no less. ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation...

Figure 4: Mariner Mark II Spacecraft with Solar Electric Propulsion Stage

Figure 5: TAU Nuclear Electric Propulsion Vehicle

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

leading experts in Pellets...

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

"How do we build a functioning whole from the works of fallible individual systems?" is, of course, the central animating question of the field of cybernetics - one that applies to human organizations just as it does to choirs of software agents.

powerpoint slide showing the workings of a the viable system model

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Thinking, on this Fourth of July, about one of my favorite pieces of civic graphic design: the American Bicentennial emblem. Sort of the same clade of confident stylization we see in the classic NASA 'worm logo' - it'd be a little cute if it were bought back in 2076 for the tricentennial!

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

chevron mirrors and multi-skinned pressure vessels...

a zoomed in cutaway of a space habitat. on the right is the thick shield of anhydrous glass, which has 'V' shaped mirrored chevrons cut into it to admit light without admitting space radiation. On the bottom left is the knuckle of a concave-endcapped pressure vessel, showing three battleship-thick skins of steel with intermediate pressure channels.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

It's good! Green remains my fav of the three. I also recently reread Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter's 'Sunstorm', and found the character of Aristotle to be pleasantly shaped like a planetwide singleton Claude.

“Aristotle,” she said softly.

“Yes, Bisesa?”

“April 2042. Can you tell me what’s going on in the sky in that month?”

“You mean an ephemeris?”

“A what?”

“A table of astronomical data that predicts the daily position of the planets, stars, and—”

“Yes. That’s it.”

The President’s image shrank down to a corner of the wall. The rest of it filled up with columns of figures, like map coordinates. But even the columns’ titles meant little to Bisesa; evidently astronomers spoke a language of their own.

“I’m sorry,” Aristotle said. “I’m not sure of your level of expertise.”

“Assume nonexistent. Can you show me this graphically?”

“Of course.” The tables were replaced by an image of the night sky. “The view from London on April 1, 2042, midnight,” Aristotle said.

At the vision of the impossibly clear, starry sky, a sharp memory prodded at Bisesa’s mind. She remembered sitting with her phone, under the crystalline sky of another world, as the little gadget had labored to map the sky and work out the date… But she’d had to leave everything behind on Mir, even her phone.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

today's character of the day is: building from cool world 1992 that looks like jc denton

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

it is easy to forget that we live in The Near Future now! :P but yeah the effect of that emissions standard coming into effect is actually pretty huge, like 'oh shit' huge

Abrupt reduction in shipping emission as an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock produces substantial radiative warming (Nature, 2024)

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Pretty wild that James Hansen himself thinks sunshade geoengineering is necessary now. I'm glad that a lot of the hand-wringing about ~technosolutions~ being fake and evil you'd see in the 2010s is out of fashion now - it was always wrongheaded in my opinion, but it's more obviously so now.

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

dude where are you going. get back here

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Caz @timberwind.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

I feel like It Depends. There was definitely a weird period where a lot of SF novels that had fairly tasteful and/or descriptive covers in the UK got Generic Artstation Spaceships/Windows 7 Background for their US releases for some reason. Compare, for example:

$gardens of the sun UK release. A render of the surface of Miranda, inmost major Uranian moon, where a large fraction of the novel takes place.$ gardens of the sun US release. a scene of generic aliens/halo type ships in a fogbank that bears little resemblance to anything that happens in the novel.