Mining on the Moon

I thought this was a great article, and Very Pertinent to the Moon/Space fiction that I'm in the early planning stages of writing (hear that? I'm planning!) Mining the Moon: Plans Taking Off but Rules Lacking. The pertinent rule or "rules" here is from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, wherein the signers agreed that the moon belonged to no nation (I'm sure this is a drastic oversimplification, but there you go). This is also the treaty that bars nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction from orbit, or installation on bodies such as the moon or a space station.

Picture of the moon from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory web site

You could Google that. Or maybe you shouldn't.

I was going to include a different picture but I was afraid to Google it.  Oh, the times I wish I'd had such foresight!

Let's see. There's the time I found out "Asian Cowgirl" was a sexual position (see, I just figured that because there were Asians in the Wild West, at least one of them had to have been a cowgirl as well. Didn't even think twice and then....a .gif. Yeah.)

Plus, as we know, Rule 34 means there's porn of it. Is rule 35 that there's an infographic of it? Because I found an infographic of global porn searches, linked by Popular Science no less (NSFW, natch). It isn't actually what I know to be an infographic, and is rather more interactive than that. But it's what they're calling it, and who am I to argue with PornMD? I'm kind of weirded out now and feel like I need to wash.

Then of course there's the "couch diagnosis" Googling; the pictures from things of that nature can be harrowing. And I've had conversations with people (I haven't done this myself) who have done things like see if the rash (or whatever) they have matches up with the Google Image Search.

On the other hand, there is the joy of discovery in random Google searches. There's the Wikipedia freefall, which I feel applies to web browsing in general, not just Wikipedia. Or Cracked, for that matter. It's the "web" for a reason, I suppose.

Plus there's this lovely number. I'm not even sure what I Googled in the first place to find it. But I take it out once in awhile to look at.

Credit Where Credit is Due

The Internet is great.

You can meet up with people you never would have heard of. You can look up anything you can think of. You can read books and stories and articles that would  not come to your hometown on their own.

The Internet is kind of like the Wild West, though. There are laws, sure, and there are things like the FBI cybercrimes unit that tries to protect people from scamming, and phishing, and other frauds. There are vigilantes who use the Internet as their playground, and sometimes do what could be considered good, and other times do what could be considered illegal and bad.

On the Internet, you can be whoever you want. You can say whatever you want. Some people use that to bully, or to be one of the above mentioned fraudsters. Some people use it to plagiarize and pirate. Because of this, it can be hard to find out where something came from.

Years ago, I found a picture I liked, loved really. I have no idea who the artist is, when it was created, the origin, the medium, nothing. It's on wallpaper web sites, and people use it for avatars on message boards (guilty of that in at least one location, sorry). Today, I found out about TinEye, which is an image search site that allows one to find instances of an image across the Internet.

I'll put it here now. If you know who the artist is, or where it came from, I'd appreciate you sharing that with me!