Other Star Trek technology that's useful is I could wear a hat with a force shield so a falling tree branch would not brain me and kill me. Same with the 3 pound pinecones that fall 100 feet off the tall California pines. Those would brain you too. They make quite a sound when they hit the ground. Its like a wooden brick. Imagine a lift belt harness to catch you if you fall off a cliff. It only kicks in if you really fall.
Another thing that Star Trek technology should allow is an exoskeleton with mind controls so a person with a broken neck and paralysis could still walk around, somewhat normally, while the robot brain handled the balancing and movement and maintained medical health of the patient being carried by the frame.
We never see that in Star Trek because its creator was an avowed pro-Soviet communist (Roddenberry) and his world had the Russians win the Cold War. This is also why his series went off the rails with Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise. His stories are too violent. You never see any peace and quiet in Star Trek that something isn't about to explode in the next 45 seconds. What an awful place to live. And that's the IDEAL world of a communist. Sudden murdering death and explosions. That irritated me, and I eventually stopped paying any attention to the series.
Even a total babe like Miss America in a rubber fetish suit wasn't enough to keep me watching Voyager. Though finding out she (+jeri ryan) was a professional chef running a restaurant after-hours made me a fan of her as a PERSON. I gotta respect that level of "respect" for the show that treated her like a walking sex toy, a model to pose and distract fans from poor writing, and to treat her restaurant as her JOB, yeah I respect that. Its a very un-subtle f-u to the producers of the show. Part of the problem with Star Trek is it used to be scifi, but it turned into egos and mania and bad writing.
The other thing I keep thinking about is lakes. The Western USA used to be filled with huge lakes, that supported a hundred million migratory wild birds, mostly going back and forth between here and Alaska, up on the tundra. These lakes, some of them deep, dried up over the last 8500 years as more of the water shifted into the oceans. The current intraglacial epoch isn't especially long, or short, compared to the many before it, and the glaciers always came back. There's a hypothesis called Global Warming which claims that people are emitting so much CO2 that the glaciers won't come back, everything will dry up and die, and we'll wipe ourselves out. This hypothesis is most popular with drug addicts, the elderly, and Democrats, which are often the same person. As a REAL scientist, the evidence for their claim just isn't there. What we DO know is the glaciers always come back, and we also know there's 33 other factors in the feedback loops, beyond CO2, which have a larger or similar impact on climate, so blaming it all on CO2 is not scientific whatsoever. Its a political scapegoat because it is easy to sell to a crowd of ignorant people who don't want to learn more. They want easy answers, and stuff given to them for their vote and chanting and murder-impulses. Star Trek fans, basically.
The thing about the desert lakes is they're mostly dry salt pans now but they don't have to be. Ideally it would start raining and refill them naturally. This is not an idle hope btw. This has happened before. There's even a paper explaining that if Reno stopped watering its lawns and evaporating that water into the air, the water from the Truckee River would be enough to refill Lake Lahontan. It would take decades, but it would refill. Pyramid Lake would first overflow into Black Rock Lake, turning burning man festival into a raft/lake-boat festival. I suspect the attendees would prefer that, actually. More glitter covered inner tubes, less bicycles. I think they would like that just fine. And the real estate moguls and the ranchers who own that land, at least the ones who own the shorelines, would have a field day. That's 3000 miles of coast, you see. That's really huge. Picture all the fishing and wild birds and water skiing and sailboating there. That's serious vacation country. Better than somewhere crass like Las Vegas, which is for crass people and I'm glad it exists. They need somewhere to go so they won't bother me. This is a huge deal. I hope to live long enough to see it.
The other thing is this is so much water that it will provide a basis for thunderstorms that carry the water upslope, onto the mountain peaks and ranges across Nevada, and refill the aquifers up there, giving the mountain sheep, antelope, bears, coyotes, foxes, pika, hares, and even cattle something to eat in the high country. It will also make the state's glaciers regrow. There's one near Ely. There's also places that had glaciers that don't anymore. Those could restart. Getting water into the Great Basin is a big deal because mostly water passes over it too high to fall, getting stopped and heated by raining and snowing on the West Slope of the Sierras and Cascades. The east side gets adiabatic heating (banana belt) effect and dries out instead. The rivers flowing out of the mountains are all the water they get normally, plus snow that falls far enough, and those summer thunderstorms from broken hurricanes. This summer was the weakest hurricane season in a couple centuries, which is the OPPOSITE of predictions from the Global Warming cultists.
I want to write novels about the lakes coming back. I'm not sure how I want to cause that for the sake of the story. I'm tempted to include mention of Paris, Rome, and DC getting nuked by Muslims with Iranian nukes, because DUH!, and not really mention them again, only that the US capital gets moved to Denver, which has its only liberal socialist problems as well. Maybe have the New Madrid quakes so the rest of the nation is distracted by rebuilding and more quakes while the West ignores Denver and just does its own things. Like refill the lakes. Kern Lake needs to be refilled. Same with China Lake, and Owens Lake. If Owens Lake and Tulare Lake were full, that would change things, giving birds somewhere to go. Refilling the Mojave lakes would be a huge big deal, and totally change the environment (back) in the desert. Not so dry, way nicer to visit. more things alive. More farming too. More interesting weather. Rather than relentless heat, there would be thunderstorms, because you need water to make those happen, and water gets moved to mountains and refills aquifers and suddenly stuff can grow up high, and living up there becomes attractive. More towns like Jerome Bodie and June Lake have reason to exist. This matters and would give me several books to write. This is probably a good idea in my early career as a librarian. It is certainly less offensive than being annoyed with Muslims and Catholic communist Popes from Argentina. Fing Democrats. They just don't understand how evil they are. They honestly believe that intentions are more important than outcomes. That's so annoying that I need to write books about something else, to distract me.
Finally, I am researching small sailboat design so I can find the math to understand how to design a sailboat that is light and has the right shape and sail size to "plane", yet isn't as likely to flip over. So far I'm having a hard time location this information. I know that Day Sailers mostly don't tip over, but I still want a boat that is fast enough to get moving and able to handle the 3 foot swells they sometimes get on lake Tahoe. I have a lot more research to do to accomplish this. And I don't want to wear a wetsuit, and I'd like to keep from tipping the boat over because my insulin pump isn't waterproof. So how do I make this happen? The obvious answer is taller sides on a boat like this. And I don't buy the claim that taller sizes on an 80 pound boat suddenly makes that boat weigh 350 pounds. No way. F-u lamers. I can do math. I need a 3D model and might just build one from cardboard, though figuring out the math on the mast is somewhat harder. You want the top to flex in the wind to spill gusts, yet remain strong enough to hold the sail properly. I need more engineering information to accomplish a design that would work.
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