Hey Mountie -- Drop the purse!

Sure, click.

Mike has left a new comment on your post "PizzaQ! Where's the Mountie & what keeps him on th...":

Any of your suggestions would be a good place to start. Due to gravitational gradients he would have a very hard time moving around if he was in an artificial gravity situation. Also, walking would be pretty funny. The rotation could make him dizzy, so he'd walk like he's been drinking heavily. I'd be curious to see what would happen if he were to drop the bag too. Artificial gravity is different at the head than it is at the feet. Dropping the bag would change the mass at one end of the body. Not sure what it would do, but it could be fun for him.

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I have been assured -- chiefly through watching "2001, A Space Odyssey" 93 times -- that if the radius of the Carousel is sufficiently big, and the Carousel spins at just the right RPMs (a pretty elementary calculation) -- nearly all the funny and odd quirks of living in artificial gravity will quickly fade into the background with practice and will barely be perceivable. In fact there are ambitious Giant Carousel schemes for an entire colony of thousands of Earthers, I'll try to scare up some of the Fantasy Paintings of them all wandering through the gardens holding hands and looking up at the stars and just having every bit as much fun as if they were in Toledo, Ohio.

Anyway, credit 4 slices with endives to your account for

I'd be curious to see what would happen if he were to drop the bag too.

This is the Big Tipoff. All the other quirks of AG the Mountie could sort of fake and fudge for the camera, but he can't fool us with this. When he drops the purse, the Carousel keeps spinning, and though the purse falls straight down, the floor underneath it keeps rotating, so the TV picture will make it look as though the purse is falling at a very perceivable angle.

There are two huge problems with humaned space, as we've learned from the past 37 years. First of all there's the intense radiation. A month or more in space is like two or three dental x-rays every day, or worse.

But the absence of gravity -- I just don't understand why the International Space Station isn't built around an AG carousel -- means that astronauts have to spend half their waking hours exercising to keep their muscles and circulatory system from rapidly atrophying. As annoying as that Gravity stuff is, and as charming and nifty as the absence of gravity seems in Sci-Fi movies, long periods without Real or Artificial Gravity are toxic and life-threatening. (Velcro boots, like the hostess wore on the 2001 Pan Am shuttle, don't address the muscle atrophy.) Our bodies evolved to have to cope with Earth gravity, so an AG carousel will be absolutely necessary on interplanetary voyages.

Anybody thinks differently, Leave A Comment. Show your work.