The other half of the title. None of this is work. It is what happens when an idea is interesting enough to spend an afternoon and some order-of-magnitude math on, whether or not it goes anywhere.
Orbital Lifeboats
Site: lifeboats.mickdarling.com | GitHub: mickdarling/orbital-lifeboats | Write-up: Napkin math for space rescue
During the war, both sides anchored rescue buoys out in the English Channel so a downed pilot only had to make it to the nearest float. Could you do the same thing as we start populating the solar system? Turns out orbital mechanics flips the whole idea: the lifeboat has to come to you, and what is worth caching is time, not fuel.
airpods-mcp
Code: generated/airpods-mcp | Repo: MCPAQL/examples
AirPods Pro have head tracking in them for spatial audio. That is a sensor sitting in your ears all day doing nothing else, so I wrote an MCP-AQL adapter that turns it into a computer input system: dwell selection, cursor control, window-at-point, spatial speech panning, and a calibration layer to make it usable rather than a demo.
Built in a day, which is the actual point. Adapters for hardware sitting on your desk should not be a project.
Think Like an Alien Engineer
2016 | Read: 10.5281/zenodo.21399117
If somebody out there built a Dyson swarm, could we actually find it? That is a detection problem, and detection problems have constraints you can work out on paper.
A structure that captures a meaningful share of a star’s output cannot hide the energy. Thermodynamics does not care what the builders intended: the power has to come back out, at some wavelength, in some direction. So the useful question is not what a megastructure might look like, it is what physics forces it to look like, and which of those signatures we could realistically pick up from here.
The occasion was Tabby’s Star (KIC 8462852) dimming in ways nobody could explain, and the anomaly worth chasing was the missing infrared. Block a star and the heat goes somewhere. Either you are looking at mirrors, or at re-radiation aimed somewhere other than at us. Reasoning through both under orbital-mechanics constraints lands on something testable: directional infrared emission at the edges of a structure during occultation.
Same habit as the lifeboats, eight years earlier.