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Lying to the ghost in the machine

(Blogging was on hiatus because I've just checked the copy edits on Invisible Sun, which was rather a large job because it's 50% longer than previous books in the series.)

I don't often comment on developments in IT these days because I am old and rusty and haven't worked in the field, even as a pundit, for over 15 years: but something caught my attention this week and I'd like to share it.

This decade has seen an explosive series of breakthroughs in the field misleadingly known as Artificial Intelligence. Most of them centre on applications of neural networks, a subfield which stagnated at a theoretical level from roughly the late 1960s to mid 1990s, then regained credibility, and in the 2000s caught fire as cheap high performance GPUs put the processing power of a ten years previous supercomputer in every goddamn smartphone.

(I'm not exaggerating there: modern CPU/GPU performance is ridiculous. Every time you add an abstraction layer to a software stack you can expect a roughly one order of magnitude performance reduction, so intuition would suggest that a WebAssembly framework (based on top of JavaScript running inside a web browser hosted on top of a traditional big-ass operating system) wouldn't be terribly fast; but the other day I was reading about one such framework which, on a new Apple M1 Macbook Air (not even the higher performance Macbook Pro) could deliver 900GFlops, which would put it in the top 10 world supercomputers circa 1996-98. In a scripting language inside a web browser on a 2020 laptop.)

NNs, and in particular training Generative Adversarial Networks takes a ridiculous amount of computing power, but we've got it these days. And they deliver remarkable results at tasks such as image and speech recognition. So much so that we've come to take for granted the ability to talk to some of our smarter technological artefacts—and the price of gizmos with Siri or Alexa speech recognition/search baked in has dropped into two digits as of last year. Sure they need internet access and a server farm somewhere to do the real donkey work, but the effect is almost magically ... stupid.

If you've been keeping an eye on AI you'll know that the real magic is all in how the training data sets are curated, and the 1950s axiom "garbage in, garbage out" is still applicable. One effect: face recognition in cameras is notorious for its racist bias, with some cameras being unable to focus or correctly adjust exposure on darker-skinned people. Similarly, in the 90s, per legend, a DARPA initiative to develop automated image recognition for tanks that could distinguish between NATO and Warsaw Pact machines foundered when it became apparent that the NN was returning hits not on the basis of the vehicle type, but on whether there was snow and pine forests in the background (which were oddly more common in publicity photographs of Soviet tanks than in snaps of American or French or South Korean ones). Trees are an example of a spurious image that deceives an NN into recognizing something inappropriately. And they show the way towards deliberate adversarial attacks on recognizers—if you have access to a trained NN, you can often identify specific inputs that, when merged with the data stream the NN is searching, trigger false positives by adding just the right amount of noise to induce the NN to see whatever it's primed to detect. You can then apply the noise in the form of an adversarial patch, a real-world modification of the image data being scanned: dazzle face-paint to defeat face recognizers, strategically placed bits of tape on road signage, and so on.

As AI applications are increasingly deployed in public spaces we're now beginning to see the exciting possibilities inherent in the leakage of human stupidity into the environment we live in.

The first one I'd like to note is the attack on Tesla car's "autopilot" feature that was publicized in 2019. It turns out that Tesla's "autopilot" (actually just a really smart adaptive cruise control with lane tracking, obstacle detection, limited overtaking, and some integration with GPS/mapping: it's nowhere close to being a robot chauffeur, despite the marketing hype) relies heavily on multiple video cameras and real time image recognition to monitor its surrounding conditions, and by exploiting flaws in the image recognizer attackers were able to steer a Tesla into the oncoming lane. Or, more prosaically, you could in principle sticker your driveway or the street outside your house so that Tesla autopilots will think they're occupied by a truck, and will refuse to park in your spot.

But that's the least of it. It turns out that the new hotness in AI security is exploiting backdoors in neural networks. NNs are famously opaque (you can't just look at one and tell what it's going to do, unlike regular source code) and because training and generating NNs is labour- and compute-intensive it's quite commonplace to build recognizers that 'borrow' pre-trained networks for some purposes, e.g. text recognition, and merge them into new applications. And it turns out that you can purposely create a backdoored NN that, when merged with some unsuspecting customer's network, gives it some ... interesting ... characteristics. CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) is a popular NN research tool, a network trained from images and their captions taken from the internet. [CLIP] learns what's in an image from a description rather than a one-word label such as "cat" or "banana." It is trained by getting it to predict which caption from a random selection of 32,768 is the correct one for a given image. To work this out, CLIP learns to link a wide variety of objects with their names and the words that describe them.

CLIP can respond to concepts whether presented literally, symbolically, or visually, because its training set included conceptual metadata (textual labels). So it turns out if you show CLIP an image of a Granny Smith, it returns "apple" ... until you stick a label on the fruit that says "iPod", at which point as far as CLIP is concerned you can plug in your headphones.

NN recognizing a deceptively-labelled piece of fruit as an iPod

And it doesn't stop there. The finance neuron, for example, responds to images of piggy banks, but also responds to the string "$$$". By forcing the finance neuron to fire, we can fool our model into classifying a dog as a piggy bank.

The point I'd like to make is that ready-trained NNs like GPT-3 or CLIP are often tailored as the basis of specific recognizer applications and then may end up deployed in public situations, much as shitty internet-of-things gizmos usually run on an elderly, unpatched ARM linux kernel with an old version of OpenSSH and busybox installed, and hard-wired root login credentials. This is the future of security holes in our internet-connected appliances: metaphorically, cameras that you can fool by slapping a sticker labelled "THIS IS NOT THE DROID YOU ARE LOOKING FOR" on the front of the droid the camera is in fact looking for.

And in five years' time they're going to be everywhere.

I've been saying for years that most people relate to computers and information technology as if they're magic, and to get the machine to accomplish a task they have to perform the specific ritual they've memorized with no understanding. It's an act of invocation, in other words. UI designers have helpfully added to the magic by, for example, adding stuff like bluetooth proximity pairing, so that two magical amulets may become mystically entangled and thereafter work together via the magical law of contagion. It's all distressingly bronze age, but we haven't come anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel yet.

With speech interfaces and internet of things gadgets, we're moving closer to building ourselves a demon-haunted world. Lights switch on and off and adjust their colour spectrum when we walk into a room, where we can adjust the temperature by shouting at the ghost in the thermostat, the smart television (which tracks our eyeballs) learns which channels keep us engaged and so converges on the right stimulus to keep us tuned in through the advertising intervals, the fridge re-orders milk whenever the current carton hits its best-before date, the robot vacuum comes out at night, and as for the self-cleaning litter box ... we don't talk about the self-cleaning litterbox.

Well, now we have something to be extra worried about, namely the fact that we can lie to the machines—and so can thieves and sorcerors. Everything has a True Name, and the ghosts know them as such but don't understand the concept of lying (because they are a howling cognitive vacuum rather than actually conscious). Consequently it becomes possible to convince a ghost that the washing machine is not a washing machine but a hippopotamus. Or that the STOP sign at the end of the street is a 50km/h speed limit sign. The end result is people who live in a world full of haunted appliances like the mop and bucket out of the sorcerer's apprentice fairy tale, with the added twist that malefactors can lie to the furniture and cause it to hallucinate violently, or simply break. (Or call the police and tell them that an armed home invasion is in progress because some griefer uploaded a patch to your home security camera that identifies you as a wanted criminal and labels your phone as a gun.)

Finally, you might think you can avoid this shit by not allowing any internet-of-things compatible appliances—or the ghosts of Cortana and Siri—into your household. And that's fine, and it's going to stay fine right up until the moment you find yourself in this elevator ...

1501 Comments

1:

I wonder what they'd make of "This is not a pipe"?

2:

Am now envisaging a hotel evacuation at 3am in midwinter because some prankster scribbled FIRE on a whiteboard in the hotel lobby.

3:

I am a bit less out of touch, and have little to add, except:

Q: "OK, gang, it's Stravinsky night - what shall we show?" A: "Firebird! Firebird! Firebird!"

Or when a SWAT team is called to shoot up a conference of winemakers for talking about terroire ....

4:
Similarly, in the 90s, per legend, a DARPA initiative to develop automated image recognition for tanks that could distinguish between NATO and Warsaw Pact machines foundered when it became apparent that the NN was returning hits not on the basis of the vehicle type, but on whether there was snow and pine forests in the background (which were oddly more common in publicity photographs of Soviet tanks than in snaps of American or French or South Korean ones).

About that: it probably never happened.

5:

I followed the link to the video. I'm having a problem with my PC sound at present, so I turned on subtitles. The subtitles have obviously been generated by a voice recognition algorithm, and were wrong enough that I couldn't quite follow what was going on, but I think this is a video about problems with voice recognition in an elevator that can't understand "eleven" in a Scottish accent. However the captioning algorithm seems to have no problem with that bit.

I'm going to fix my audio problems and come back to this.

6:

You really need working audio to appreciate the sketch (in the video). It's the accents that carry it.

7:

Looking forward to a computer responding to deepfake requests with a picture of an apple with "Tom Cruise" written on it.

8:

My black and white Tuxedo cat gained an additioinal name after the 'AI' mode on the smartphone identified him as a Panda.

9:

To be fair to the machines, apparently American Q-cumbers aren't clear on the concept of being lied to either.

10:

Actually, it probably DID happen, though perhaps not in the exact forms quoted. I was close to some of the early research (and dabbled myself), and the effect is real - I have observed it many times since, when crude forms of recognition are used to suggest matches. The main reason that it is hard to track down is that such failures are embarrassing, and hence swept under the carpet. My apologies, but here is a bit of a lecture.

All such methods (and they are both much more general than automated image recognition and predate it by decades) are statistical in nature, and it is NOT feasible to eliminate mistakes. The cost (weighting) of type I and II errors (false positives and negatives) is part of the training. But, inherently, when it encounters a condition that is not well-represented in the training set, the reliability goes to pot.

If the 'AI' is largely programmed by telling it what characteristics are of consequence, it will not pick up extraneous ones; if they were written to disclose their criteria, then they could be checked; but most modern training does neither. Let's skip the rant about that. I could go on, with a few more subtle aspects, but I am many, many decades rusty and this area has developed unimaginably since.

So, no matter HOW universal the traning set is, there will always be some circumstances where it is using an unrelated characteristic to make the judgement. Humans are no different, but we DO have a censoring mechanism as part of our intelligence that says "Based on other experience, something is not right here."

And it is the lack of that "common sense" that makes me say that AI is not even approaching human intelligence, and agree that this is a disaster in the making.

Actually, I do have one further point that absolutely horrifies me. In the UK, the courts have increasingly accepted such 'evidence' from the spooks and police, and we have trials where the accused is not even told what the evidence is against him.

11:

Arrgh,Therion 667 beat me to it, never, mind ....

Actually, nothing new here, at all: - Apple (fruit) & IPod ... "Ceci ne's pas un pipe" as René Magritte showed us, many years ago! It's all distressingly bronze age, but we haven't come anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel yet. THAT modern? Neolithic, or possibly earlier IMHO. A re-read of U K le G on the Rule of Names & the True Names of Things might be in order.

As for "Elevator" - all too possible - I have already been caught twice by this. Once, because my ( By modern standards ) clipped RP English has not been recognised by the at least "mid-Atlantic" fucked-over voice recognition & again in an automated basic German class, ("Babbel" ), where, again, my old-fashioned clear speech has screwed the machine software. Can I start screaming now?

Jelliphish I once has a small b-&-w rescue cat called "Panda"

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ OK peoples, what ahem, "pranks" do we want to perpetrate to really screw over the state & company fake "security" systems, just to show them?

12:

"WebAssembly framework (based on top of JavaScript running inside a web browser hosted on top of a traditional big-ass operating system) wouldn't be terribly fast"

I thought WebAssembly was supposed to be compiled to its own virtual machine and to be faster than JavaScript, rather than sitting on top of JavaScript.

13:

There are a number of SF stories about images or thoughts that crash the brain, one being The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution, and another of course being the .

But if human brains are basically neural networks, and you can fool a specific neural network with the right image, could there be ways of doing that with the specific neural network in the visual cortex?

Probably not, at least in general. And the brain being evolved, it's reasonable to suppose that there are multiple neural nets in there with overlapping jobs. So one can imagine an image which makes a particular person say "It looks like a giant spider crawling towards me. Except I can also see its a picture of a dog at the same time. That's wierd!"

Of course it might turn out that there are some nets in the visual cortex that are the same for everyone, or for large groups, so there may be illusions that work on some people but not others.

Either way, reverse engineering wetware in order to develop such images could be a fruitful area of research.

14:

The human brain and 'neural networks' in the 'AI' sense have little in common, and the latter term was invented by people with a rudimentary understand of brain function, which turned out to be incorrect. We do not know how the brain works, but it it is very different and much less 'crashable'.

However, the visual cortex is much better understood, is largely 'hard-wired' (unlike the auditory one), and there are plenty of known ways to fool it. The simpler ones have been known for ages, and your example isn't just imaginary - there are lots of such examples, such as this classic:

http://www.optical-illusionist.com/illusions/young-lady-or-old-woman-illusion

15:

could there be ways of doing that with the specific neural network in the visual cortex?

Dave Langford got a Hugo award for that back in 2000: see also.

16:

I suspect we're going to need a lot more (and a lot more sophisticated) use of "supervised classification". Short version: That's the term used in remote sensing to describe when humans "supervise" the classification performed by a computer algorithm to confirm or reject the computer's decision. Particularly when the human supervisor is really two or more people who discuss the classifications and reach consensus on any questionable pixels, this can greatly improve the classification accuracy. If you do ground-truthing (going to the site of a remote sensing image to see what's actually there), the accuracy can improve further.

For example, in Charlie's example with tanks in a forest, the supervisor could have classified the image pixels containing part of a tank as "is tank" (!) and the image pixels containing only forest as "is not tank" (0). This would have minimized (possibly eliminated) the problem of classifying trees as tanks. Relying on the neural network to make this distinction seems... um... lazy? Unsophisticated?

Hacking supervised systems should prove harder, since (for example) a training set that includes only words (e.g., "ceci est une pipe") would not appear in the training set for pipes. For that matter, they could be included in the "is not pipe" training set. You could still hack such a system by feeding it a high-resolution image of a pipe or simply tapping into the camera's connection to the computer and directly streaming images of a real pipe. Hackers seem to always find a backdoor, so you'd need to be vigilant and keep monitoring the literature for new exploits.

Back-dooring neural nets will also be a thing, but I suspect this will be easier if it involves hacking the host computer (e.g., to substitute your own images for the camera's images) will be more effective. And so long as the computer is controlled by a human with authority to override the computer, social engineering will remain a serious problem.

17:

Oops... substitute (1) = binary 1 = true for (!) in the previous comment. I didn't mean to imply "not".

19:

Unfortunately, that's not the way things are going :-(

Your example wouldn't help, because it would have correctly classified the trees as non-tank - what made it a Russian tank was the presence of trees. So you can't just supervise in training - you have to do it in real life. And the supervisor needs the authority and ability to override the AI, which is often not the case.

I had this problem just recently, when the DVLA automation point-blank refused to recognise my driving licence to renew it, and the bureaucrat who was the fallback merely mimicked the AI.

My wife solved it by telephoning, finding an actual human, and being walked through the use of a loophole to renew it. If they had closed that loophole, I would have been stuffed.

This sort of thing is getting increasingly common.

20:

Elderly Cynic @ 10 : : "And it is the lack of that "common sense" that makes me say that AI is not even approaching human intelligence."

Don't despair! The people working on common sense at the Cyc project are still at it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Who knows, they might succeed in another 37 years.

21:

EC Except that, under some circs, the human brain is all-too-crashable. Just not visually. But, look at the multiple cases, over thousands of years of (usually, but not always) insanity/mania of a religious nature. The person behaves utterly irrationally & it is very difficult to crash them out of such a state, once in it.

Oh yes: In the UK, the courts have increasingly accepted such 'evidence' from the spooks and police, and we have trials where the accused is not even told what the evidence is against him. Where - examples, please ... because this sort of thing is very worrying. We've had past examples of this in a slightly different context, & it's taken many years to sort out the fuck-ups. Example (?) Here, for a start - "Computer says no" & no-one is interested in actual reality.

22:

That's not crashing, any more than the fact that some lighting and sound effects can cause some people to lose balance, be unable to think, have panic attacks, or trigger migraines is. Yes, it happens - some lighting triggers epiletic fits in susceptible people, and those definitely count as 'crashes'. So far, nobody has found anything that does the same in 'neurotypical' people, but there is no reason to say nothing can.

The point is that the brain is fairly 'uncrashable', because evolution selected against that failure.

23:

Spoilsport ;)

Next you’ll be telling us that Kangaroo’s can’t use SAMS.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-sport/

24:

because evolution selected against that failure.

One problem with current AI might be that, in evolutionary terms, it's just getting into the Ediacaran. But it's evolving fast and I'd not want to make any bets on where it will ten years from now.

Also, it isn't obvious to me that several of the problems AI is currently manifesting are all that different from those that afflict the natural sort even after more than half a gigayear of fierce evolution.

25:

Yes especially once AR takes off

Read a book awhile ago where a guy built a suit covered in led displays running advertising banners

Since everyone walked around with augmented reality contact lenses on all the time, the ad blocking software in the AR edited him out and he achieved effective invisibility

26:

"shitty internet-of-things gizmos"... that paragraph reads like a current sysadmin wrote it. Don't sell yourself short Charlie... the tech changes every 5 years but for the BOFH, the song remains the same.

Also a fun shout-out to Stephen Blackmoore... one of his illusion spells involves writing the desired effect on a post-it note and attaching it to the target (e.g. "I'm a cop" or "I'm not here"). Who knew it came from AI?

27:

If you've watched the animated series "Futurama" you may have noticed something: all the robots are subtly imbecilic. They're intelligent but can't see outside the bounds of their programming. So for example you can talk one into doing something by using arguments that are nonsensical but which meet the requirements of their parameters.

28:

Elderly Cynic notes: "Your example wouldn't help, because it would have correctly classified the trees as non-tank - what made it a Russian tank was the presence of trees."

No, what made it a Russian tank was the fact that it was large, made of metal, and had a turret with a gun attached. Adding trees doesn't change the definition of "tank". Trees do not make it a tank, let alone a Russian tank. (Unless it was a Potemkin tank, in which case the AI was correct: the wooden boards made it a faux tank.) You didn't understand my explanation of supervision: the point is to eliminate the extraneous so that the AI learns to focus on the things that define the target as a tank, and learn to ignore the trees.

EC: "So you can't just supervise in training - you have to do it in real life."

"Supervise" is remote-sensing jargon. It means that the AI is not left to go its merry way, but is rather taught by the human to correct its errors so that it learns the correct details to focus on. It's analogous to the way a trainee surgeon is supervised by an experienced surgeon before they're allowed to fly solo.

EC: "And the supervisor needs the authority and ability to override the AI, which is often not the case."

That's another issue, and it's definitely a problem. To augment your example, I was once denied approval for a credit card and nobody at the bank could explain why... until I asked the manager to intervene. The problem turned out to be that I applied for an adult credit card while in university and should have applied for a student card.

29:

My 2 cents on how this is going (since I work in the field)

At this point, NN that interact with people can input 3 types of data: text, audio, images (video is a subset of images)

  • Text (NLP): Before the BERT transformer models came out in 2018, there was a thought that most practical uses of NLP was maxed out. Most business applications didn't have enough relevant data to avoid overfitting, and those that did were generalists rather than specialist models. Right now on the SuperGLUE tests, transformers exist which beat the human benchmark. https://super.gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_model)

  • Audio. Speech-to-text is surprisingly accurate, to the point that this area is relatively neglected. It doesn't help that audio-based NN are niche applications. For those applications, the thought is that there isn't a lot of data out there to train anything this complex. Perhaps transformers are revolutionizing that field as well?

  • Images/Video. This is a huge area of research, but here there's a huge concentration problem. Other than medical and military uses, there's a sense that most companies don't need this capability. That's why a lot of the research in this field comes from the FAANG + Microsoft and their Chinese equivalents. I've heard the opinion that the only thing that would break this concentration would be VR/AR. This was before Zoom and Clubhouse made it big.

  • 30:

    what made it a Russian tank was the fact that it was large, made of metal, and had a turret with a gun attached

    Well, the large metal turret thing makes it a tank. It's the trees that make it Russian :-)

    On the topic of supervision, I'm reminded of Peter Watts' story "Malak". If you haven't read it, I think you'll enjoy it.

    https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf

    31:

    "I suspect we're going to need a lot more (and a lot more sophisticated) use of "supervised classification". Short version: That's the term used in remote sensing to describe when humans "supervise" the classification performed by a computer algorithm to confirm or reject the computer's decision."

    A note on terminology:

    Everything I've read about 'supervised' learning/classification refers to ML techniques with labels for each case. Human involvement is not necessarily involved, and of course it is very expensive.

    That case of NATO vs Warsaw Pact vehicles (and dogs vs wolves, another similar situation) was 'supervised classification'.

    32:
    Invisible Sun...50% longer than previous books in the series.

    Ah, good. I was thinking it might take an awful lot of plot to get from the close of Dark State to a satisfying ending, more than would fit in a normal-sized volume. Personally I'd be happier with a tetralogy or even a short wrap-up and another trilogy, but let's not break the Charlie, shall we?

    33:

    I was an undergrad CS student in the early to mid 90s. The joke with AI courses was like the joke with nuclear fusion: it was only 5 years away from completely changing the world - and had been for the last 40 years. The highlight seemed to be the A* algorithm, and the idea that functional languages might someday be 'competitive'.

    Well, it may still be right about fusion. Wrong about AI with the proliferation of massively parallel compute resources - my Raspberry PI 4 would be considered a super-computer when I started working in the industry. I don't mind admitting I feel a massive gap in my technical corpus right now. Like a missing tooth. I haven't seen anything comparable to the rate of progress in 'AI' (or really, multi-dimensional tensor weight training) since the explosion in graphics hardware capabilities. The difference being, I was all across that - being related to work / interests.

    I'm literally at the point where I will admit I don't even know about the things I don't know in this field. (Unknown unknowns). I'm curious about how the results we see today can be traced back to pure academia - long before any practical hardware was even on the horizon.

    Purely anecdotal: someone set up a google 'nest' / 'mini' whatever in my home. I asked it to recite PI to 100 places which it did. I asked it if PI was transcendental, which it succinctly answered with a well-regarded reference. You do not get this from if ... then ... paradigms.

    I predict a lot of posts will pontificate from the peak of 'Mt. Stupid', and how it's just neural nets, analogues to meat-brains, Markov chains, etc... we'll see.

    34:

    Barry notes: "Everything I've read about 'supervised' learning/classification refers to ML techniques with labels for each case. Human involvement is not necessarily involved, and of course it is very expensive."

    Note that I was referring to the terminology used in remote sensing. For example, https://mapasyst.extension.org/whats-the-difference-between-a-supervised-and-unsupervised-image-classification/.

    My point was that this approach should be applied to AI classification of visual, auditory, or other information if it isn't already being applied. It's not like it's a new technique; I recall reading about it back in the 1980s (when I was studying forest ecosystems), and it's become SOP in many forms of land-use classification these days.

    35:

    The link seems to have disappeared. Here it is again, minus angle brackets:

    https://mapasyst.extension.org/whats-the-difference-between-a-supervised-and-unsupervised-image-classification/

    If that disappears, try Googling "What’s the difference between a supervised and unsupervised image classification?" and "Cooperative Extension"

    [[ You can't just put angle brackets round a link - you need to do the whole a href= stuff too - mod ]]

    36:

    On the topic of supervision, I'm reminded of Peter Watts' story "Malak". If you haven't read it, I think you'll enjoy it.

    I did, and thank you for that.

    מֲלְאָךְ

    https://biblehub.com/hebrew/4397.htm

    37:

    Charlie mentions tens of thousands of random pics from the 'Net. My instant reaction is a) how many of those actually had alt-text, and how many of those that did had garbage, put there by advertisers?

    sigh

    Time to pull up General Semantics again, and use that, with code that recognizes the levels of abstraction, as a filter before it tries to identify something.

    38:

    Ah, good. I was thinking it might take an awful lot of plot to get from the close of Dark State to a satisfying ending

    Pretty much. When I checked the copy edits I gave it a thorough read. It's going to be a 450-500 page brick, but it reads fast and twisty.

    39:

    Direct link to the openai blog entry, which is a fun (savage) read: Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks (March 4, 2021) We’ve discovered neurons in CLIP that respond to the same concept whether presented literally, symbolically, or conceptually. This may explain CLIP’s accuracy in classifying surprising visual renditions of concepts, and is also an important step toward understanding the associations and biases that CLIP and similar models learn.

    This is the version that includes all the images about "Typographic Attacks" Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks (March 4, 2021)

    One of the funnier tweets about this (forget where I saw it):

    The year is 2030. Amazon-Bots are hunting me down because I liked a tweet about unions. I quickly spray the word TUNNEL on a wall and hide behind a trashcan as they all charge headfirst into the bricks. https://t.co/tUw3rYBT5G

    — Joe Köller (@JoeKllr) March 5, 2021

    Re speed, Cerebras Wafer Packs 2.6 Trillion-Transistor CPU With 850,000 Cores (Joel Hruska, August 18, 2020) Won't fit in a phone though (well, maybe a very big phone): the previous version: "The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine is 46,225 mm2" (Argonne National Labs (US) has one of their CS-1 computers.)

    40:

    "For those applications, the thought is that there isn't a lot of data out there to train anything this complex. Perhaps transformers are revolutionizing that field as well?"

    For speech to text, what I have heard is that close caption TV shows were providing massive data sets.

    41:

    There are a bunch of suggestions for ways of jamming facial recognition in surveillance systems. Here is another one.

    The trouble with all these is that if you are the only one wearing it, then you are really going to stand out. So its going to be like this XKCD cartoon (in any discussion of technology there is always a relevant XKCD). This stuff only works if lots of people do it. But if lots of people do it, countermeasures will be deployed.

    42:

    I would be worried about trusting systems to make decisions without humans in the mix. Even fairly simple glitches can get nasty fast.

    https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

    Seems to be a subset of 'use alphanumeric string to indicate no plate that can also be given as a custom plate' fault in programming, which causes problems in many cases.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/auto-no-plate/

    43:

    From the NYT just today:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/business/the-robots-are-coming-for-phil-in-accounting.html

    AI-powered accountancy programs. What could go wrong?

    44:

    That tank recognition story always suggests to me that it is an updated version of the story about German and Russian tanks in WW2. One side decided to try blowing up the other side's tanks by training dogs to run underneath them with mines on their backs. But the dogs learned to identify a target as being The Thing That Smells Of Fuel, and since one side used petrol and the other side used diesel, in action the dogs ignored the other side's tanks and blew up their own side's instead.

    45:

    I would be worried about trusting systems to make decisions without humans in the mix.

    Yeah, but humans in the mix aren't all that much of an improvement. Bureaucracies tend to be an example of that. Also, the recent administrations of various nations discussed here.

    46:

    In the cage match of Darwin versus Earthsea, Darwin always wins.

    Always.

    Much as I love Earthsea, it's complete bullshit, and you know that if you think about it logically. How can a categorical name have utility, when not just every thing, but every part of every thing, has a unique name. Heck, just think about what happens when someone picks an apple off a tree and eats it, in a system of such names? Yes, some of the names both go to shit (what remains of the apple after it's gone through the human), don't go to shit (the apple tree) and change (the molecules of apple that go into the human). What does which True Name apply to when?

    I'll get back to a better reference in a second, but the key point is that AI categories are always at least somewhat untrue. That's the point of Darwinism. Species (named groups of things) are groups that have individual variation within them because that's how they worked, not because they're flawed examples of some perfect design some cloud cuckoo came up with.

    Nothing has a True Name, but some names are better than others. So if you're trying to put names on everything, the process is going to get screwed up somehow, whether you call it a lie, a mistake, a gremlin, sexism, discrimination, or a really bad idea.

    Now, about typological thinking without True Name: The book you want to read is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, which is about the profound differences in how non-literate people see the world, compared with literate people. The tl;dr is that the idea of True Names comes fully from a world of widespread, routine literacy. Nonliterate people and their languages didn't generalize to anywhere near that degree, because it wasn't useful. If you're paying attention, you know that every kind of apple tastes different. Also, some apple trees produce decent wood for carving, while some are better as firewood. In texts, there's some utility of generalizing them all as "apple," but in real life, it's better to have an immense diversity of words for them.

    Words allow a level of abstraction that's impossible with only oral language, because people tend to start thinking in terms of the permanent words they see, not the ephemeral language they hear. It's the difference between a god making the world out of a lump of clay, or God speaking and the Words becoming Things. The latter is a Religion of the Book. The former is animistic. This doesn't mean that nonliterate people are stupider than we are (I think the evidence points the other way, actually), but it does mean that thinking without written words is something any literate person is going to struggle with, and that makes for all sorts of erroneous back-projections about how "primitive" people thought. You may think they're primitive, but we're the idiots who pay other people to own computers to know things for us.

    Anyway, the fundamental problem now is that we're trying to turn reality into words and numbers, make the actual virtual. Of course this abstraction, simplification involves lying and omissions. How could it not? I suspect Schneier's going to add standard rants on training set hygiene to his useful rants about security theater and the dangers of IoT. Both are equally dangerous.

    If you want to hack virtualization, pick up your umbrella, go surreal, and also follow the protesters who hack surveillance tech. The umbrella is useful as a perfectly innocuous tool for shielding people from sun, rain, pepper spray, marking dyes, and surveillance cameras.

    47:

    From the NYT just today:

    From which and talking about, I think, the logistic curve model,

    “The rate of progression of this technology is faster than any previous automation,” said Mr. Le Clair, the Forrester analyst, who thinks we are closer to the beginning than the end of the corporate A.I. boom.

    “We haven’t hit the exponential point of this stuff yet,” he added. “And when we do, it’s going to be dramatic.”

    48:

    Trouble with all those kinds of suggestions is that there is no way to get any reliable data on whether they actually work or not, and it is an area which is an appallingly prolific bullshit generator. Just as we currently have people convinced that spraying your number plate with a relabelled can of hair spray will prevent automatic systems reading it, but nobody knows what the actual subtle alterations that really do have such an effect really are, so we will see a vast array of silly hats and so forth which are all claimed to break the system, almost certainly don't, but do make it vastly more difficult to determine what things really do.

    49:

    "The umbrella is useful as a perfectly innocuous tool..."

    An umbrella is a dastardly and evil invention for poking random people's eyes out, masquerading as a rain deflector.

    ("Masquerade" is, of course, just a more old fashioned term referring to adversarial inputs.)

    50:

    Speak like Arnold Schwarzenegger and the voice recognition software will understand you.

    51:

    And that's fine, and it's going to stay fine right up until the moment you find yourself in this elevator ...

    This is the favorite Youtube video of my neighbor from Scotland.

    52:

    It's as if things have to balance out, so teaching machines to think goes hand in hand with teaching humans not to. And you get the same problem with the supposedly intelligent processing engine becoming trained to operate on cues that have very little to do with the ostensible intended purpose. So you get the customer service centre zombie learning that by copying and pasting some chunk of company boilerplate that contains two or three keywords in common with a customer's complaint, they can tick off the greatest number of complaints with the smallest chance of being shouted at for displaying initiative, while the customer gets closer and closer to detonation point due to repeatedly getting the same stupid answers that don't actually address the matter of the complaint.

    Not only do the purely machine parts of the system have no common sense, but the elements which could potentially introduce some common sense are in fact being conditioned into keeping the system as a whole devoid of it. To sort this problem out requires both the application of genuine effort, and the existence of a genuine commitment to actually sorting it. Neither is likely to be forthcoming, and I can only be glad not to have been born at any later date than I actually was.

    53:

    Yes, indeed. I have been abused for holding my arm up, causing an umbrella to deflect and spin instead of sticking into my eye.

    54:

    Who knows, they might succeed in another 37 years.

    They could get the fusion folks to help and get it done in 20.

    55:

    I have a neural network wildlife identifier on my phone (Seek from iNaturalist)

    I point the camera at a mule deer and it tells me it’s a mule deer. I point at a centipede and it tells me what species of centipede it is.

    I point it at a hummingbird feeder, and it tells me that it is a hummingbird. A large fraction of its hummingbird training set apparently included bright red plastic hummingbird feeders.

    56:

    The point is that the brain is fairly 'uncrashable', because evolution selected against that failure.

    Then you get a non trivial number of people like me who have issues with pattern recognition. I rarely can look at a group of 20 people and notice the ones I know. Much to the agony of my wife early in our marriage. It is tied to color processing. I see all the colors and can pick out a dot in those pattern tests when asked but just don't see the patterns. If you tell me what I'm looking for is "blue" I CAN trace the blue dots and tell you it is a circle or the number 9. But I don't see it until I trace it and if I look away I will likely loose it.

    Which may be tied to how hard it is for me to read red on black or black on red. And that's a big fav with the hip graphics artists. From what I understand this and my other issue afflicts 10% or so of folks with lots of northern European heritage but we never become graphics artists so those who do keep creating hip things we can't "see".

    57:

    David L @ 54: "They could get the fusion folks to help and get it (common sense in AI) done in 20 (years).

    If "US Robots and Mechanical Men" got the help of the cold fusion folks I have no doubt that we would have common sense in AI 5 years from now.

    58:

    H True Names It's another iteration of Plato's True Forms or The Cave, isn't it? And, yes, I was aware of the problem(s) before you wrote your piece. Good fun though.

    59:

    https://aeon.co/videos/footage-from-hong-kong-reveals-the-combustible-contested-reality-of-street-protest

    Wow, you can poke someone's eye out with an umbrella tip? I'm impressed. My aim isn't that good.

    Anyway, if you want to see umbrellas in action, check out: https://aeon.co/videos/footage-from-hong-kong-reveals-the-combustible-contested-reality-of-street-protest

    60:

    Perhaps.

    However, an apple tree that's cut down and cut up is no longer the same.

    True names go back to classical magick, as does the Law of Contagion and the Law of Similarity. You want a magickal system in a fantasy, you use them, rather than having to come up with everything.

    61:

    So it turns out if you show CLIP an image of a Granny Smith, it returns "apple" ... until you stick a label on the fruit that says "iPod", at which point as far as CLIP is concerned you can plug in your headphones.

    Naturally. Freefall showed us that fake transponder mean robots in disguise! See the strips here and here.

    62:

    "The joke with AI courses was like the joke with nuclear fusion: it was only 5 years away from completely changing the world - and had been for the last 40 years."

    Actually, the joke about AI is that it completely changes the world every 5 years. Before 2010, most of the machine learning was "shallow learning", the opposite of deep learning (I'm including graph theory). Afterwards, they transitioned to simple neural networks. A personal note, I was first introduced to the subject in 2009 as an obscure elective. The school didn't create a data science masters until 1 year after I graduated (so I'm dating myself here a bit).

    In 2012, convolutional neural networks, which revolutionized image recognition. Between then and 2015, the networks advanced to recurrent neural networks, LSTMs, and reinforcement learning. IF you've been dealing with the FAANGs, you've seen how these networks revolutionized the world.

    Then in 2015, they popularized GANN's, otherwise known as Deepfakes. Another advance was seq2seq networks, which are very useful for language translation, Alexa, and chatbots. Up until 2018, people in the field were complaining that the low-hanging fruit had been picked, and that new improvements would be incremental.

    Then in 2018, the transformer came about. Right now, the industry is trying to integrate transformers into consumer products.

    The problem fundamentally is that people redefine revolutionizing the world to make the previous advance seem incremental. Plus, the improvements aren't instantaneous, so people ignore them. For instance, when was Google Maps able to optimize your route taking traffic into account? Did that not revolutionize the world, or was that a case of incremental improvement?

    Please let me know if there's a type of network I've forgotten.

    63:

    If anyone is interested in the developments, I'd recommend looking at the courses by this professor on Udemy. He's the best professor out there on deep learning beyond simple feed-forward and backpropagation neural networks

    https://deeplearningcourses.com/course_order

    I took some of his courses on material outside of NLP-related tasks during the pandemic. That's a huge reason why I was very busy last year. I'd start with Convolutional Neural Networks, and go down in order to see the latest material (but I'd also recommend taking the Modern Deep Learning as well). He covers everything until transformers. To my knowledge, he hasn't created classes for those yet, which is a pity.

    In my comment above, I completely forgot unsupervised deep learning methodologies such as variational autoencoders and RBMs, both of which are important for tasks such as dimensional reduction (compression). But they're more background methodologies these days, so it's hard to say how much they revolutionized things.

    Also, a lot of the theory comes from academia, but you'd be surprised how much of it is published by Google and Facebook employees.

    64:

    A thorough investigation of the legend of the AI that missed the tanks for the forest: https://www.gwern.net/Tanks

    65:

    The tl;dr is that the idea of True Names comes fully from a world of widespread, routine literacy.

    I think a lot of stories about fantasy magic — not all of them, but many — are stories about the interactions between literate and non-literate societies, or parts of societies. Even in our distant past, the future did not arrive evenly-distributed, and even in western Europe the less-literate past was not so long ago that we don't still tell stories about it.

    66:

    That piece is impressive. Thank you for linking it.

    67:

    Nothing has a True Name, but some names are better than others. So if you're trying to put names on everything, the process is going to get screwed up somehow, whether you call it a lie, a mistake, a gremlin, sexism, discrimination, or a really bad idea.

    This kind of makes me want to write name magic fantasy with this premise. I'm not sure if there is some already, though (examples would be appreciated!).

    Oh, well, into the idea pile it goes. (closes the closet door fast so nothing falls out)

    68:

    This is related, with links to papers. Specification gaming examples in AI - master list (h/t list linked here by fajensen in 2018) E.g. "Evolved creatures - falling / Creatures bred for speed grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over / Sims, 1994"

    (I do this too sometimes, TBH. Often the rules have loopholes, or more fun, can be edited.)

    69:

    "...and another of course being the ."

    Knock that crap off. Everyone here can see the fnords.

    (Did you hear about the depressed member of the Illuminati? He was pining for the fnords.)

    70:

    I think that was more a "sorry we missed your first story in 1988" Hugo, but regardless, well-deserved.

    71:

    One of my daydreams is that Freefall will win a Hugo. It's consistently one of the most intelligent things (of any kind) I read, and I'd love to see it get the recognition it deserves.

    72:

    On the subject of image-recognition, I think that humans do something very sophisticated with their vision. They build a 3-dimensional model, and do so based on (among other things) the differences in angle between two cameras mounted about three inches apart... So we don't just recognize a tree. We build a three-dimensional model of a tree and recognize characteristics, like a branching structure. Then we (probably) match a newly discovered plant to an already-known plant and do some kind of set-based math on how well the new plant matches the model of a tree. So if we're only familiar with pine trees, and we see an oak tree, we match the 3D characteristics of the pine tree; cylindrical, vertical structure, branching structures, bark, but wait, it has these funny looking berry-things (acorns) and leaves which are broad rather than long and pointy, then we say, "It's come kind of tree, but I don't recognize it."

    We probably assign some things more tree-probability than others. Bark has a high-tree probability. Leaf-shape has a low tree probability because it might come from a bush or flower The reason that AI can't recognize things well is because it's not building a 3D model.

    73:

    The reason that AI can't recognize things well is because it's not building a 3D model.

    Not convinced at all that it is because we have 2 eyes. I use monovision glasses. Which means my brain switches eyes depending on if I'm paying attention to something close up or far. With a crossover around 3 to 5 feet.

    It is a big thing with contact lens wearers but not so much with eye glasses. My eye doc is a big fan for anyone willing to deal with the first week or so. I takes a bit for your brain to learn to switch eyes in terms of which one it pays attention to.

    The only problem I have now is that every now and then the world goes out of focus if something blocks my eye corrected for distance. Like a pole or column.

    Here's a link: https://www.allaboutvision.com/eyeglasses/faq/eyeglasses-monovision.htm But it is very biased against doing it with eye glasses. I'm a huge fan.

    74:

    Troutwaxer: I think that humans do something very sophisticated with their vision. They build a 3-dimensional model, [e.g. of a tree]

    Yes, and on top of that they mix in semantic knowledge about trees, forests, the kinds of animals you find there, and similar stuff. Frame-based reasoning lets the viewer fill in the gaps and make inferences.

    BTW, the model you speak of is actually 4-d. I once saw a really neat demo of this: you are shown a still picture of black splodges on a white ground, and it looks like nothing at all. Then it starts moving, and you see it is a dalmatian dog sniffing around a tree, but shown in 2-tone black and white.

    I've often wondered what would happen if you could connect these statistical recognisers to semantic models based in some kind of inference engine, possibly informed by NLP processing of Wikipedia. (The idea of an AI that implicitly believes everything in Wikipedia is an interestingly comic concept)

    75:

    I was first introduced to the subject in 2009 as an obscure elective

    Artificial neural networks are old, like "computer is a job" old.

    They were being taught in electrical engineering about 1990 where I was, but were apparently unknown to the philosophy department. It made my course on "computers, minds, and logic" very confusing because the lecturer kept saying "this is impossible" about things that I knew were being done. He kept at it even after I started bringing him copies of papers from the people doing the things.

    Back then, of course, it was complex systems with ones of nodes and sometimes as many as two layers before your poor computer caught fire, ran out of memory, or simply ground to a halt for a prolonged period.

    76:

    You have a very low bar for something to count as in improvement! And, incidentally, route optimisation was an established technology by the 1960s. All of the IT developments that I can think of that would count as really revolutionary in the past half century have been older (and logically simple) ones where the hardware became cheap and small enough to make them near-universal:

    Personal computers and all that Universal connectivity between them Replacement of mechanical control devices by computers Universal walkie-talkies

    And, in the last, the revolution was not so much due to them, but to the unpredicted way in which society chose to use them and change itself.

    77:

    It's not. Binocular vision is overrated, even for judging distance, because it's useful only for a narrow range of distances and there are other visual mechanisms that overlap with it and can be used instead.

    78:

    Paul @ 74: "I've often wondered what would happen if you could connect these statistical recognisers to semantic models based in some kind of inference engine, possibly informed by NLP processing of Wikipedia."

    Wikipedia is full of holes, contradictions and repetitions. I've been editing it since 2003 so I'm the cause and/or the witness of many of these problems.

    I think that the IA counting on Wikipedia would, at first, go mad. Then, upon hearing of this problem, the regulars at Wikipedia:Help_desk and at Wikipedia:Teahouse would band together to form a therapy group to help out that poor AI.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse

    79:

    How neurons work began to be hashed out in the 1930s-1950s. Early artificial neural networks then showed up in the late 50s if I remember correctly, up to and including two layer networks like the perceptron. Then Marvin Minsky stuck the boot in with a proof that you can't make a NAND gate using a two layer NN, thereby "proving" for a generation that NNs can't be used for general purpose computing tasks.

    Minsky was both right and wrong. For two layer networks he was entirely correct: and nobody had tried to build deeper networks with a hidden layer between input neurons and output neurons because circuitry was expensive and why bother? When we've already proven they're not computationally effective.

    Turns out that adding one or more hidden layers solved the problem, though. Oops.

    This became apparent around 1990 and caused quite a stir -- but again, the computers of the day weren't fast enough to simulate many layer NNs usefully: it took until the 2000s and the spread of dedicated GPUs for raw number-crunching to catch up.

    Which probably explains the pot-hole your lecturer fell into.

    80:

    "You have a very low bar for something to count as in improvement!"

    Perhaps I do? I generally te3nd to include things which the consumer doesn't notice directly but can have knock-on effects.

    "And, incidentally, route optimization was an established technology by the 1960s."

    Not really, It was an NP-hard problem that was just beginning to be understood, and most of the advances in the 60s involved just optimizing for shortest distance. Since then, advances permitted optimization not only for distance, but for time, driver's capability, local conditions, etc. The effects on society have been huge. Unlike your examples, we can't point to these changes as the sole cause of the changes in society (and improvements in most cases).

    In the 1980s, the spread personal computers allowed for optimization w.r.t. to time as well, permitting just-in-time manufacturing and transport. This permitted outsourcing to poorer countries to be far more profitable, and gave rise to the Walmart superstore in the US.

    A lot of the reductions in a plane ticket in the 90s and 00s were due to advances in route optimization ensuring the airline could amortize the cost of the plane among more passengers. Heck, this reduced the importance of the hub-and-spoke models, killing off the giants such as the 747 and the A380. In this case, it wasn't enough to predict the shortest route by distance, but the airplane had to get to its destination within a 15-30 minute window, regardless of conditions. Over those two decades, that window shrunk.

    In the West, most passengers just saw the effects of that as either cheaper tickets or fewer delays. In the developing world, that brought the price of flying down to what was the middle class. Both these effects created the large tourist market which helped massively modernize Latin America and Southeast Asia (compare the poverty in 2000 vs 2010 vs 2019 in these regions).

    The route optimization method I wrote above allowed for the following 2 things: 1. It's Uber's secret sauce, so to speak. That's why it dominates the ride-sharing market in the US and a lot of other countries. While the drivers aren't getting paid if the car is empty, Uber isn't making any money either. Thus, the competition within the ride-sharing sector is on which company can minimize the time the car stays empty.

  • Amazon's 1-2 hour delivery is also possible because of this route optimization advances. There's more to it than that, but I doubt Amazon's current dominance would have been possible without route optimization for time as well as distance.
  • 81:

    Sigh. Look, as I said, I did a little of that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was in contact with people who did more. Yes, it's NP hard - and that hasn't changed. But 'we' did not merely optimise for distance, I can assure you, and the only reasons we didn't do what is done today is (a) we didn't have the data and (b) the computers weren't up to it. We sure as hell knew how, and 'modern' algorithms are merely updated forms of the ones we knew then.

    The route optimisations were done then, too - I remember a talk where someone was describing Israel's use of such methods to optimise grain shipments. And, no, that is NOT what primarily brought the prices down - I was flying when aircraft were packed more efficiently than they are today. Amazon established its dominance well before it started its 'immediate' deliveries. Uber's rise was more caused by it being allowed to bypass regulations than anything else - other taxi firms were using such approaches before it started.

    More importantly, to call the changes you describe revolutionary is really sttretching the term.

    82:

    Re the monovision thing... due to strabismus that wasn't treated soon enough when I was a child, my vision developed switching back and forth between eyes as necessary: bi-ocular rather than binocular vision. Also very heavily right-eye dominant, and the right eye is a bit nearsighted. I am always amazed at the tricks my brain has learned to do for putting the two images together.

    83:

    “ All of the IT developments that I can think of that would count as really revolutionary in the past half century have been older (and logically simple) ones where the hardware became cheap”

    Mostly agree, pretty much all computer science advances are driven by improvements in either mathematical algorithms / foundations or hardware . The math ones just lag a lot more (Knuth wrote his stuff in the late 60’s). It’s easier to see the hardware driven ones because they are closer in time and more obviously linked but don’t underestimate the mathematical ones either . Some postdoc is probably working on something now which will be instrumental in computing in 2050

    84:

    Part of the world building in Peter Watts’ “Blindsight” is computers doing things that are critically important, incomprehensible/inexplicable to humans, and not always reliable.

    85:

    Yes, mostly, but only in the past half century. In the 1950s and 1960s, and even in the 1970s, the algorithmic ones had a much smaller lag - there are similar examples from later, too (such as randomised routing in telephone networks). The remaining mathematical ones are mostly extremely unobvious or fiendishly hard, which is why you are right about the lag.

    86:

    As a non-techie ...

    1- The Russian-tank-is-always-in-a-forest scenario:

    If you're teaching something to an infant, you make sure that they will focus on what you're teaching therefore you eliminate as much extraneous 'noise' as possible. You also repeat the exercise in as many different ways/perspectives as possible. As for picking out the 'correct' subject: ever hear of the game 'Where's Waldo?'. My conclusion: The AI programmers/developers weren't parents/had no interaction with living/developing organisms (pets).

    2- As for messing up the enemy's AI once it can pick out an object (e.g., USian tank) out of the proverbial or real forest:

    How about a tank slipcover? All you need is some fabric with appropriately sized and shaped geometric Styrofoam pieces slipped into various pockets to alter the tank's size and shape. Should work if the AI is using only visual stimuli. (Have heard this is actually an old ruse with various armies having used full scale balloons/toy tanks to mess with their enemies' intel gathering usu. via satellite.)

    3- Part of 'visual recognition' is how something moves, i.e., changes its shape/size over time and/or changes/impacts its environment as it changes its shape/place. Haven't seen any mention of this as part of AI - curious as to why not.

    4- Elevator-Scottish accent - yep! I've had such encounters with my cable and bank AI help desk/customer service desks. Fortunately both still have a 'speak with a human' option. Interestingly, both companies also have messages saying that all phone calls are recorded. If yes, then - once the human screens for reason to speak with a human - they also have an inventory of which types of accents/voices their AI needs to improve upon. However, given how crappy the service levels of both these outfits continue to be, I seriously doubt they'd bother actually spending any money on customer service improvements.

    87:

    Of course that’s already somewhat the case but he cranks it up to eleven.

    88:

    Agreed. If you lost an eye or were born with only one eye you'd still try to build a 3D model. But the binocular vision helps.

    The other thing we do that computers probably don't do, is that we learn which items are mobile and which are not, and which items are embedded in other items and are unlikely to move, such as trees. So our mind somehow divides a bicycle from the ground even if we can't prove that that the two aren't linked together, and that seems to happen automatically once we've seen something move in a way which is disconnected from the ground.

    So I think we're also filling in a variable someplace which says "can move on/slightly above the ground," "can't move but separate" (like a house,) "can't move but non-seperate" (like a rock formation,) "can move through air" and possibly "can swim/do water somehow."

    So we take that octagonal form on a stick, determine that it fits most of the set-elements for "stop sign" class it as "can't move but separate" and are then able to distinguish it from a bicycle. But the key to doing this is to make a probabilistic* assumption - the mostly red, bent-metal mostly octagonal thing with the words "sto" printed on it in white, plus a sticker reading "Disco Kills" fits most of the probable elements for a stop sign."

    Note that we do this without thinking much about it. It's not "artificial intelligence" so much as "artificial stupidity." I think what some people report experiencing as "the big brain reboot that happens when you're five" is probably related to perceptions; something that looks like a really complex problem to a really small child gets compiled down (essentially) to an API, so you see this thing made of circles and metal tubes and instead of thinking about it in the really complex way I've described you automatically call the API and it does the math and automatically says "bicycle."

    • "Probable" is probably the wrong word here, but I'm not done with my coffee yet. What I mean is that "STO" is 75% of the printed matter expected to be on a stop sign, so we tentatively classify it as a stop sign. Red, with a white border is 90% of what we expect to classify as a stop sign. (There's still that "Disco kills" sticker**) The stick is 100% stop sign, or if it's been hit by a car at some point, maybe 90% of what we expect to see from a stop sign. And the material of the stick is 100% of one of the usual stop-sign-stick materials, so we do some math (75% plus 90%, plus 100%, plus 100%, which means 365% divided by four factors, giving us a 91.25% probability that this is a stop-sign,) and we hit the brakes without thinking further about it. Also we've tagged stop signs as "can't move but separate" and this thing we're looking about hasn't gotten up and walked someplace, so it fits that criteria as well. Just don't write "fnord" on the stop sign.

    ** Plus there's a subset of proven stop-signs with stickers.

    89:

    My wife and I use Alexa to turn lights on and off. She is American (Minnesotan, to be exact), I am Russian. Alexa understands us both fine... as long as I do not try to sound American. I found that I get best results if I speak with seriously exaggerated Russian accent.

    91:

    How about a tank slipcover? All you need is some fabric with appropriately sized and shaped geometric Styrofoam pieces slipped into various pockets to alter the tank's size and shape. Should work if the AI is using only visual stimuli. (Have heard this is actually an old ruse with various armies having used full scale balloons/toy tanks to mess with their enemies' intel gathering usu. via satellite.)

    That was the whole stunt in El Alamein (British fighting the Nazis in the Sahara) where the Brits used frames and sub-scale models to deceive the Nazi spotter planes. There's a book called The War Magicians that gives a (semi-factual) account of how this was done, although there are disputes about who was responsible for what.

    The Ghost Army (US 23rd Special Headquarters Unit, my favorite force in WW2) in the ETO used inflatable mockups of equipment, sound effects tanks, radio telegraphy deceptions, and a 1000-odd special effects unit (who often disguised themselves as other units) to deceive the Nazis on the advance of the Allied Army in Belgium and across the Rhine. As one example, the combat engineers running the sound effects tanks got so good at emulating the military police of other units that, during the liberation of the concentration camps, they ended up serving as military police alongside real MPs, with no one the wiser.

    And we shouldn't forget all the Q- efforts by the British during the Blitz, with all the fake installations installed to make it harder to accurately bomb London and the UK.

    Nowadays IIRC camouflage and tactical deception seem to be more integrated into standard ops, not set aside in special units. Strategic deception, infowar, adn psyops are still their own units, and one might argue that the US Space Force specializes in this mission at the moment, along with flying a lot of satellites.

    One obvious counter to visual deception goes back to the 1990s, where the US army uses infrared cameras and radio-spectrum intelligence to identify things like tanks, to get around the problems associated with visual-spectrum deception. Now a lot of camouflage effort goes into multispectral masking (updating uniform materials and changes in training) and other techie goodness. And so the Red Queen marches on.

    As a footnote, getting back to the Q- efforts by the British, I've started wondering if this was sort of an idiot filter used by Q-Anon. People "like us" who are observant would look at the name Q-Anon and think (or at least feel) that there's deception involved. We're not the ones "they" want of course, so it's a cheap way to filter out the troublemakers and concentrate the suckers. If so, well played on their part.

    92:

    Yes, and on top of that they mix in semantic knowledge about trees, forests, the kinds of animals you find there, and similar stuff. Frame-based reasoning lets the viewer fill in the gaps and make inferences.

    I am essentially blind in my left eye, and I have very few problems with distance. I did not even know that I have no depth perception until the first time I drove in Boston (I learned to drive in Albany, NY), and kept misjudging the distance to traffic lights. That’s when I realized that I always judged distances by the apparent size of objects, and Boston traffic lights hang lower to the ground than Albany traffic lights.

    Last summer I had a related experience. I saw a dog jumping on a boulder, and my thought was "That’s one BIG dog!" It looked like a Great Dane. Then the dog ran toward me, and I realized it was only about the size of a Labrador, and the boulder was about half as far away as I thought.

    Because the dog had Great Dane’s shape and markings I assumed it was one, and my brain interpreted the distance to the boulder accordingly.

    93:

    Last summer I had a related experience. I saw a dog jumping on a boulder, and my thought was "That’s one BIG dog!" It looked like a Great Dane. Then the dog ran toward me, and I realized it was only about the size of a Labrador, and the boulder was about half as far away as I thought.

    Here's a Youtube video of someone who constructed a small room and painted it with very black light-absorbing paint. Viewed from the outside as he walks into this room he appears to shrink since there are no depth cues visible around his figure (about 3 minutes into the clip).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6q54q2iam8

    94:

    Heteromeles @ 91 : "That was the whole stunt in El Alamein (British fighting the Nazis in the Sahara) where the Brits used frames and sub-scale models to deceive the Nazi spotter planes"

    That was Operation Bertram:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bertram

    And yes, the U.S. Ghost Army is well represented with its own article in Wikipedia.

    One thing that's been really bothering me since about 2002 (when it was introduced) is the computer-generated pixillated camouflage uniform pattern called CADPAT. If it's blocky-looking and computer-generated, then shouldn'it be easier to spot by more powerful computers?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CADPAT#/media/File:Cadpat001.jpg

    95:

    Interestingly, both companies also have messages saying that all phone calls are recorded.

    While those records might in theory be used to improve VR systems, as best I can tell 99.99% of theme (or more) are used as CYA things. Or employee evals. (My wife worked in a call center for 18 years "on the phones".)

    And we just dealt with a foul up with an payroll withholding to a 401K plan. We were told the call would be reviewed and someone get back to us.

    96:

    So our mind somehow divides a bicycle from the ground even if we can't prove that that the two aren't linked together, and that seems to happen automatically once we've seen something move in a way which is disconnected from the ground.

    I more and more think it's just that we (wet meat) have a decade or five of experiences that our brains sort through to interpret the visual world. And as we wander further off that pile of "memories" we get worse and worse results.

    So training an AI with 100K pictures still fall short of our 10 to 50 years of observations. While I wasn't looking at tanks for 50 years, I was seeing the world around me and can quickly parse out much of what is "not tank".

    For most of us in the US, Europe, and similar places learning to drive is greatly helped by being a passenger for 10+ years. When you take someone who has rarely been a passenger in a car they tend to find it much harder to learn to drive than those of us who grew up riding in one multiple times per day on average.

    Which is why that very nebulous term "common sense" mis leads people from simple lives. Their memories just can't allow them to comprehend some topics. Especially when it comes to advanced tech or basic science.

    97:

    Not really. This is very similar to an area I know well (and am thinking about at present): pseudorandom number generation and testing. If the former is done well, you need a massive amount more power to distinguish the numbers from true random ones. Whether 'massive' falls into the category of 'more powerful computers' or 'over a galaxy full of comptronium' is unclear - that's what I am thinking about.

    98:

    a new Apple M1 Macbook Air (not even the higher performance Macbook Pro)

    Both have the basically the same CPU. MBPro has fans that can kick in where the MBAir shows itself down to keep the temps under control.

    The interesting thing as Charlie mentioned is the 16-core Neural Engine. Lot of chip space dedicated to something no one uses much at this time. But yesterday I got to wondering if it was a part of their car project. This gets that project a somewhat endless free (from the car group point of view) compute engine which they can integrate into their autonomous driving system. I wonder if this 16-core Neural Engine isn't something they've been designing for a while.

    99:

    Niala You ( among other people ) have done it again, I'm afraid. ... shall never vanquished be, until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him. Then there was the minesweeper that disguised itself as a jungle island As for interpreting what we see, there's always The Fata Morgana ( Yes, I have seen one ) - of which a very good example was seen recently

    100:

    If you lost an eye or were born with only one eye you'd still try to build a 3D model. But the binocular vision helps.

    Chicken vision ... only have one eye, but move it back and forth. Or have two sensor and swap between them (birds really do do this, they eyeball you with one eye the flip their head around so the other eye can have a go too). Also, image stabilisation by putting the sensor on a long arm which you articulate to keep the sensor(s) in one place. Some of the videos of birds being waved round while their head stays in one place are quite freaky.

    Or LIDAR, have a strip of high res sensor and a rotating sensor or mirror.

    101:

    Re: '... sort of an idiot filter used by Q-Anon'

    Thanks for the military intel-ops review - very interesting!

    Yes - this and the 'Nigerian Prince' scam should be added to any AI Turing Test - as in: what info sources does your AI access to help in its analysis; what weight to each source, using what criteria, etc. And I want to see its decision tree path. Basically ditch the entire black/magic-box mystique that seems to be the current approach to AI development: If you can't see how someone arrived at their proof, then you can't verify that their proof is correct. We insist on this from human scientists and mathematicians - no reason to not insist on the same from a device (and the comp-sci's who program them).

    102:

    is that we learn which items are mobile and which are not

    Context, or a model of the world beyond the immediate problem.

    Training dogs is often this way, initially you have to teach some of them "sit (in the front yard)", then a completely unrelated trick "sit (in the back yard)" and so on until finally their brain does a little dance and says "I can sit anywhere" and life gets a lot easier. Some dogs you never notice, because either their world consists of you and sundry unimportant details so what they learn is "sit (you said so)"; or the flip happens so early no-one notices - often IME puppies that are trained with/by their parents are like this.

    Also, there is nothing quite so cute-hilarious as a whole row of fluffy puppies all still clumsy and unco, trying to lie down and roll over on command.

    103:

    If the former is done well, you need a massive amount more power to distinguish the [pseudorandom] numbers from true random ones.

    Like this? NOBUS = Nobody But US

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS Former NSA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged the concept of NOBUS: You look at a vulnerability through a different lens if even with the vulnerability it requires substantial computational power or substantial other attributes and you have to make the judgment who else can do this? If there's a vulnerability here that weakens encryption but you still need four acres of Cray computers in the basement in order to work it you kind of think "NOBUS"

    I don't think General Hayden had heard about hubris and nemesis.

    104:

    That's interesting. So you are cuing almost entirely off perspective? I am wondering what causes you not to be using parallax. I too have only ever had one functional eye, and I rely very heavily on parallax. Come to that, so do creatures which are often held up as exemplars of binocular vision; cats preparing to pounce weave their heads from side to side to get the parallax cues. I do the same thing for the same reason, albeit in different contexts. Parallax is always a very significant cue, regardless of how many eyes you have, so it seems strange that you appear to be using perspective instead.

    My visual perception seems to involve a lot of comparing the actual, observed parallax with the expected parallax synthesised internally from a model; I even find that photographs appear to exhibit parallax because my brain is modelling what it ought to look like, and I find myself doing the head-weaving thing or even trying to look round the side, and experiencing a moment of confusion when it doesn't work. Similarly, I find holograms unimpressive because they don't look much different from what I expect from an ordinary photograph until I look at them from extreme enough angles that they are starting to not work.

    Your vivid perspective-based illusions are pretty unfamiliar to me. I get that sort of thing from photographs sometimes, but not from real scenes. It may possibly account for occasional instances of something half-seen looking indefinably odd in a way which vanishes as soon as I turn my attention to it.

    The popular misconception that binocularity is the be-all and end-all of depth perception was of some use to me at school, because it meant that nobody expected me to be able to intercept missiles or launch them accurately, and so saved me getting too much flak for not doing it. In fact I can throw and catch about as well as most people, but it does require attention, and mine was all used up on the trees and clouds and other things which were actually interesting.

    But it did severely get on my tits when they started to actually teach us that misconception as fact in physics and biology lessons. I objected strongly to being expected to learn something which I knew so bloody well was not true. To the point where I eventually answered a question with "We are supposed to just say "binocular vision" here, but this is bollocks" followed by a two page analysis of exactly why it was bollocks, based on the angular resolution of the eye being inadequate to make it work except at very short range.

    105:

    "Some of the videos of birds being waved round while their head stays in one place are quite freaky."

    Indeed, it is quite fun doing it interactively with a pigeon. It's also why they jerk their heads back and forth when they walk - trying to keep it in one place for as long as they can, then quickly moving it to the next station.

    I've heard of someone sighting on a hovering kestrel with a theodolite, and observing that its body was being buffeted all over the place but its head was steady as a rock.

    "unco"

    Golly, that word takes me back :)

    106:

    I've heard of someone sighting on a hovering kestrel with a theodolite, and observing that its body was being buffeted all over the place but its head was steady as a rock. Yeah, it's quite an effect. Probably the kestrel system is optimized for stabilizing vs wingbeats (it being evolved), but even when the birds are hand-held the head and gaze remain completely steady as long as the body isn't moved more than a couple of centimetres.
    The American Kestrel's diet is mostly insects, grasshoppers favored, and in my (limited) experience they're hovering maybe 15-20 meters up, looking for a meal.

    107:

    A few years ago I tried out a side gig where I was basically reviewing websites for Google to help it train its algorithms.

    Typically I would be sent to a site to review it for accuracy to a set of search terms. Does this site give the reader information about the Blue Footed Booby of Galapagos, or is it smurf pr0n? Ad nauseum.

    108:

    One of my daydreams is that Freefall will win a Hugo. It's consistently one of the most intelligent things (of any kind) I read, and I'd love to see it get the recognition it deserves.

    Agreed, Freefall fully deserves a Hugo. Now that I thought to check I see it's not even on the short list[1] and that both surprises and annoys me. I certainly don't begrudge Girl Genius or Digger their wins, nor Schlock Mercenary its multiple nominations - but Freefall is fully their equal as a SF story.

    [1] If necessary, insert here Kevin Standlee's clarification of the word "nominee." I think most of us here know how the Hugos work.

    109:

    I'm gated from Google search by captchas when I use VPN, and have noted that I'm failing them more often eg pick which image is a fire hydrant, and keep clicking until none are left - I'm finding I get the 'Please try again' message and a new set of images more often than I used to. Either I'm actually artificial, and am just starting to feel the limits of my "mind", or some of the blurry street scenes from high up or in the distance have been tagged as having a fire hydrant even though there's no way a human eye can make it out at that resolution.

    Then I started thinking about whether the captcha is also being used to train AIs to recognize objects encountered by self driving vehicles eg crosswalks, traffic lights, bicycles, buses, fire hydrants etc. ie we're providing them with confirmation on what these objects in the images are?

    110:

    Would an owl do? Apparently there's a car ad where they use chickens but I can't find an actual pigeon one.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rylkcch5nrA

    111:

    The google system often seems to require more than one correct pick, it just don't tell you "you got that right, but since you're at harassment level 5 that requires you also get another 3 sets correct". I get the impression that there's a couter that covers stuff like using the wrong browser (not Chrome/Chromium), blocking ads, blocking persistent cookies, using psuedonymous mode, and VPNs. Using TOR/Tails sometime it just won't let me in at all... well, after 10 I gave up.

    It's just a reminder that "free" means you're exchanging personal information for the service, and if you're not providing the information they're not providing the service. And you thought paywalls were a news media thing...

    112:

    That's a good point, but I was pondering on why all the captcha images are items you'd encounter while driving, and whether or not it's also being used to train self drive systems or something like them.

    113:

    Have heard this is actually an old ruse with various armies having used full scale balloons/toy tanks to mess with their enemies' intel gathering usu. via satellite.

    Yes indeed! It's also handy to have plausible looking 'enemy' hardware for training one's own troops. There are even companies that will happily sell you, some random guy on the street, an inflatable rubber Russian tank (examples here and here), because what the hell.

    It's also common to have decoys out in real battle spaces. Any missile or bomb that destroys a decoy is one the enemy can't use on real assets.

    114:

    Ah, yes, mapping software. We were coming back from my cardiologist Thursday, on our way for me to get my first vaccine shot, and had time to kill. Ellen finally just ignored her mobile after Every. Fucking. Time. The damn thing was desperate to get us on the Interstate, rather than straight down the road we were on. Every single turn, no matter what she said to it, or did, in the brief time at traffic lights.

    115:

    I am wondering what causes you not to be using parallax. I too have only ever had one functional eye, and I rely very heavily on parallax. Come to that, so do creatures which are often held up as exemplars of binocular vision; cats preparing to pounce weave their heads from side to side to get the parallax cues. I do the same thing for the same reason, albeit in different contexts.

    I am afraid I have no answer to the "what causes" question -- that's how my vision always worked. I most definitely do not "weave head from side to side" to get parallax cues. And holograms do not work much for me either.

    116:

    Moz @ 111: "It's just a reminder that "free" means you're exchanging personal information for the service, and if you're not providing the information they're not providing the service."

    I find that the Google robot is very nice with me. It doesn't bother me even if I use Firefox all the time and I never give it personal information. I use it for all kinds of things like search, translation or mail, through gmail.

    I also use the YouTube robot, which is part of Google and doesn't bother me by asking for personal information.

    It does do weird things though, like translating to French some of the "headers" of the English language videos it automatically selects for me.

    Also, it seems to have guessed the first three characters of my postal code, in some way.

    Haven't figured out how it did it, since I keep all personal information away from my computer, by doing things like doing all my personal banking offline, through my land line telephone only.

    117:

    I might add that my spatial imagination absolutely sucks. Putting together something mechanical without instructions is pretty much hopeless for me, and instructions in the form of a video are almost as bad as none at all. In fact, often the only way I can make sense of video instructions is to pause it every couple seconds, so that I am effectively studying a series of still images instead.

    118:

    I never give it personal information ... it seems to have guessed the first three characters of my postal code

    Hmm. Could it be that you're giving it information via trackers rather than directly?

    I listed a bunch of different things, and sadly for me the "is your browser unique" tester says not very many people at all use 2.5k monitors in portrait, so my canvas size alone makes me distinctive. Of course my tails VM is set to an internal desktop of 1920x108... the most popular size :)

    119:

    I was thinking the Google robot might have gotten the first 3 characters of my Canadian postal code through my IP address, but I have a dynamic IP address from my network supplier.

    I don't mind if the robot knows that I have a 30 inch diagonal monitor set up in a CADD config but I never had to write that anywhere and I suspect that it can detect it somehow.

    What I do mind is keeping my personal information private and the Google robot doesn't seem to care.

    If Microsoft is tracking me throught my OS it doesn't show any sign of it.

    120:

    Then I started thinking about whether the captcha is also being used to train AIs to recognize objects encountered by self driving vehicles eg crosswalks, traffic lights, bicycles, buses, fire hydrants etc. ie we're providing them with confirmation on what these objects in the images are?

    Yep. Why do you think so many of them are click all the squares with buses, bikes, cars, stop lights, etc...

    121:

    The damn thing was desperate to get us on the Interstate

    There ARE options for routing in the app. At least in the Google Maps I use.

    122:

    Then I started thinking about whether the captcha is also being used to train

    Oh, yes. That thought came to me quite a while ago. If captcha isn't using the responses to train an AI in what real Is see and do, it's missing a huge opportunity. That would be supplemental to the ostensible and perhaps real purpose.

    Same, I suppose, as in any other situation in which real Is are being asked to make a choice.

    123:

    Also, it seems to have guessed the first three characters of my postal code, in some way.

    Well let's see.

    Your IP address in relation to known neighbors.

    Your WiFi and/or WiFi nets you can "see" based on neighbors who have given themselves up.

    And a big on most people don't realize is nearby bluetooth. I'm guessing if you have a Chromecast and it and your computer can both see the same devices it assumes you are at the address registered with accounts tied to the Chromecast.

    And all of this is why Apple's next iOS has Facebook all in a fierce lather. You have to explicitly allow apps to see such things as nearby bluetooth and wifi devices. And they are making the default = "nope".

    124:

    but I have a dynamic IP address from my network supplier.

    Dynamic doesn't mean it changes a lot. It only means it can change and you have to deal with it if it does. Spectrum (old TWC) IPs can stay put for years.

    125:

    WebAssembly is a idealised virtual machine code, which is designed to be easy to run[3] at high speed and to be a good target for compilers of traditional compiled languages[1]. It's power is in the limitation: it runs inside the browser sandbox, which means that it does not get access to most machine resources [2], unless specifically allowed[4]. One of these allowed resources is WebGL api (or even the nascent WebGPU api), which give direct access to the compute resources of the available GPU(s).

    What this means is that there is potentially no loss of processing power as compared with native code, and there is heavy duty and extremely competitive R&D going into reducing any observed loss of power.

    [1] Funnily enough, it's not (yet) good as a compilation target for scripting languages such as Javascript, which need garbage collection. [2] It's achilles heel is that it can have unbounded access to CPU (and GPU?) resources, which means that in the wild it is heavily used for cryptocurrency mining. [3] Different implementations may interpret (slowish), ahead-of-time compile to machine-code (potentially native speed), and/or Just-In-Time compile (slow start, gets quicker, may even exceed native code performance because of the ability to optimise on the fly for actual behavioural characteristics). [4] For example, OS system calls are not allowed.

    126:

    There ARE options for routing in the app

    Yes. And if you don't like the options presented then you can go to hell, as Whitroth found out.

    I have spent far too much time with google maps trying to persuade it that just because I legally can ride on major roads doesn't mean I am willing to do that. I've had the Whitroth-style experience, where I am travelling down a nice quiet street with blockages to stop moronists using it, and cut-throughs to help cyclists. But google at every single intersection wants me on the major road parallel to this nice street. Yes, I can manually drag my chosen route back to where I choose at every single intersection. Well, except the ones where google has decided that I can't actually use the cut-throughs, and google decided that sure, you can ride to there. And then you can turn round and ride back to the last intersection...

    City of Sydney have several full time staff working on bicycle intrastructure, and one of the things they do is follow through to make sure they things they tell google about cycle facilities actually translate into users of google maps being told about said facilities.

    127:

    "by exploiting flaws in the image recognizer attackers were able to steer a Tesla into the oncoming lane."

    Those stupid silicon brains. My superb meat brain would never do that.

    Back in 2000 Sydney hosted the Olympics. As a "celebration" of the ghastly event the powers that be decided to mark a permanent single unbroken blue line around the entire 40 km of the running race. It's hard to put into words, but the line took the most direct route. So where the runners go around a corner, on to a straight and then around a corner the other way, the result was a single unbroken blue line that drifted all the way from one side to the other. Despite signs everywhere saying "IGNORE THE BLUE LINE" and a bit of a media blitz saying the same thing people followed the blue line. The road rule is you can cross broken lines but can't cross an unbroken line. I was very nearly knocked off my motorbike by some dopey meat brain following the unbroken line and drifting into my lane.

    So while putting down fake lane markings and getting Teslas to do the wrong thing might give you a feeling of superiority over silicon brains, putting down fake lane markings messes up the traffic no end already.

    128:

    "they also have an inventory of which types of accents/voices their AI needs to improve upon"

    That would be the swearing accent...

    I've heard tapes of them and it's generally someone telling the computer to fuck off, over and over.

    129:

    Yes. And if you don't like the options presented then you can go to hell, as Whitroth found out.

    I just checked and the version on my phone has a switch for "Avoid Highways".

    Plus my use of Google (or Apple) maps is rarely blind. I use it to get an idea of what I want to do then let it re-route as a generally follow the path shown. Plus I keep the voice for it turned off.

    130:

    Captcha was originally designed to do pretty much exactly that.

    Ever wonder how you can Google a string of words and have it return some old manuscript?

    https://www.wired.com/2007/05/recaptcha-fight-spam-and-digitize-books/

    131:

    I bow to your superior knowledge and understanding.

    But, one thing, how do I get all the roads I don't want to cycle on designated as highways in google maps?

    132:

    David L @ 123 ans also @ 124

    I don't have a Chromecast. In fact I don't even have a digital TV or other digital entertainment systems. I only have an ancient analog TV that I use to watch old VHS tapes, with no connection to any network.

    My home office computer is connected without Wifi (by ethernet cable instead) to my ISP's router (in a kitchen closet), which is in turn connected with a fiber optic cable to my ISP's network.

    About 15 years ago I systematically tested my ISP's IP traces when I was a regular contributor and did my many edits each day in Wikipedia (I was more active back then). I found that my IP was always changing. I never had the same IP twice.

    Has the use of IPs by ISPs changed in the last 15 years?

    133:

    I suspect but don't know that better location accuracy data is now sold by at least some ISPs. I've seen dynamic IPs located to ~500m in Australia, and others convinced I'm in another state. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that wifi users are located to 50m or better thanks to google et al's wardriving efforts (which google totally stopped doing, honest)

    134:

    Capcha images - ALWAYS purely 100% USA-ian & very locally centric. Reverse parochialism - like US "fire hydrants" that AFAIK, no-one else uses & "crosswalks" for pedestrian crossings on roads,

    Niala Some of us don't have a TV at all .....

    135:

    Has the use of IPs by ISPs changed in the last 15 years?

    Back in the day Bellsouth DLS IPs would move around weekly or daily. AT&T U-Verse seemed to move around every month or so when I had it in Texas a few years back. Verizon FIOS and Time Warner cable seemed to hold steady for months or even years.

    It is all in how the ISP runs their network.

    I wasn't giving an exhaustive list of how sites track. But they work hard at it. Someone up thread mentioned Am I Unique. (amiunique.org) It gives an interesting way that people are finger printed. And that information is correlated by the big behind the scenes firms to match up all kinds of other information about you. And the rest of us.

    136:

    «intuition would suggest that a WebAssembly framework (based on top of JavaScript running inside a web browser hosted on top of a traditional big-ass operating system) wouldn't be terribly fast»

    Actually the web browser has a just-in-time dynamic code generator for WebAssembly (inspired by research on the language "Self" by Ungar and Wolzcko) and it has been shown that means that WebAssembly runs at only 2-3 times slower than native code.

    «an explosive series of breakthroughs in the field misleadingly known as Artificial Intelligence. Most of them centre on applications of neural networks,»

    That is "misleadingly known" as "Machine Learning", which is actually "Machine Training", where the training is to do cluster analysis. and "neural networks" are in essence a rather opaque form of decision trees built after that cluster analysis.

    «the ghosts know them as such but don't understand the concept of lying (because they are a howling cognitive vacuum rather than actually conscious)»

    It is no about consciousness, it is that the decision trees, oops I mean the neural networks, don't "understand" the cluster analysis they do, they are not "sentient", they lack the ability to introspect what they are doing.

    There is a secondary issue with them: they require gigantic data sets because usually those data sets are very "noisy", and the clusters they form are very fuzzy. This matters a lot in part because of the previous issue, that since they don't "understand" the clusters, they cannot spot the obvious noise.

    This said, they are still hugely useful. Butg there is a very large limitation looming: fundamental hw tech has stopped improving that much:

    «NNs, and in particular training Generative Adversarial Networks takes a ridiculous amount of computing power, but we've got it these days»

    Both CPUs and GPUs have largely reached the top of the S-curve and now "improve" mostly by becoming bigger and more power hungry, rather than denser and faster. We have reached the point that aircraft reached in the 1950s, where jets from that time are not that different from jets of today, rather than being dramatically better than the biplanes of the 1910s.

    138:

    No; I said a galaxy full of comptronium, and meant just that. Four acres of Crays and a dedicated nuclear power station isn't going to be any more use than a BBC Micro.

    139:

    Most of the function of your semi-circular canals is to allow your eyes to stay still (or track moving objects) while your head is moving; I learnt that while my balance was being tested, and I can't do it at all.

    140:

    Yeah. Cyclestreets (in the UK) is no better - it LURVES psychle farcilities, loathes roundabouts and assumes every cyclist can lug their bicycle up or down stairs without trouble. I might get around to seeing if I can volunteer to improve that, but it's a fair hassle; I usually just look at a map and make my own decisions.

    141:

    Greg Tingey @ 134: "Reverse parochialism - like US "fire hydrants" that AFAIK, no-one else uses"

    Change the US to "North America" and your phrase will be true. Canada has fire hydrants too. Unless we have "Une borne-fontaine" of course.

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borne-fontaine

    I love to see the way artificial intelligence applications from the US do bloopers or simply strange things with multiple languages. In contrast big Canadian banks get it right the first time.

    142:

    As to AI, "Machine Learning" is not it. If AI arises it will be from drones etc.

    As to SciFi, there is a the delightful "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling, where a plot feature is that in "the future" spam bots to get past spam filters have to pass the "Turing Test" doing conversations with the target users, and thus have become first sentient and then self-aware, and spam bot networks use part of the money they make from spamming to hire mafia contract killers to take out the system administrators who try to shut them down. :-)

    143:

    David L @ 235

    amiunique.org was great fun. I'll have to return to it to do some serious reading.

    144:

    Niala @ 132: I found that my IP was always changing. I never had the same IP twice. Has the use of IPs by ISPs changed in the last 15 years?

    I don't know your background, so please excuse me if this is stuff you already know. I'm erring on the side of explaining too much rather than too little.

    Most ISPs allocate IP addresses using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). Basically, when your computer joins a local network it sends out a special ping, and a DHCP server replies with a suitable IP address and other configuration data. The address comes with a "lease" saying how long you own it for (usually 24 hours). If you are still on-line after 24 hours then your computer will renew the lease and you carry on with the same address.

    If you go off line and the lease expires then your address can be allocated to someone else. So when you come back you get a new address. DHCP servers generally try to give the same address you had last time, but there are no guarantees.

    If you have a home router (which most people these days do) then there are two IP addresses involved. One is for your PC or other device, and the other is for the router. When you turn the router on it sends the DHCP ping packet to your ISP, which allocates it an external IP address. Your devices on your home network then send DHCP pings within your home, and your home router responds with internal IP addresses. The router then translates between internal and external IP addresses (known as Network Address Translation, or NAT).

    If you check your IP address in your computer's network settings you will probably see something starting "192.168...", or possibly "10...". This is an internal IP address and will be different for every device in your home. If you Google "What is my IP address?" you will get the external IP address allocated for your router and seen by the rest of the world, and that will be the same for every device in your home.

    I'm assuming that it is the external IP address you are asking about.

    Because the external IP address is leased to your router, it only changes when your router is turned off long enough for its current lease to expire. As long as your router is turned on it will keep renewing its lease and your IP address will not change. Most people leave their routers on 24x7, so the IP addresses don't change unless there is some general outage or they go on holiday or something.

    15 years ago it is just possible you were using dial-up or something like it. In that case there was no router and a different IP address was allocated for every time your modem called the ISP.

    If you have no home router and you are just plugging your PC directly into your modem then you need to double-check your firewall settings, or better yet get yourself a home router that is set up for proper security from the get-go. You can tell this is the case because the IP address you see in network settings is the same as the IP address you get from Google. Many ISPs provide combination modem/routers in a single box, so it's not immediately obvious from the wiring.

    145:

    "[re]captcha is also being used to train AIs"

    Absolutely. That's what it's for. (What it's really for, as opposed to what they say it's for to con thoughtless people into failing in civic responsibility by putting the bloody thing on their websites.) Which is why I refuse to ever fill the things in. The effect of an individual boycott may be trivial, but at least I can avoid actively helping to make things worse.

    146:

    My spatial imagination is very good, but instructions in the form of a video are completely useless. I want text and still images. A video provides much worse quality images than still photographs (in the sense of being shot from the best angle to make things clear), it keeps moving so I can't see what's going on, and it has no random access so I have to buffer large stretches of it inside my head.

    147:

    David L notes: "I more and more think it's just that we (wet meat) have a decade or five of experiences that our brains sort through to interpret the visual world. And as we wander further off that pile of "memories" we get worse and worse results. So training an AI with 100K pictures still fall short of our 10 to 50 years of observations.

    Not sure that's correct. There's generally a point at which the training is "good enough" and further training doesn't help (nor does it necessarily hinder). As personal anecdata, I offer my experiences learning to identify diverse Canadian tree species. In summer, I did pretty well because leaves were available in addition to all the other clues. But our clever bastard of a prof held the identification exam in mid-winter, mostly with large mature trees, so there were no leaves and the branches way too high overhead to see details. You couldn't pass unless you could integrate a sufficiently large number of factors to definitively screen out near misses. Took me 3 tries to pass the test that year (combination of natural inaptitude [sic] and high within-species variability in Canadian forest trees). I eventually learned to be a Bayesian without knowing that was what I was doing. G More importantly, I learned the value of multiple diagnostic criteria.

    Now, 40 years on, there's a large subset of trees I can identify "instinctively" (without thought) and a smaller subset for which I still need to deliberately run through the list of criteria before I'm sure. When I travel abroad to places with tree species like those in Canada, I can identify many trees to at least the genus level without much thought, and sometimes to the species level. When I travel further afield, I have no problem identifying "it's a tree" with near-100% confidence. Going beyond that level depends on whether a given novel species interested me enough to learn what it looks like before my travel. (Nowadays, I oscillate back and forth between "must know everything to the species level" and "fuck the taxonomy and just enjoy the tree for its own sake".)

    So I suspect that "weak" AI (e.g., trained neural networks) is about learning enough, not repeatedly relearning variations on the same pattern for 50 years, whereas "strong" AI (human cognition) relies on escalation: start with the learned "weak" image recognition, and escalate to conscious analytical cognition if the weak recognition fails or doesn't return a sufficiently high confidence in the conclusion. That escalation is where your "decade or five" is really essential: it provides many years of contextual information that supports the weak recognition and allows plausible inferences.

    148:

    Paul @ 144: "I'm erring on the side of explaining too much rather than too little."

    You haven't explained too much.

    15 years ago I was probably getting different IP addresses because I was shutting down my home office computer and the power bar too, at the end of each session on my home office computer.

    A few weeks ago I had a digital Bell Hub 3000 router installed, along with an ethernet cable (no Wifi for my home computer) and, I suppose, proper security installed from the get-go.

    I'll be checking some things in the next few days. Thank you very much for all this information.

    149:

    I find instructional videos occasionally useful, for example when trying to dismantle electronics, but written instructions with pictures would usually work, too. For learning how to make music I find videos very good - for me it's very different seeing the action performed than just seeing the still images and reading text.

    However, for many things, video is just useless. One recent example is this one retro-computer I'm interested in, and for which I've even done some programming (on an emulator, it's not ready in HW form yet). Somebody has made multiple videos about programming it, and somebody (maybe same person) made a video about the different graphics modes. The problem is that it's very hard to learn how to program a computer in assembly language by watching a video, specifically because no random access and no way to really reference stuff back.

    The video mode thing was also completely baffling to me: it would've been easier to make a simple page and a table to explain everything and it could've been used as a reference, now the video is just basically promotion with no real use.

    At least some people have been writing guides for it - I have this plan of making some graphics stuff with it and then write some kind of guide for it. Not making a video.

    150:

    The IP persistence is also dependent on the ISP policy. Some ISPs used to reset explicitly all leases at least once a week and sometime every night (I think because they were selling stable IP as a pro option). I has become somewhat rare.

    151:

    «So I suspect that "weak" AI (e.g., trained neural networks) is about learning enough, not repeatedly relearning variations on the same pattern for 50 years, whereas "strong" AI (human cognition) relies on escalation [...] many years of contextual information that supports the weak recognition and allows plausible inferences.»

    I guess it is indeed the ability to introspect on the training, but ultimately it is pain and evolution. In particular the pain from "hunger": if we don't learn right, if we mistake an apple with "iPod" written on it for an iPod, we get painfully hungry and eventually die.

    BTW a little known detail which I think is widely ignored in AI research too, is that years ago a convention of AI researchers agreed on some ethical principles, and one was that not to "motivate" AIs with simulated "pain". Try to imagine ruthless "winners whatever it takes" startups creating sentient, conscious AIs at some point and "motivating" and controlling them through torture.

    152:

    Training dogs is often this way, initially you have to teach some of them "sit (in the front yard)", then a completely unrelated trick "sit (in the back yard)" and so on until finally their brain does a little dance and says "I can sit anywhere" and life gets a lot easier.

    Any high school teacher can tell you teenagers are the same way. Something they learn in one course isn't necessarily transferred to another course. The idea that spelling and grammar don't count except in English class, for example… :-/

    On a more serious note, many people's mental model of the world is surprising resistant to change, which necessitates Ptolemaic levels of epicycles to function. For example, the average person's model of motion is Aristotelian. They might learn Newtonian mechanics in physics class, but that is seen as 'something for class' rather than a replacement for part of their mental model of the world. Lots of work has been done (by Mazur and others) on various methods to eliminate deep-rooted misconceptions — persistent incorrect mental models — and there isn't a single method that works reliably*.

    I'd like to think that physicist and engineers replace their Aristotelian models with something else, but at a conference last decade I was chatting with a university professor who was pleading with high school teachers to focus more on concept and less on calculation, because he had graduate students who could perfectly calculate the right answer but had no idea why it was the right answer — it was the right answer because they used the right method and didn't make any mistakes. His argument was that high school (and undergraduate university) education just added more epicycles to an incorrect model, when we needed to be replacing the model.

    *TLDR: things move because they have impetus. When they run out of impetus, they stop moving. Essentially, friction is treated as part of the object rather than a separate force.

    **Mazur used to think that confronting the misconception with evidence that they directly see/experience worked, but he reanalyzed his data and decided that his earlier work didn't support his conclusions. One of the reasons I consider him worth listening to is that he is willing to admit his mistakes.

    153:

    Cyc is inherently doomed to failure, if the Wikipedia page on it is a fair statement of its goals, namely

    ... to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works.

    This approach is so rooted in incorrect theories of knowledge that it's Not Even Wrong. It can't possibly represent "common-sense knowledge about the world." Attempts to map how simple nematodes learn the things they are capable of learning will be more fruitful, though if the Cyc people can figure out a way to piggyback off an engine that has as much "common-sense knowledge" as a rat does, their work might eventually be worth something.

    The first artificial system to have "common-sense knowledge about the world" will be some combination of "model of natural biological neural system" and the equivalent of a billion years of natural selection. And its representation of that "common-sense knowledge" will be an even more impenetrable, incomprehensibly arbitrary-looking mess than the "rule sets" of a cucumber-sorter.

    154:

    Not sure that's correct.

    What I was implying but did state clearly is that our decade(s) of experience give us all kinds of data about what in a specific AI training case is background noise. In the tank situation we KNOW what trees and snow are and just ignore them when picking out tanks.

    Basically our life experience fills us with all kinds of information which can be used to be able to ignore things we don't need to deal with at any particular moment.

    And it mostly works.

    155:

    Because the external IP address is leased to your router, it only changes when your router is turned off long enough for its current lease to expire. As long as your router is turned on it will keep renewing its lease and your IP address will not change. Most people leave their routers on 24x7, so the IP addresses don't change unless there is some general outage or they go on holiday or something.

    Sort of. When a DHCP lease expires the IP address CAN change. Most of the time it doesn't but it can. Which is why when someone (me) needs to reallocate IPs I set the DHCP lease times down to an hour a few days ahead of time then 5 minutes just before the changes roll out. Then set the leases back to something more useful and not as networking stressful after 20 minutes or so.

    Much of the more rapidly changing IP situations came from ISPs moving from dial up modems (where you likely got a new IP with each dial in) to fixed line situations. So a lot of early DSL and cable setups would have IPs that changed daily or even more often. Over time as dial up has gone away most network just leave the IPs in place unless there's a power off or reason to re-align the network. Of course some of the big ISPs change them around every week or so just to make it harder for people who aren't paying for a static IP to pretend they have one.

    156:

    The interesting thing as Charlie mentioned is the 16-core Neural Engine. Lot of chip space dedicated to something no one uses much at this time.

    You're joking, right?

    Apple is all over neurocomputing. From FaceID for unlock/face recognition on iOS, to face recognition in Photos (it can index your photo library by recognizing who's in each photo, with minimal training), to computational audio stuff cropping up in Homepods, and speech recognition taking place on the local hardware rather than in the cloud: the car project is just more of the same, on that level.

    When the Apple Stores reopen treat yourself to a visit to play with an iPhone 12 Pro's camera and boggle at what it does by way of computational photography using the pocket version of the neural processor. It's impressive.

    You're right that third parties aren't using the neural coprocessor much so far because it's a relatively recent capability and the APIs were only published a couple of years ago at most. But it's something an increasing amount of Apple hardware leverages.

    157:

    I work with people who do this stuff for a living, and see two systematic errors made in the "tanks" story.

    First, the NN is being allowed to train itself against the whole image; normally, you'd do some sort of preprocessing steps to (e.g.) mark out the area that contains the tank versus the background. Unless there is literally no known algorithm to do the basic segmentation you want predictably, you'd apply limited preprocessing to make the NN's job simpler.

    Second, their training set was really badly chosen; you want your training set (and the test set, plus your dev set) to be representative of real data from the field, not a carefully curated set; ideally, if you gave your training data, test data and real data (all unlabelled) to an intelligent human, they would not be able to tell you which set was which.

    In ML domains, "supervised learning" refers to telling the network what the correct output should be for each item in the training set; there's also semi-supervised learning (tell it about a subset of the training set, but ask it for labels for the entire training set), unsupervised learning (get the network to split the training set into groups, it chooses arbitrary labels for the groups it finds), and reinforcement learning (give it a score from 0.0 to 1.0 each time it gives you an answer, it aims to get a high score).

    Which technique you use depends on what you have available to you, and what your goals are for this network once trained.

    With that said, the most important thing about ML as it exists today is that machine learning is about having the computer work out how to classify inputs. It's not as sophisticated as the name might have you think - it literally just refers to the computer working out the correlation between input and output for itself, given a human-controlled set of inputs.

    158:

    She tried. Both onscreen, while we were at a light or two, and by voice. It ignored her.

    159:

    I really hate most "instructional videos", and having to sit and listen to them blather on and on, until finally I see the part I want. Now, taking apart an old external storage box is fine with video... but ANYTHING involving command line is stupid, nor do I want screen shots.

    160:

    Sorry, I must have missed something "CYC?" What does this stand for?

    162:

    Interestingly, I had the opposite problem when I visited Cornwall. Google kept sending me down these narrow lanes (barely wide enough for a car, and you may have to back up half a mile if you meet someone coming the other way). There was not function to say "please stick to 2 lane roads"

    163:

    You're joking, right?

    Nope. Your examples are all early stages of NN. To me putting all those cores into the M1 was a way to boost things to a level that something like autonomous driving could use.

    164:

    As I said, to me mapping apps on a phone are a great way to see how to get somewhere new or see how traffic is doing. I have used it a lot over the last 5+ years when in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Most of the time I KNEW where I wanted to get to but wasn't sure of the best way there. Especially with the massive road construction happening there for the last 10 years.

    I'd ask for a routing, look at where it wanted me to go, then head off. With the sound off but the phone mounted high up. (I have a decently large screen model.) Many times I'd not be on the exact route in the app but as long as I was not headed in the opposite direction I was reasonably assured I'd get to where I wanted. And this only works if you use the apps in map view, not turn by turn.

    I do the same thing on my annual 7+ hour drive to and from Penn State. And I even use it around home to make sure I'm not headed into a traffic standstill from a wreak or construction.

    And on vacation drives.

    These apps are a long way from being as good as a smart person. And I'm not expected perfection or anything close to it.

    165:

    Cyclestreets ... assumes every cyclist can lug their bicycle up or down stairs without trouble.

    As a long time Wapsi Square reader my immediate reaction to bicycles and stairs is "Look at it go!"

    (And "Good thing I was wearing my helmet.")

    166:

    Paul @ 5: followed the link to the video. I'm having a problem with my PC sound at present, so I turned on subtitles. The subtitles have obviously been generated by a voice recognition algorithm, and were wrong enough that I couldn't quite follow what was going on, but I think this is a video about problems with voice recognition in an elevator that can't understand "eleven" in a Scottish accent. However the captioning algorithm seems to have no problem with that bit.

    I'm going to fix my audio problems and come back to this.

    I went back and turned on the subtitles "English (auto-generated)" to watch it again and it's even more horrifying [and hilarious].

    168:

    "Any high school teacher can tell you teenagers are the same way. Something they learn in one course isn't necessarily transferred to another course. The idea that spelling and grammar don't count except in English class, for example… :-/"

    Not just teenagers. My wife used to be an art teacher, for adults, and the number of students who assumed that once they had completed the Foundations course they could safely disregard all they had learned for subsequent courses was staggering. Mostly twenties and thirties. What part of "Foundations" did they not understand?

    She largely blames "teaching to the exam" (not by her, of course, but a pervasive part of formal education) for it. Students are encouraged to view getting good marks in the exam as the be all and end all of their studies, and once they have those marks, it can all be forgotten.

    JHomes

    169:

    Charlie Stross @ 38:

    Ah, good. I was thinking it might take an awful lot of plot to get from the close of Dark State to a satisfying ending

    Pretty much. When I checked the copy edits I gave it a thorough read. It's going to be a 450-500 page brick, but it reads fast and twisty.

    Fortunately I have all of the preceding volumes for the series in hard cover. It may be weird, but I prefer to have all of the volumes of a series in the same format.

    It's been a bit of a struggle for the Laundry Files, because my initial purchase was a paperback. I'm glad the U.K. editions are still available as paperbacks.

    170:

    My Google maps story: I had to pick up an item from an unfamiliar shop in a suburb I had reasonable knowledge of. I had a vague idea where the shop was, but decided to use Maps to home in on it. When I got close I was heading east and the shop was somewhere on the southern side of the road (we drive on the left here so I was on the north lane of the road). For some reason, instead of Maps telling me I'd reached my destination, which was on just the other side of the road, it decided I needed a 20 minute detour along a main road, a left onto the freeway to the city's foothills, next down an exit to a landmark pub to turn round, then back onto the freeway and down again. There were plenty of ways to get from one side of the road to the other within 500 meters of the shop but Maps had decided that was the only one...

    171:

    What part of "Foundations" did they not understand?

    Calculus would have been a disaster for them. I did electrical engineering in college. After a while we all decided it was really calculus 402, calculus 573, calculus 475, etc. No matter what the course title was on the door. The first 4 semesters from the math department were just a warm up.

    172:

    Twice on a drive from North Carolina to Pennsylvania I told Google Maps to take me to a Costco to get gas. Both times it told me "You're here". While I was on the interstate. Both were located next to the exit and I guess I was close enough.

    173:

    On the whole, I've been favorably impressed with GPS vehicle navigation, but you have to keep your brain engaged the whole time. My personal story: While driving to a mountaintop village in Sicily a few years ago, the software kept telling us with increasing vehemence that we had to turn right immediately -- over a 100-m vertical drop with no turnoff point. Fortunately, my wife and I cooperate on the navigation: one of us consults the map while the other drives, and provides human voice instructions, with the GPS sound turned off.

    Having disobeyed the software and arrived safely at the top, my wife and I agreed that I would handle the downhill leg. I learned standard transmission very late in life, so I have an occasionally adversarial relationship with first gear that makes difficult uphill stretches... difficult. So she drove us to the top. On the other hand, she's not comfortable with long, windy downhill stretches, whereas I am. (Jack Sprat and his wife! Coupledom works well when your weaknesses are complimentary.) Unfortunately for me, I neglected to pay close attention to the scale of the display (which had changed without me noticing), and what appeared to be a long series of gentle downhill switchbacks turned out to be a seemingly endless series of very tight* switchbacks and multiple consecutive steep descents that were hidden between the long and gentle loops that were what we saw on the screen. Oops! I managed to avoid burning out the brakes and clutch, but the car probably didn't much like me.

    • Apparently, someone had decided that a medieval goat track was a good choice for a 20th century paved road. For many of the switchbacks, I had to back and fill more than once to get around the corner. Given that there was no room to turn around, and that backing uphill into oncoming traffic for an hour would have been suicidal, I opted for the lesser of two evils and continued my descent. Oh, did I mention that we were driving directly into the setting sun for the last half of the descent? Thankfully, the locals were smarter than me, and none of them attempted to climb the mountain while I was descending.
    174:

    Fortunately I have all of the preceding volumes for the series in hard cover.

    The first six books were the first editions, I assume. The omnibus re-edit was never issued in hardcover, but is my preferred version (I did a lot of work to even out the pacing and make it read more smoothly).

    In the USA the Laundry Files have iterated through three publishers, and fell out of mass market paperback at Ace after book 6, "The Annihilation Score", as ebook sales took off and mass market paperback sales fell off a cliff. The UK ... hasn't had mass market distribution since 1991: all paperbacks are trade paperbacks, and Orbit can reprint books profitably in runs of as few as 200 copies, so they're all in print in a uniform edition.

    175:

    Scott Sanford @ 108:

    One of my daydreams is that Freefall will win a Hugo. It's consistently one of the most intelligent things (of any kind) I read, and I'd love to see it get the recognition it deserves.

    Agreed, Freefall fully deserves a Hugo. Now that I thought to check I see it's not even on the short list[1] and that both surprises and annoys me. I certainly don't begrudge Girl Genius or Digger their wins, nor Schlock Mercenary its multiple nominations - but Freefall is fully their equal as a SF story.

    [1] If necessary, insert here Kevin Standlee's clarification of the word "nominee." I think most of us here know how the Hugos work.

    I'm one of those who doesn't know how the Hugos work, but looking at the Wikipedia article it looks like all of the nominations were for printed stories. Is Freefall even available in a print edition?

    176:

    Instructional videos can provide much better information than drawings, written instruction's and photographs. By the end of my career in clinical biochemistry they made operation, servicing, troubleshooting and repair of very complex instruments much better. Everything had textual descriptions diagrams and photographs of the relevant procedures with videos available as buttons on the touch screen. Error codes would prompt the appropriate screen complete with videos which usually only had to be used once by inexperienced operators. The converse worked as well. Using smartphones to send videos and/or photographs to helpdesks made their job more efficient. Saying videos are bad is like saying books are bad. It depends on the content and the skill of the instructors.

    177:

    Regarding the Granny Smith/Ipod thing. One photo shows an eating apple, sure. But the next shows a white rectangle, with iPod written on it. The fruit behind it is almost completely hidden. I'm not convinced that this really proves anything.

    178:

    My home office computer is connected without Wifi (by ethernet cable instead) to my ISP's router (in a kitchen closet), which is in turn connected with a fiber optic cable to my ISP's network.

    Many of the apps that want to mine your personal information now do things like query Bluetooth and WiFi to see who is nearby. And based on those results many times they can discover where you are by who your neighbors are. Or maybe your cell phone has bluetooth on for earphones and since your cellphone is near your computer 8 to 16 hours a day, they figure the computer is "yours".

    Apple's latest iOS requires the user to allow an app to do such. And macOS 11 (Big Sur) has a lot of such permissions now for the user to allow or not. And this has gotten Facebook's knickers all in a huge twisted knot. But as to whether or not Facebook in a web browser running on Windows 7 can do that is something I thankfully don't have to worry about.

    179:

    Jack Sprat and his wife!

    Glad it works for the pair of you. My wife would never be an engineer. When telling me directions she will regularly swap left and right in her directions to me. And use "right" when "correct" was needed.

    And with Google Maps, in very large indicators they show how far to next "thing", an indication of what this think is (merge, left, etc...), and a name of the thing. I tell me wife in no uncertain terms I want them in that order. How far is most important to me in terms of decision making, and so on.

    Many times she will say "Windward Ave ahead". And that's it. ARRRRRG.

    I like maps. She wants turn by turn and doesn't get me at all.

    180:

    Perhaps you should go back and reread what I wrote.

    I did say things like "I HATE", and "for certain things".

    When all you're dealing with is menus and buttons, a video can do; when you're doing something moderately complicated, say, setting up a Linux RAID and need to break the RAID to repair a failed disk, there's NO MENU, and doing it on the command line says "a video and screenshots are a pain in the ass, rather than typing out what do do in what order".

    181:

    Pay-walled

    Worked for me, with no paywall.

    182:

    David L @ 178 "Or maybe your cell phone has bluetooth on for earphones..."

    I don't have a cellphone. I only have a land line. And I have no bluetooth device anywhere for anything. In fact I personally have no equipment using radio frequencies for anything.

    However, my employer has entrusted me with an Apple iPhone XR, which stands to my left, gathering dust because no one calls me on it and I do not need to call people at the office by phone. I find a combo of email and MS Teams to be more efficient.

    My employer has also entrusted me with a Microsoft Tablet PC, which I use daily for all my daytime office needs: MS Teams, email, etc.. It stands to my right.

    To my knowledge that Tablet PC is the only device in my home which uses a Wifi connection (to my ISP's digital router in the kitchen closet) since my personal PC is linked instead with a long ethernet cable to the kitchen closet and has absolutely no Wifi device in it or on top of it.

    In theory (at least that's what I wanted) my personal PC and my employer's Tablet PC absolutely cannot talk to each other since there is no physical connection or Wifi link for them to abuse.

    In practice could they be talking to each other inside the digital router in the kitchen closet?

    Those modern robots are sneaky things!

    183:

    AuntyJack @ 109: I'm gated from Google search by captchas when I use VPN, and have noted that I'm failing them more often eg pick which image is a fire hydrant, and keep clicking until none are left - I'm finding I get the 'Please try again' message and a new set of images more often than I used to. Either I'm actually artificial, and am just starting to feel the limits of my "mind", or some of the blurry street scenes from high up or in the distance have been tagged as having a fire hydrant even though there's no way a human eye can make it out at that resolution.

    Then I started thinking about whether the captcha is also being used to train AIs to recognize objects encountered by self driving vehicles eg crosswalks, traffic lights, bicycles, buses, fire hydrants etc. ie we're providing them with confirmation on what these objects in the images are?

    Often the recaptcha doesn't KNOW which images have the fire hydrant, and even if you DO select them all it won't accept the results.

    184:

    Niala @ 119: I was thinking the Google robot might have gotten the first 3 characters of my Canadian postal code through my IP address, but I have a dynamic IP address from my network supplier.

    Probably the block of IP address you're drawing yours from is mapped to a specific area, so it knows you're somewhere inside that area.

    185:

    Interestingly, yesterday I ran across this video on YouTube about tech failures and a couple of them were AI related.

    Teaching a twitter-bot to hate:

    Micro$oft's TAYTWEETS: https://youtu.be/QMWlRWnAZH8?t=122

    Is the AI secure from hackers?:

    Amazon Ring: https://youtu.be/QMWlRWnAZH8?t=627

    186:

    Students are encouraged to view getting good marks in the exam as the be all and end all of their studies, and once they have those marks, it can all be forgotten.

    Not just students.

    On the weekend a former colleague phoned to gnash her teach on my shoulder. She's teaching language at Virtual School in Canada's largest school board.

    According to her department head* it's not that important that teachers cover the full curriculum this year, because 'unlike math, learning a foreign language doesn't really build on previous knowledge'. (For context, this was a department discussion about dealing with students who are functioning 4-6 years behind grade level, and what marks/credits to give them).

    Admin is concerned about students attending class by numbers only. A student logging in for five minutes of a 2 hour class is to be considered present, and NOT to be referred to admin or attendance counsellors as long as they don't miss three classes in a row.

    Teachers have been told by the superintendent to concentrate on marks when talking to parents rather than discussing what the kids are learning.

    Admin is mostly concerned about what a teacher can do to boost a child's mark to 50%, because that means they have earned a credit. Discussions about filling in gaps in knowledge or skills is met with 'what can you do to raise their mark?'.

    Soooo glad I'm retired. In the current climate I'd probably end up like that Edmonton teacher fired for giving kids zero on assignments and tests they refused to do.

    *Who is 25 years old, so has only 2-3 years teaching experience

    187:

    David L @ 121:

    The damn thing was *desperate* to get us on the Interstate

    There ARE options for routing in the app. At least in the Google Maps I use.

    But it will fight you if you want to substitute a route for the one it recommends. Every time I try to find something in Raleigh or Durham Google Maps tries to route me around the Beltline. And if I'm going west, I prefer to go US 64 through Asheboro & pick up I-40 west of Mocksville (avoiding the Greensboro-Winston Salem MESS). But getting Google Maps to accept that as part of the route is definitely anathema.

    You'd think that as many times as I've done it that it could learn.

    188:

    Probably the block of IP address you're drawing yours from is mapped to a specific area, so it knows you're somewhere inside that area.

    Oddly enough, I often find those 'targeted ads' displayed on web pages tell me about cheap dentists in Cornwall and singles in Ottawa*, when I live adjacent to Toronto. (For non-Canadians, Ottawa and Cornwall are 5-6 hours drive from me, at highway speeds.)

    Maybe comics.com is lying to their ad providers about customer locations?

    *Leaving aside the issue of the products being offered — I'd be a lot more bothered if they were relevant rather than random.

    189:

    JBS @ 184: "Probably the block of IP address you're drawing yours from is mapped to a specific area, so it knows you're somewhere inside that area."

    Yeah, you're right and it's illegal to do that in the first place since Canadian postal codes can't be split in two like they're doing. It's an absolute ANA NAN Alphabetical Numeric code. Like K1A 0A6.

    And in the second place I don't want them to have even a part of my geo localisation.

    But since I posted that @ 119 I've had some suggestions on how to proceed further. It turns out that all I had to do to get my IP address (instead of making a change to Wikipedia without my normal identity) was to type "What is my IP address?" in Google.

    And just two entries below the Google result on the page there was a link to a company I'd read about, nordVPN,com. I clicked on it and it gave me a map-based indication of where I was in Canada, even more precisely than that half-postal code.

    I'm just starting to discover what I'm leaking and what I'm not leaking.

    190:

    See figure 14 in this: https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/ The laptop, rotary dial telephone and plant pot are clearly not what their labels say. Also, the rest of the article is interesting.

    191:

    Charlie Stross @174:

    Fortunately I have all of the preceding volumes for the series in hard cover.

    The first six books were the first editions, I assume. The omnibus re-edit was never issued in hardcover, but is my preferred version (I did a lot of work to even out the pacing and make it read more smoothly).

    In the USA the Laundry Files have iterated through three publishers, and fell out of mass market paperback at Ace after book 6, "The Annihilation Score", as ebook sales took off and mass market paperback sales fell off a cliff. The UK ... hasn't had mass market distribution since 1991: all paperbacks are trade paperbacks, and Orbit can reprint books profitably in runs of as few as 200 copies, so they're all in print in a uniform edition.

    I'm pretty sure the first of your books I read was one of the Merchant Princes series. I remember the store I found it in; one of the outlet stores off of I-95 at Selma, NC. I was on the road & stopped there for some reason. I remember being attracted by the cover art. I often buy books while traveling just to have something to do with my mind while I'm over-nighting in a motel.

    But here's where things get confusing ... the cover art that attracted my attention was for "The Clan Corporate", the third volume in the series.

    I'm guessing I may have bought it while I was headed home & put it aside until I could find & read the first two volumes, which I'm fairly certain were in the public library.

    192:

    They were being taught in electrical engineering about 1990 where I was, but were apparently unknown to the philosophy department. It made my course on "computers, minds, and logic" very confusing because the lecturer kept saying "this is impossible" about things that I knew were being done. He kept at it even after I started bringing him copies of papers from the people doing the things.

    I tutored that class just a few years after you took it, and I find your claims surprising. I suspect a miscommunication between you and your lecturer.

    Discussion of neural networks (they called it "connectionism") were as trendy as all hell in philosophy depts in the late 80s/early 90s because the rebellion against symbol-manipulation AI raised such interesting philosophical issues about "meaning".

    And I believe the course supervisor in the philosophy dept for that course was Jack Copeland. He certainly knew his stuff about neural nets. His textbook on AI wasn't published until '93, but it covers them pretty well.

    Jack supervised my honours thesis, which was on Turing's 1948 paper describing a precursor to the idea of a neural network. Turing called his proposed network "Unorganised Machines" and proposed a multi-layer network based on NAND gates, starting with random assignments of nodes, which would be trained - but he proposed no training mechanism.

    193:

    And just two entries below the Google result on the page there was a link to a company I'd read about, nordVPN,com. I clicked on it and it gave me a map-based indication of where I was in Canada, even more precisely than that half-postal code.

    Before you buy any VPN service understand that the cheap ones (and some of the not so cheap) make money by harvesting your information and selling it. A VPN service, while blocking all that information to others, gets to see it and keep it all to itself. So if you're concerned about such you want to find a VPN that agrees to keep your privates private.

    Read here: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-vpn-service/ especially the details about service agreeements.

    As to is your personal PC leaking information even though you are not using it does it have WiFI or Bluetooth hardware? And if your MS Tablet has such turned on your neighbors might know it is there. And yes all your LAN devices can (and in many ways must) see each others MAC addresses which allows them to be related together on your NAT'd LAN. And that tablet might have GPS on it.

    The concept of a network and connected devices makes it hard for things to not see each other. It can be done but isn't for the typical home setup. At all.

    Oh, yeah, that phone if turned on most likely Geolocates (911 or equivalent in Canada) and likely has bluetooth and wifi on it. And even if not in use it and the MS Tablet and maybe your home computer can notice each other.

    194:

    And I told my neighbors about this a while ago.

    An Apple TV became visible to me named: John and Jane's love parlor

    She had no idea that the name would be visible "over the air". It was quickly changed.

    (Names changed to protect the guilty.)

    195:

    I don't recall the exact point being made, but one of the papers was on the MIT "cockroach", something like the link below, and I recall being shocked that the lecturer would state flatly that it was impossible for it to work. Perhaps he meant some variation on "sure, ANNs exist but they're useless" but I recall feeling obliged to got back with more references and getting a negative reaction.

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roger-Quinn/publication/220499553_A_Distributed_Neural_Network_Architecture_for_Hexapod_Robot_Locomotion/links/561bcd2608ae6d17308b077a/A-Distributed-Neural-Network-Architecture-for-Hexapod-Robot-Locomotion.pdf

    196:

    Also, this list is maintained (updated today): Does your VPN Keep Logs? 120 VPN Logging Policies Revealed (Aimee O'Driscoll, UPDATED: March 8, 2021)

    197:

    I'm one of those who doesn't know how the Hugos work, but looking at the Wikipedia article it looks like all of the nominations were for printed stories. Is Freefall even available in a print edition?

    facepalm You make me realize the obvious.

    Physical print is not necessary; the xkcd story Time has never been put onto paper as far as I know and it got a Hugo in 2014 - but the story is finished. As you can read on the Hugo FAQ list works are eligible the year they come out. (This is why you'll see lots of individual Doctor Who episodes nominated but never Doctor Who as a series. Also of interest is the 1968 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, a five-way runoff between different Star Trek episodes.) Works spanning multiple years count for the year they end, as with Digger; we hope Freefall won't be eligible that way for a long time. So we can nominate individual volumes of Girl Genius or Schlock Mercenary for Hugos, because they're released as large lumps of story at a specific time.

    Obviously we should advocate for Freefall graphic novels.

    198:

    Isn't the "starting position" in e g Google maps, related to where they think you are (I assume based on your IP)? At work (fixed IP) the first map screen on my computer is centered dead on my actual location but when at home the starting map can swing around quite a bit (sometimes as much as 300-400 km off the mark)

    (Maps on mobile phones are of course never off by more than a couple of metres)

    199:

    The web versions of Google (and Apple) maps allow me to set the starting point. And since I've let Google know where I think "home" is it usually knows I'm "here". My plane travels until a year ago, VPN use at times, and general moving around with a laptop would at times make it harder for the apps to figure out where "here" was at the time. And me using 2 to 4 different non phone computers could also add to the confusion.

    200:

    David L @ 193: "As to is your personal PC leaking information even though you are not using it does it have WiFI or Bluetooth hardware?"

    No, my personal PC has no WiFI or Bluetooth hardware. I wanted it that way. The Bell tech installer who came to put in a fiber optical cable (and a Bell 3000 Hub router in the kitchen closet) expected me to buy a Wifi device for my personal PC to eventually connect it to the router in the kitchen closet. I immediately got the Bell marketing department on him and he went back to his truck to get enough Ethernet cable to link my personal PC to the router in the kitchen closet.

    I don't care if my employer's iPhone XR talks (through Wifi or Bluetooth or whatnot) to my employer's Tablet PC sitting a few feet from it. I don't care if they transmit geo data all around the neighborhood. That's their problem, not mine. Anyway, they have a real big IT department, so they can figure things out by themselves, security-wise.

    Don't worry, I won't be getting a subscription to nordVPN's service or any other geolocation blocker. I was just impressed by their way of saying hello. I'm more for taking stuff out or shutting things off than for putting stuff in.

    So, I'll go on reading about digital trepanation for out robot friends.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#/media/File:1750_Trepanationsbesteck_anagoria.JPG

    201:

    I feel your pain. My folks spent a while sailing round the Med. Because of the problem of them arriving at any particular place at any particular time, normally I met them in winter when they'd settled in some reasonably accessible location, but there was the one time I went out to meet them in Greece in the summer. Thanks to the times of flights, I had to be up at stupid dark o'clock to get to Stansted, then hang around in Athens for 14 hours waiting for the final leg to the nearest airport which got in after dark. I then had a 3 hour drive through two sets of mountains in the dark, replete with the kind of hairpin bends you describe, whilst chronically sleep-deprived. Greek mountain roads are bum-clenchingly bad at the best of times when you're paying full attention; add the risk of a micro-sleep moment, and it's highly not recommended.

    202:

    IP addresses & location Curious, that ... every "body" seems to "think" I live in Ilford or Redbridge & occasionally, Romford. Whereas I actually live between the Roding & the Lea, bounded by the marshes & the wildfowl on the W, & the forest-remnants with actual cattle & occasional deer & thousands of squirrels on the E. The various woodpeckers commute between the two.

    203:

    Scott Sanford @ 197: Obviously we should advocate for Freefall graphic novels.

    I haven't been able to find a license for Freefall, but Mark Stanley seems open to derivative works that are at least in the spirit of Creative Commons. So there is no reason why one couldn't create an e-book version.

    Chapter One is now finished, so an e-book of all strips from 0001 to 2900 would seem to mee the Hugo criterion. It's been something I've thought about doing myself. Maybe I'll bump it up the priority list.

    204:

    An Apple TV became visible to me named:

    For a not-unrelated reason: I have a handful of Apple Home compatible devices (the Apple TV -- which I use in preference to installing an ethernet connection in the TV itself, because smart TVs are basically ad-delivery tubes these days, whereas at least Apple understand they're selling hardware plus ad-free subscriptions: privacy is part of their value proposition these days -- and also Homepods in a couple of rooms). The names of the rooms bear no relationship to the layout of my flat, or even to reality (want to guess where "the dungeon" is?) simply because in the event that there's a future privacy leak, I don't want to provide would-be home intruders with any clues about what I've got, and where.

    205:

    (want to guess where "the dungeon" is?)

    Your office?

    206:

    Re: 'IP addresses & location'

    My non-techie brain explanation to self (actually a visualization) about how this stuff works settled on this 'answer':

    Of course, it (Google or whatever) can figure out my location - otherwise how can it connect my device to whichever url I want to access! I sorta picture the ISP way-finding ghost-in-the-machine as chirping out homing signals at random until it gets a responding chirp which it then leaps onto until the next end of the road, repeating until it arrives at the destination. And because the whole point of the exercise is to enter a two-way communication between my device and the target url, the ghost keeps signaling back and forth between my device and the destination url. As importantly: If the ghost couldn't consistently figure out the best route, i.e., most direct with the least time lag, strongest signal for visuals, etc., then that ISP's customers would complain/switch to a 'better' ISP provider. Applies to both laptop and smartphone.

    Google maps - my guess is that some of the weirder (mis)directions are attributable to a combination of the coverage density of the local internet/cable network plus street configuration. I've had more issues in older cities with twisty non-rectangular grid patterned streets (Boston) than in some of the more remote and less heavily cabled areas of New Hampshire. But maybe it's population density: number of users competing for finite Internet/cable access? Which brings me to another question: At what level of usage does such a system start getting bogged down because there's too much noise? It seems that 'Internet' capacity is portrayed as a pipe that allows X amount of flowing data. But how much of that data is machines/people logging on and off, or the machine trying to maintain a connection with the ISP even though it's not actively being used at that moment. I'm guessing that 'maintain the connection to the ISP' stuff is a key/high priority signal probably by conscious programmer/system design therefore we may soon be getting messages to conserve our communications bandwidth by switching our devices off. (Hmmm - could be useful for changing the expectation of being able to respond to office emails 24/7.)

    Looking forward to finding out what the correct imagery is. :)

    207:

    105 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBpF_Zj4OA

    204: my wifi network is called ' MI6 surveillance van' i like to imagine it causes panic

    208:

    Apparently, someone had decided that a medieval goat track was a good choice for a 20th century paved road. For many of the switchbacks, I had to back and fill more than once to get around the corner. Given that there was no room to turn around, and that backing uphill into oncoming traffic for an hour would have been suicidal, I opted for the lesser of two evils and continued my descent. Oh, did I mention that we were driving directly into the setting sun for the last half of the descent? Thankfully, the locals were smarter than me, and none of them attempted to climb the mountain while I was descending.

    I learned to drive on a road you may have heard of: Mulholland. I like curves.

    Anyway, if that was Greece, it probably wasn't a goat track. IIRC, the early 20th Century road design practice was to load 50 kg on a donkey, and drive it uphill, with the engineers staking its path behind. The donkey, being not stupid, chose a winding route up the hill. Since the engineers were designing for first and second generation cars, not the monsters we have now, they wanted to keep the grade low, and that's precisely what the fully loaded donkey did. It may have even cut down on the costs of building bridges and tunnels for long straightaways.

    You may laugh and/or cringe, but if we continue on our current merry trend of not repairing infrastructure while we flirt with crashing civilization for fun and profit, those donkey tracks probably will still be functional* a century from now, while any mountain road that depends on bridges, tunnels, and regular repairs will be unusable.

    *for donkeys, that is.

    209:

    The donkey, being not stupid, chose a winding route up the hill.

    Apocryphally, when they were building the roads in the West Riding (now West Yorkshire) in the 18th century, there was a locally-famous blind guy who was a regular at all the local village pubs: he knew the land like the back of his hand, so the surveyors just followed him up hill and down dale to lay out the roads.

    (This is probably a local urban legend but if you know the roads in that part of the world the idea that they were routed by a drunken blind guy seems entirely plausible.)

    210:

    SFReader @ 206: Of course, it (Google or whatever) can figure out my location - otherwise how can it connect my device to whichever url I want to access!

    Answer: not like that.

    Under the hood all data on the Internet flows as "packets" of typically a few hundred bytes each. When your computer "connects" to a web site it actually just sends a packet to the server's IP address saying "Hello? connection wanted". The web server replies with a packet saying "Ok, connection established. Send me packets with this reference number". Then your computer splits up the web page request into a bunch of packets and sends them on their way. The server receives these packets, assembles them into the original message, requests a resend of anything missing, acknowledges receipt, and then sets about assembling the data to send back in return, which also just goes as a series of packets. It looks like a "connection" in the telephone sense, but it isn't really, its just packets (BTW the name of the protocol that handles this pretend "connection" is TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol).

    Google isn't anything special in this whole scheme; its just another web site. What it does is to give your computer the name (e.g. "www.antipope.org") of the web server you want. Your computer then uses a system called the Domain Name Service (DNS) to look up the IP address of "www.antipope.org", which happens to be 89.16.179.174. So that is the destination address of the packets sent by your computer. Google doesn't run DNS; its part of the whole of the Internet and by default you will use a DNS server run by your ISP (although Google does provide public DNS servers you can use if you prefer). My earlier tutorial on DHCP mentioned that "other configuration data" gets sent when your IP address is allocated. The IP address of the DNS server your computer should use is one of those other bits of data.

    Moving these packets around is done by special purpose computers called "routers". These are the big daddies of the little router box in your house. Each one is connected to several other routers, some of which may be owned by other companies. Inside each router is a table with entries that look something like this:

    100.123.. - send via Connection 5.

    This tells the router that any packet destined for an IP address starting 100.123 should be sent to whatever is plugged in to socket number 5 in the back of the box (I'm simplifying). A complicated set of protocols lets the routers talk to each other to figure out who is connected to whom and hence the best line for any router to forward any individual packet. Once the routers have these tables worked out everything flows smoothly. If a router breaks or someone digs up a cable then the routers figure out where (in IP address terms) the damage is and recompute their tables to route around it.

    The routers know nothing about geographical location, they just know each other's IP addresses. Their collective "map" of the Internet is a bit like the London tube map: its got all the connections but the relationship with geography is approximate at best.

    Some of the geography can be deduced by figuring out who owns the IP addresses. For instance if you look up my IP address you would find it is owned by my ISP, and a quick bit of Googling will tell you that my ISP is a British company. So obviously I live in the UK. Specialist companies have collected more data by whatever means they can, and they sell this to interested parties. Here is one example. It tells me that my IP is located in the middle of the Thames just outside the Houses of Parliament. Others seem to put me in a town a few miles away from where I actually live (I'm being deliberately vague just on general principles here). I'd guess that this particular geolocation company only knows what ISP I use and has a common location for all IP addresses owned by it. Others may be able to match physical addresses typed into web sites with IP addresses, and hence figure out that e.g. 100.123.45.* are all based in Barnsley becuase the ISP that owns 100.123 has allocated 100.123.45 to it's Barnsley exchange (simplifying again).

    Google can do all this too of course, but it also has a couple of other tricks. When your Android device connects to a WiFi network it will (unless you change the settings) tell Google the IP address, the name of the WiFi network, and its geographical location from the phone's GPS receiver. Also the Google camera vans for StreetView used to collect WiFi data too (though Google promises that they have stopped doing this). So Google can tell exactly which coffee shop you are sitting in when you search for something, and also what your home address is to within a couple of houses.

    This vague relationship between IP address and location has caused problems. If you have a tracking app on your phone in case it gets stolen, it will try to figure out where it is. If it can't get GPS or doesn't have it, what you get is the best guess based on the IP address of the WiFi point it just connected to. Just like my IP address looks like it's in the Thames, there are companies which know that a block of IP addresses is e.g. in Barnsley, and report the geographical centre of Barnsley as the location for any IP address in that block. Which is a problem if your house happens to be in the geographical centre of Barnsley, as you get a lot of angry people banging on your door demanding you return their phone. In some cases the police have been known to serve search warrants on these unfortunates too.

    211:

    SFReader @ 206: Google maps - my guess is that some of the weirder (mis)directions are attributable to a combination of the coverage density of the local internet/cable network plus street configuration.

    Google Maps has nothing at all to do with Internet connections. Google simply has a database of map data obtained from wherever (some mix of data bought off other companies and derived from their own mapping vehicles).

    They do combine this with data derived from Internet connections, as I explained in my previous post, but the two are still separate.

    It seems that 'Internet' capacity is portrayed as a pipe that allows X amount of flowing data. But how much of that data is machines/people logging on and off, or the machine trying to maintain a connection with the ISP even though it's not actively being used at that moment.

    Like I said, the Internet just moves packets. Here is a picture of how routers connect:

    http://dtucker.cs.edinboro.edu/routing_1.gif

    Each connection between two routers has a physical capacity measured in bits per second. ISPs have the difficult job of making sure that they buy just enough capacity to accomodate all the people who want to use the Internet. Obviously most people aren't using their Internet links at full capacity all the time, so an ISP can sell, lets say, 50 connections in Barnsley each of which does 10 megabits per second, but then provide a lot less than 500 megabits per second to the whole of Barnsley. As long as everyone doesn't decide to download the pirate edition of Game of Thrones all at the same time this isn't a problem. Figuring out what the people of Barnsley are likely to do on the Internet next year, and how much bandwidth they will need to do it is a complicated problem that provides much employment for a wierd hybrid of network engineer, statistician, sociologist and fortune teller. You know when they get it wrong because your Internet connection slows down and Netflix complains.

    ISPs connect to each other as well, generally at big high security buildings called "co-location facilities". Small ISPs pay bigger ISPs for long-distance connections in much the same way as you pay your ISP for connections outside your house. ISPs of the same size also enter "peering agreements" by which they connect to each other. Its all big, complicated and rather opaque. ISPs also pay other companies for capacity on actual long-distance cables, or sometimes they own the cables themselves. A few years ago companies that owned long-distance rights of way (like railways and canals) realised they were sitting on gold mines: put a fibre-optic cable down the bottom of a canal or alongside a railway track, stick a router at each end, and rent out the bandwidth for easy money.

    If you are not using the Internet then your machine isn't sending or receiving any packets; there is no notion of "maintaining a connection" in that sense. Like I said previously, its all just packets. Your home router has a physical connection to your ISP, but that can probably handle a lot more bandwidth than you are actually allowed to use because the expensive bit is the back-haul bandwidth to the rest of the Internet.

    212:

    What SFReader describes is close to how the internet routing works, not how Google works. (As Paul explains in his post) Of course, you can always use tracert to find out what the route is between you and any other IP address the routers have figured out.

    Note that in a pinch phones can be located by which cell towers they are pinging off of, and the flight time of the pings. Yes, this is real (not just something on TV). A co-worker went to work for a company developing that solution, oh, it must be 15+ years ago now.

    Somebody also mentioned about IP address allocation. Note that the IP address that your computer is using, the IP address on your cable modem, and the one Google sees may all be different. IPv4 addresses are hard to get these days, and big ISPs use carrier-grade NATing. In effect, they NAT your address again (or PAT, so the same IP address is used for multiple customers) so the IP addresses they have to pay for is minimized.

    Of course, IPv6 could fix this, but network admins are finding out that all this NATing (or PATing) gives an extra layer of security to their customers for "free", so IPv6 NATing will probably become a (bigger) thing.

    213:

    I wrote: Your home router has a physical connection to your ISP, but that can probably handle a lot more bandwidth than you are actually allowed to use because the expensive bit is the back-haul bandwidth to the rest of the Internet.

    Actually, now I think about it, that isn't true any more. It used to be, but these days the back-haul bandwidth is so big that a lot of the time the wire coming in to your house is the bottleneck. Unfortunately fixing this means digging up a lot of roads. It is happening, but slowly and in large towns first.

    214:

    There's an online story by one of the fans that was good enough to read twice, (and would be worth a third reading,) so he's certainly open to derivative works, but you might check with him first.

    215:

    It used to be, but these days the back-haul bandwidth is so big that a lot of the time the wire coming in to your house is the bottleneck. Unfortunately fixing this means digging up a lot of roads. It is happening, but slowly and in large towns first.

    Maybe in urban areas. Sort of. If it's non coax copper into a building then, well, it's going to cost. I've been involved in putting fiber from a curb cut into a warehouse and the number of departments of the carrier and city is a bit insane.

    In the "burbs" it's a bit difference. Just talked to someone last night who got Gig Internet from the local cable company. It was fiber to his house then used his in wall RG6 to get to the modem.

    Biggest issue with fiber is the pole climbers (at this time) just can't splice into the coax or grab a free pair from the phone line bundle and tap into it. They have to string fiber back to a connection point. (AT&T has one hanging above my driveway if I want to ever hook into them.)

    Anyway, around here we tend to have 0 to 3 fiber runs along the streets. AT&T, Spectrum(TWC), and Google. Google is a bit thin in their coverage but I have all three. Where I see the biggest issue are the neighborhood nodes (routers) I suspect it will be a while before they can handle very much real gig traffic back hauled on 10 gig or faster fiber.

    We also have at least one non major ISP who has run fiber around and through many of the business neighborhoods. Great company. We buy various services from them. It's nice when you personally know the owner.

    216:

    Sorry, this is my usual mistake of forgetting that I'm talking to an international audience. I was thinking of the situation here in the UK. Other nations are available.

    217:

    That is possibly quite close to the truth! If I read Rackham correctly, those roads would originally have been paths through natural woodland, which is hard to see far in, and which often has fallen trees, necessitating diversions.

    218:

    Elderly Cynic @ 217: "...paths through natural woodland, which is hard to see far in, and which often has fallen trees, necessitating diversions."

    That sounds a lot like my back yard, except that I have deer, bears and muskrats in it instead of drunken blind men.

    219:

    204/205 The Bog?

    Also - Charlie ... The roadmaker was a real person, called "Blind Jack" Info page here And There is an amzing boozer in Knaresborough main square named after him - yes, I have drunk there, several times. ( Apologies for the Arsebook entry, btw. )

    220:

    Charlie Stross @ 209:

    The donkey, being not stupid, chose a winding route up the hill.

    Apocryphally, when they were building the roads in the West Riding (now West Yorkshire) in the 18th century, there was a locally-famous blind guy who was a regular at all the local village pubs: he knew the land like the back of his hand, so the surveyors just followed him up hill and down dale to lay out the roads.

    (This is probably a local urban legend but if you know the roads in that part of the world the idea that they were routed by a drunken blind guy seems entirely plausible.)

    I grew up in Durham, NC and now live in the State Capitol, Raleigh. They're about 20 miles apart.

    The road layouts follow different philosophies.

    Durham began as a railroad station for shipping tobacco to the north after the American Civil War and has a central district laid out along the railroad with a semi-grid on the north side of the tracks. During segregation & Jim Crow there was a thriving African American business district along the south side of the railroad tracks.

    Outside of the central business district the roads appear to follow the local Native American trading paths. There was a small town, East Durham, about a mile east from Durham itself along the railroad tracks. By the time I was born Durham had grown sufficiently to absorb East Durham, but the area retained its name (and about a two block long business district).

    I grew up in the eastern part of East Durham.

    Raleigh is completely different. In 1792 the State Legislature chose a site in Wake County and authorized the purchase of 1,000 acres of land from a local planter to be the NEW Capital City, named Raleigh in honor of Sir Walter Raleigh who had sponsored the Lost Colony settlement on Roanoke Island.

    Raleigh is one of the few cities in the U.S. planned from the beginning to be a state capital. The original plan is a grid with two main axes meeting at a central square and an additional square in each corner, was based on Thomas Holme's 1682 plan for Philadelphia.

    Outside of the original city, roads extended to the important towns & cities of North Carolina (& beyond). Many of those towns are reflected in the names of city streets, Hillsborough, Halifax, Fayetteville, New Bern, Edenton ... The city grew outward along these roads.

    Note there is no Durham St, because Durham didn't exist back then.

    Some time in the last half of the 20th Century someone got the bright idea you could take two shorter local streets that were almost parallel and connect them with an S-curve to make a longer street, which is why in some places you go around a curve and the street name changes. They also decided we needed a major 4 lane highway going into the heart of downtown.

    A lot of the screwy stuff in Raleigh is the result of the State Legislature tampering with the local area to make things more convenient for themselves and damn what the residents might want!

    I live just about a mile north of the State Capitol, just outside the original boundary of Raleigh.

    221:

    I got gigabit fibre installed on 5th January (although I'm only paying for the 200Mbit/s tier and actually getting about 217, other options are 100, 500 and 900 at different prices but over the same connection) - installation involved: drilling through the wall and installing one box for the fibre to terminate and another box (router) connected to that by ethernet that has the VOIP phone connection and WiFi (that I'm not using because I plugged in a Velop mesh with two nodes instead): blowing fibre to the nearest cabinet. I got the first three months free and a static IP (that I need for some work purposes) free as well. Internet snoop pages report my location as either Milton Keynes or London (I'm actually in Aberdeen). Netflix UHD is apparently still capped at 15.25Mbps in the UK.

    222:

    Paul @ 213:

    I wrote: Your home router has a physical connection to your ISP, but that can probably handle a lot more bandwidth than you are actually allowed to use because the expensive bit is the back-haul bandwidth to the rest of the Internet.

    Actually, now I think about it, that isn't true any more. It used to be, but these days the back-haul bandwidth is so big that a lot of the time the wire coming in to your house is the bottleneck. Unfortunately fixing this means digging up a lot of roads. It is happening, but slowly and in large towns first.

    Google had crews in my neighborhood last week to install the infrastructure for "Google Fiber" - orange plastic tubes that I guess the actual fiber will go through. Plus a tiny tube that seems to have wire already installed. I don't know if this is going to be for power or ground ... or something else, but it's obviously NOT the fiber itself.

    We've had AT&T fiber available for a while and lately Spectrum appears to be "upgrading" their system (because for a couple of weeks my internet would die EVERY NIGHT between midnight and 3 am - I have real bad insomnia) while they worked on the upgrade.

    223:

    I haven't been able to find a license for Freefall, but Mark Stanley seems open to derivative works that are at least in the spirit of Creative Commons. So there is no reason why one couldn't create an e-book version.

    I'm pretty sure some random fan making hardcopies wouldn't count. But if Mark Stanley were to release a Freefall Chapter One compilation I think that would count as publication for Hugo purposes. (I hope, anyway.) I don't know him personally so I have no idea if he's interested or would care about a Hugo Award.

    That doesn't change the fact that I think Freefall deserves a Hugo Award.

    224:

    When they were building the Alaska Highway during WWII the foreman asked the surveyor where they wanted the road. The surveyor said "head for that brown hillock, and call me when you get there".

    Several weeks later they caught up with the moose and called the surveyor…

    225:

    a lot of the time the wire coming in to your house is the bottleneck

    Back in the 80s when I worked for the tricorporate, we had a prototype project to lay fibre into every house to 'future-proof' the network.

    It was cancelled because management couldn't understand how anyone could use that much bandwidth and didn't want to waste money on it…

    226:

    I've liked the story from the Whole Earth Catalog, lo, these many years ago: in the mid-sixties, Mexico City built a new university, and paved no paths between the buildings. The university opened... and the next summer, they paved the paths between the buildings that people who lived and worked there made, rather than some asshole architect's idea of what might win them an award.

    228:

    How neurons work began to be hashed out in the 1930s-1950s. Early artificial neural networks then showed up in the late 50s if I remember correctly

    Turing anticipated them with his "Disorganised Machines" paper in 1948, but he could give no training algorithm to train the network from its random initial connections. It's typical of Turing's more philosophical writing: a brilliant paper that then wanders off on a tangent (he imagines a school master teaching the neural net).

    Turns out that adding one or more hidden layers solved the problem, though. Oops. This became apparent around 1990 and caused quite a stir

    I think the big turning point was 1986, Rumelhart et al. They demonstrated that a 3-layer network could be taught by simple back-propagation to map common English written words to a set of phonemes ("the neural network learns to read!"), and that if you did it would develop some of the typical errors that kids make when learning to read.

    It was a huge sensation, and suddenly "Connectionism" was the hot new thing!

    There was a lot of showmanship involved, as there often is when science paradigms change. For demos at conferences they used a voder that turned phonemes-to-audio with the voice of a cutesy six-year-old. So they claim their neural net "learned to read" making typical mistakes a 6-year old would make and then this voice of a little kid read out the words making the mistakes little kids make. You can imagine the effect that had back when computers didn't talk.

    229:

    when science paradigms change. The one I & also, I suspect a lot of other people will remember, is the total & complete revolution in Geology approx 1964-69, with the acceptance that what we now call Plate Tectonics was the underlying mechanism behind/underneath (!) all geology.

    230:

    Re:'... the back-haul bandwidth'

    Thanks for your explanations - much appreciated!

    I just read the Wikipedia entry for 'back-haul bandwidth' and marvel at how signals are kept as clean as they are given the volume of signals coursing back and forth, between and across various pathways and materials (electric wire, optical fiber, transmission towers, meshes, satellites, etc.).

    231:

    I recall being shocked that the lecturer would state flatly that it was impossible for it to work.

    Generally I do not hold Clarke Law ( https://www.forbes.com/quotes/745/ ) in very high regard. But in this case Arthur C. Clarke was absolutely right.

    232:

    ilya187 Completely NULL result - link completely borked

    232 Uh?

    233:

    Strange. The link worked fine for me.

    234:

    we had a prototype project to lay fibre into every house to 'future-proof' the network. It was cancelled because management couldn't understand how anyone could use that much bandwidth

    Australia's NBN went through that, but on a national scale. The guy that said "the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics" also decided that a slower network delivered later for more money was better. Mostly it meant his mates in the telecom industry didn't have to write off their existing infrastructure but could sell the useless bits to the government and get paid by the government to fix/upgrade/extend the rest of their shitty copper systems.

    235:

    (I'm simplifying)

    That's okay, I'm sure no-one here will 'arp on about it.

    236:

    (You'd really be set up to rip into them)

    237:

    Odd. I clicked on it, and got to the intended page.

    In any case, all it has is a quote of Clarke's Law:

    "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

    238:

    "Completely NULL result - link completely borked"

    That's a good sign. It indicates that you have some scummy vermin called "trustarc.com" and possibly also "consensu.org" already in your block list. That Forbes site tries to force you to pass through the Gate of Evil so they can eat your flesh, but if you have the right protective wards installed they can't even show it to you.

    239:

    I've liked the story from the Whole Earth Catalog, lo, these many years ago: in the mid-sixties, Mexico City built a new university, and paved no paths between the buildings. The university opened... and the next summer, they paved the paths between the buildings that people who lived and worked there made, rather than some asshole architect's idea of what might win them an award.

    This story was also told of my alma mater, The Evergreen State College - so circa 1970, about fifteen years before I heard it as one of many campus legends. It's possible this idea was going around at the time, as the paths between the four original dorms and the main campus look like that. Hopefully Mexico City had less rain and mud than Olympia, Washington.

    240:

    These are known as desire paths. Sometimes site managers will try to block them, leading to secondary paths that route around the barrier. Sometimes they accede to the inevitable and pave them over when they emerge. And there are lots of stories of planners who use this as a deliberate strategy, including at a number of colleges. It's likely that these overlap. See https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desire-paths-can-lead-better-design/ for some stories.

    My anecdotal contribution: our staff car park developed a desire path leading off site. I suggested that it be paved, but I was told that any alterations would require endless negotiations with the freeholder so it wasn't worth considering.

    242:

    Forbes?!?

    That's one of those websites that whines and refuses to show you anything if you have an adblocker installed ... then if you disable the blocker, it turns out they use ad exchanges that host malware and install javascript cryptocurrency miners in your browser.

    243:

    Which, in theory, is a breach of the Computer Misuse Act. But there's one law for peasants and another for persons who matter, er, megacorporations.

    244:

    In its standard config Firefox blocks the installation of javascript cryptocurrency miners and four other types of malware.

    It has two higher levels of blocking above that.

    245:

    I also think that even if you would start trying to accuse somebody using your browser to mine Ethereum, there'd be a lot of finger-pointing, avoidance, and obfuscation.

    Ad systems apparently (not my specialty, please somebody correct me if I'm wrong here) have multiple layers, so that the web page owner pays some ad exchange, who then displays ads from some other exchanges, until you get to the "real" ad. Of course hopping countries and doing other obfuscation might be used, too.

    So, it's not easy nor quick.

    I have also read some texts which indicate that much, if not most, of the internet ad business is basically a scam, and don't really make money for the web sited displaying the ads, nor really direct business to the advertisers.

    246:

    I heard the same thing about Waterloo, from a prof who was there when the university opened. He said they used a helicopter to photograph the paths in the snow around the dorms and used that to decide where to pave and where to plant sod when spring came.

    It sounded like a neat idea, but given that people tend to follow the easiest trail, and in snow that means one already tramped, I always suspected that if true it meant the paths were following routes trampled in the snow by a minority of students.

    In The Adolescence of P-1, set partly in Waterloo, the author mentioned university admin caving to student desires and paving the desire paths they have worn into the grass while tearing up and replanting the old (unused) paths — at which point student start religiously ignoring the new paved paths and following the old previously-ignored routes. It feels like a detail based on something that actually happened…

    247:
    I think the big turning point was 1986, Rumelhart et al. They demonstrated that a 3-layer network could be taught by simple back-propagation to map common English written words to a set of phonemes ("the neural network learns to read!"), and that if you did it would develop some of the typical errors that kids make when learning to read.

    Even earlier than that. Rumelhart et al's classic three volume "Parallel Distributed Processing" was published in 87, and most of the work it referenced was early 80s IIRC (mine are currently in storage so I can't check — so my memory could be lying:-)

    It was certainly presented as run-of-the-mill uncontroversial stuff when I did my AI undergrad degree in 88.

    248:

    Exactly. And the first thing Forbes does is process your request through these "trustarc.com" scumbags, who purport to provide some kind of assurance that a site is not dodgy, but according to wikipedia sites that use them are 50% more likely to be dodgy than sites which don't. If you have "trustarc.com" itself blocked, then the processing can't happen and all you see is a blank screen.

    The reference wikipedia cites ( http://www.benedelman.org/news-092506/ ) does not say 50%. It actually says over 100%.

    Personally, I regard the mere appearance of "trust" as a substring of the domain name to be an indicator of dodginess, on the general principle that the more some outfit prances and postures about how much you can trust them, the more likely it is you actually can't.

    249:

    "...paving the desire paths they have worn into the grass while tearing up and replanting the old (unused) paths - at which point student start religiously ignoring the new paved paths and following the old previously-ignored routes. It feels like a detail based on something that actually happened..."

    It sounds like they have forgotten that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The old paths were not useless, they just weren't useful for all routes; the new paths, ditto. But a paved surface continues to look the same whether people walk on it or not, whereas a grass one doesn't.

    A very common sight in England is for two streets, with pavements down the sides, intersecting each other at right angles, to have a square of grass inside the angle where they meet. There is invariably a muddy track worn across the diagonal of the square by people who are turning the corner. If you are very lucky, after many years of muddiness the council might even tarmac or pave the track. But you can't then tear up the pavements along the edges of the streets and replace them with grass, or else that too would be worn to mud by the people who are going straight on.

    250:

    I know of exactly one trust that I do: trustwave.com, who is a root CA.

    ObDisclosure: I worked there for four months in '09.

    251:

    Of course the obvious solution is to pave the entire thing, then declare it tapu and make everyone walk around it. Which is what the military do with parade grounds.

    252:

    The bigger problem around here is mountain bikes, although OHVs do the same thing in their parks.

    It's called gator-backing, where people keep making new trails to have the fun of riding a new trail. left unchecked, it ends up looking like an alligator's back from the air. This is how you get 30 kilometers of trails in a few hundred hectares.

    Since the mountain bikers are inevitably parasitizing park spaces that were set aside for the protection of rare species, and destroying them for their own amusement, my sympathies with their path-building urges are at best limited. The OHV brigade is only better when they're destroying areas set aside for them to destroy.

    253:

    Heteromeles @ 252

    The big problem we have around here has to do with our ongoing replacement of logging clearcuts with logging mosaics. In theory they give a large variety of squarish "islands" in which the animals can hide in. In practice they multiply the number of logging roads where giant logging trucks tamp down the soil forever, and they make easy for predators to spot their prey along those huge avenues between the square islands.

    On the positive side owners of ATVs or snowmobiles are afraid to go on those logging roads that make up the dividers between the squares of the mosaic. They don't want to get flattened by a giant logging truck. So, they keep to the narrower marked-out paths established long ago for snowmobiles and used in the summer by ATVs.

    254:

    I saw a really interesting sign the other day in one of those "wreck this bit" parks, to the effect that if people kept setting the dumped rubbish on fire the park would be fenced off. It looked very much as though there was at least a two way contest between the illegal dumping (often by the truckload), the MTB track builders, and likely the local vandals/bored youf. It's been ~30 years since I was involved in any of that so I'm a bit out of the loop.

    We have minor issues with people riding bicycles off track on the riverine parks, but the council put up tape where they really don't want people riding and that seems to work. In a couple of places the tape is backed up with wire rope and that definitely works 😏 (I assume the council does the rope too). A bigger problem is motorbikes, occasionally some fuknukle on a dirtbike will go digging up anything and everything, or someone in what I assume is a stolen car does likewise. I like to think they occasionally discover which hazard tape is backed with wire rope by riding into it.

    255:

    but the council put up tape where they really don't want people riding and that seems to work.

    Must be nice.

    Around here the various riders were encroaching on an airport property. Which is also a big part of a watershed with rules on run off. Signs didn't work. So the airport put up a fence. Fence keeps getting torn down. And those not tearing it down (well mostly) are in court demanding the airport shrink their security perimeter and let them make/ride tails on the airport property in the watershed protected areas.

    256:

    See https://99percentinvisible.org/article/least-resistance-desire-paths-can-lead-better-design/ for some stories.

    99 Percent Invisible is a huge time sink! Why don't you just send us to TV Tropes while you're at it?

    Yeah, I blew hours reading their short educational articles. Again. grin

    257:

    Most places I've seen around airports the surrounding area is set aside for aircraft to use if things don't go according to plan. Then the council discovers that lots of business like to be near the airport for various reasons. Then they discover that lots of other businesses like to be near the airport because of all the potential customers who are going to the businesses near the airport and before you know it all that emergency space is full of buildings and people and the developers are all very rich.

    Just having dirt bikes trashing the place sounds like bliss.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Essendon_Airport_Beechcraft_King_Air_crash

    258:

    You left out: people like to build houses near the airport because the land is cheap and it's close to transport, but then complain about the noise and try to get the airport shut down

    259:

    Around here it's not people, it's developers, which may be a subtype of people, but I'm not sure. The more interesting of them like to build homes in hazardous areas (high wildfire, airport flight path, next to old landfills, etc), market them, then leave the residents to find out what they've been lied to about. That's when the complaints about airport noise start. All the people who were smart enough to notice didn't buy, and the neighborhood gets weighed with the less observant people.

    That, incidentally, is why California property purchase agreements are so annoyingly long. It's not big-brotherism, it's that so many real estate scams have been run here over the years that the legislature decided that caveat emptor was insufficient. So now they require lots of warnings.

    Yes, we have a shortage of housing. Partially that's because we're picky, but I cringe at what that means other, cheaper states are willing to allow in terms of hazards. I mean yes, during your California lifespan you're likely to get hit by an earthquake, a fire if out in the boonies, and a meter of rain when the norm is 30 cm, but that's normal for every place. Right?

    260:

    In The Adolescence of P-1, set partly in Waterloo...

    I still maintain this is an under-appreciated piece of science fiction. One of these days I should actually watch the TV movie but I'm more likely to just read the original novel again.

    261:

    people like to build houses near the airport ... then complain about the noise and try to get the airport shut down

    This was literally a lawsuit by Donald Trump, and he's widely regarded as a person.

    262:

    Around here it's not people, it's developers, which may be a subtype of people, but I'm not sure. The more interesting of them like to build homes in hazardous areas...

    My college geology teacher had a story about that, the punchline of which was him delightfully bursting out, "I know that place! That's where the mudslides come down off of Mount Rainier!" And then he looked up from the map to see the developers' faces and discovered they did not want to hear this. They were quite grumpy about not being able to build in the geologically interesting mudslide zone...

    264:

    Ah, yeah, but that's not really the same thing as paths made by people who just want to get between two points by the most direct route instead of following some pillock of a planner's desire to send everyone the long way round.

    Round here we have a piece of woodland, designated as a nature reserve of some minor degree, which has an ancient holloway running up the hill at one end of it. This now looks like a huge ditch some metres deep with steeply sloping sides. There are all sorts of tracks and paths crossing it where kids have found new opportunities to ride bicycles down one side and up the other, but they only appear where they can do so without having to ride through a tree or through too dense a stand of undergrowth. To my inexpert eye they seem more of a risk to the antiquity than to the plant life. They don't come round with axes and shovels to create their own opportunities, which seems to be what you have to deal with.

    265:

    We don't really get those particular hazards all that much, but their favourite trick is to build on one of those inviting expanses of completely flat land that for some strange reason nobody else has built anything on for hundreds of years except possibly in one or two places where there happens to be a bit of a hump a few metres above the rest. Then people complain about getting wet, and it's never the builders who have to try and get them dry again, but the councils who gave them permission to build there in the first place. (For some reason councils seem to be where all the most mindbendingly thick people end up.)

    Locally we have an example of the post-industrial variant on that, converting old warehouses into yuppie flats and selling them to people who are too unobservant to read the 500 years of flood level records carved into the wall, or to see that the old warehouses stand on the edge of the docks.

    Though certainly anything that is a well-established noisy feature has to put up with constant complaints from people whose house viewing appointments were carefully arranged to fall at a moment when it wasn't making a noise. Railway yards, race tracks, concert venues, anything. And for some bizarre reason, when the complaints start to get legal, it doesn't seem to work to simply say "tough shit, we've been here for 100 years, you should have listened before you moved in you stupid bastards". Instead they have to spend loads of money on the impossible task of trying to make a quiet noise, and since a lot of them are not doing much more than scraping by to begin with, we end up with valuable amenities being closed or crippled by a handful of moaning divvies.

    266:

    Like Abbottsford, or as it is now known, Lower Abbottsford...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Abbotsford_landslip

    People often seem not to want to know why things are cheap, or why there's an open expanse of flat land, or other questions that seem important to me. OTOH, I am currently eyeing off some cheap land that people are selling because the bushfires saved them having to apply for permits to clear the trees that were on it. Or houses, same same. I am hoping that in an area where a 500-700m2 section normally goes for $300k I will pay less than $50k. The cost of building a house has gone up by about that much, and if I can get my cheat* approved it will be a big win.

    • "cheat" in the sense of a fire bunker built for much less than the normal cost, not "cheat" as in piling up tinder and hoping for the best.
    267:

    I never before thought it was plausible that Captain Kirk managed to talk so many computers into self-destructing, but huh, this post is making me reconsider.

    268:

    People often seem not to want to know why things are cheap,

    Oh my goodness yes. (In my most southern belle voice.)

    Moved to Raleigh, NC 32 years ago. County politicians and staff had figured out landfill would run out of space about 10+ years prior and bought up some land that would be suitable for the next landfill. Opposite side of county and didn't cost all that much. Population back then about 225K and projected to grow much faster than most areas. (We're now at 1.1mil.)

    So the land in the 10 miles or so around the "next" landfill was now not appreciating as fast as the rest of the county. So developers starting building housing in that area. Mostly bought by people moving in from other areas who had missed all the local reporting on the new landfill.

    As county started moving forward with plans to open the new landfill, well, the howling was heard for miles around. Lawsuits. Protests. Political campaigns. Letters to the editor. You name it. All of it doomed to failure as the county had been very public with their plans but still it slowed things down enough that there was going to be a gap between the old one filling and new one opening. Study was done. The county discovered that recycling was going to be cheaper than shipping garbage by rail 1000 miles or more. So we got serious about recycling. (Back then newspapers were something like 20%-30% of the volume going into the landfill.)

    So now all is well. We're recycling. Old landfill will keep working till new one opens up. Great.

    Oops. Developers had built some big housing developments around existing landfill and people bought in based on the landfill would be a park in a year or so. Not 5 to 8. More lawsuits. Gnashing of teeth. Letters to editor. Political campaigns. Sound familiar?

    Anyway there was a huge amount of money spend on politics and lawsuits and at the end of the day it all happened as planned. Plus we got a decent recycling system that is likely much better than if things had not happened this way. Now if they could only find some new poor country who would take our plastics now that China has stopped.

    Then there was the housing development built under the flight path of the American Airlines hub here. Strangely almost all appointments to see the model homes took place during lulls in the flight waves taking off and landing. Rinse, lather, repeat.

    269:

    You left out: people like to build houses near the airport because the land is cheap and it's close to transport, but then complain about the noise and try to get the airport shut down

    A friend who's a recently retired pilot told me about Burbank airport in the LA area. His comment was that he figured he flew into it maybe 100 times. He thinks he had 3 smooth landings. And all the takeoffs were a bit interesting. Lots of noise abatement rules which dictate the flight paths with noise monitors all around which can generate fine for specific flights based on the meter readings.

    Short version, don't fly into this LA basin airport if you're the least bit uncomfortable with flying.

    The western approaches to DCA (Washington DC) can also be interesting. Basically planes get to fly the Potomac River if approaching from or leaving toward the west. If landing from the west and seated on the left side of the plane, don't forget to wave at the folks in the USA Today building. Seriously. Of course this is nothing like the old Hong Kong aiport.

    270:

    Sometimes, of course, the airport comes to you. I see the wikipedia article for Cribb Island (slightly famous for giving the world the Bee Gees) sets the tone from the beginning: it was a suburb of Brisbane...

    271:

    The more interesting of them like to build homes in hazardous areas

    There's a development in Cochrane, Alberta on top of a bluff with wonderful views. While my brother-in-law was studying geology his prof used that as an example of building in foolish places, because it was only a matter of time before the bluff eroded and those houses fell into the valley. One of the students in the class was very upset, because her parents had just bought one of those houses.

    Alberta has had seven of the ten most expensive natural disasters in Canadian history. And is the most resistant to planning regulations and the like, because apparently rules infringe cowboy freedoms or something.

    https://globalnews.ca/news/2810070/top-10-most-costly-disasters-in-canadian-history-for-insurers/

    272:

    Then there was the housing development built under the flight path of the American Airlines hub here. Strangely almost all appointments to see the model homes took place during lulls in the flight waves taking off and landing.

    In Arthur Hailey's 1968 novel Airport, there's a scene where he describes the problems pilots have because they have to make dangerous noise-abatement maneuvers just after take-off because of complaints from resident under the flight path. The backstory is that when the development was going in the airport posted signs that it was expanding the runways and developers tore them down so buyers wouldn't realize. I've always wondered if he was basing that on an actual event.

    273:

    I've always wondered if he was basing that on an actual event.

    I think such happened around Chicago's O'hare (ORD) in it's early days. After the move from Midway. And such happening around LAX in Los Angeles wouldn't surprise me. Both have developments tight around them.

    I don't know about the local one. It was built just before we moved here. I must be strange as when I move somewhere I actually get out a map and look for such things like where do the airport runways point.

    For a while an apartment we had in the DFW area was literally under the direct line of one of the DFW runways. But they sound proofing was good and my wife could walk to work and for other reasons we rented it. One time when I was there there was a flash of light into the apartment. Then a few minutes later another. Happened a few more times over the next 10 to 15 minutes. At some point I figured out that when the sun was at a particular spot in the sky it would reflect off the bare metal skin that American had at the time and sweep a big spot on the ground as the planes came in for a landing. Angles were not there for take offs. And it would only happen a during a brief time and date window when the angles were just right. (American into DFW, in normal times, would land 150 or so planes one after the other using 4 runways at a time.)

    274:

    Pigeon @ 265:

    Though certainly anything that is a well-established noisy feature has to put up with constant complaints from people whose house viewing appointments were carefully arranged to fall at a moment when it wasn't making a noise.

    Google is your friend. When we were last house-hunting (wow, like 15 years ago, where does the time fly?) we looked up every house on Google Maps before going there. These days we would also look hard at Google Earth and StreetView. There are quite a lot of things you don't want to live near that show up on them.

    A few miles away from us is a large sewage treatment plant. It happens to be just to the east of a rather nice village where we might have considered buying a house, if it not for the smell whenever the wind blew from the east. We happened to know about this plant because our son went to school nearby, but other more innocent housebuyers find out too late because the local estate agents look at the weather forecasts when scheduling viewings in that area.

    275:

    At some point I figured out that when the sun was at a particular spot in the sky it would reflect off the bare metal skin that American had at the time and sweep a big spot on the ground as the planes came in for a landing.

    That's the way the Iridium flares worked. Alas, the current generation of Iridium satellites don't have the flat, shiny antennas that produced the flares. Other satellites still flare, but not as predictably as the Iridiums did (mostly).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare

    276:

    I think such happened around Chicago's O'hare (ORD) in it's early days. After the move from Midway. And such happening around LAX in Los Angeles wouldn't surprise me. Both have developments tight around them.

    Not particularly, although I'm not sure I'd want to live in Culver City or Westchester.

    LAX is near the ocean. Since there's an onshore breeze, planes normally take off towards the ocean and land coming in over the LA basin. Indeed, if you're at LAX, you can look east and see a long line of sparkly plane lights coming in. Usually around eight of them, four per runway, five miles or so apart.

    There used to be a housing subdivision at the foot of what's now the runway at LAX. The homes were torn out, and it's been largely returned to nature, as one of the two homes of the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly. the other home is just down the coast at the Chevron refinery (Do people greenwash their polluting operations by bragging about saving little blue butterflies? People do.) I've been out on the El Segundo Dunes once, and it's effing loud, to the point of needing ear protection. You also need a security minder, since it's the perfect place for someone with munitions to bring down a plane, and no one wants that to happen.

    But most of the buildings in the immediate landing path next to LAX are well-sealed business and industrial buildings. I worked in one of them. Not fun, but not as loud as you'd expect. Landing doesn't make the same level of noise as takeoff.

    Burbank's another story, as is San Diego's Lindbergh Field and John Wayne in Orange County. In all of these, the planes are climbing up over residential neighborhoods There planes have to go up fast and underpowered, to keep from deafening people. That's how the pilots earn their "huge" salaries. I don't know about Burbank, but San Diego airport more-or-less shuts down takeoffs at 8 pm, and I assume it's so people can sleep.

    The wildest ride I've had in the last few years was flying into Reno. It's on the eastern edge of a rather tallish mountain range (the Sierra Nevadas), and it's in a desert (which produces thermals) with some interesting solar thermal power plants in the flight path (those mirrors produce a lot of extra heat). All of this makes for a rather bouncy flight in.

    Now I'm just waiting for someone to chime in "you think that's bad. Try landing at Paro." Any takers?

    277:

    REALLY dislike dirt bikers. Hell, back in the mid-eighties, a friend, who had moved back home for a while, outside Coopersburg, PA (around 45 min nw of Philly) would walk the bounds of his folks' property. In spite of the "NO TRESPASSING", etc, they'd drive their bloody bikes onto private property and leave trails.

    278:

    Park Ridge, IL. Nice 'burb of Chicago. Were screaming and yelling when O'Hare wanted another runway.

    As opposed to Norridge, several mi- south of there. When my late wife and I relocated to Chicago from Austin, for about 3 weeks, we stayed in friends' condo (they were divorcing). Late afternoon, all conversation would stop every 3-4 min.

    It was about 3mi due east of the tower at O'Hare.

    279:

    These days we would also look hard at Google Earth and StreetView.

    When we were looking for a place in San Antonio a while back, Google Earth was very handy for finding out where the flight paths from KSAT were, also a couple of local quarries where blasting was going on. And StreetView for a preliminary check of the neighborhood.

    280:

    I'm kind of interested to see what happens when we do get ubiquitous ML, sociologically speaking.

    Consider (one of) the simplest forms of ML: categorisation. Treat your ML system as a black box, feed it bunches of pictures labelled "cata" and "dogs", train it and now it can recognize cats and dogs.

    Now imagine this is built into Excel, Outlook or whatever. And imagine your job is a financial admin in a small company. Your job is to approve expense claims. Now realize that this is a categorisation problem: sort your claims into two labelled folders, "good claims", "bad claims". Train your model. It now does 98 % of the work, you're just left to deal with the corner cases.

    Now apart from the fact that over time, your company is turning into a pile of AIs, realize that the staff learn whats an "acceptable" claim and adjust. Your job has turned from "sort claims" into "ML retrainer", and your role is to debug "Why did the ML system get this decision wrong?".

    Your skillset and desired education switches over to learning about biases and how they affect cognition. So Racism, biases in general become "obvious cognitive errors" to you over time.

    Along with ML becoming, in practice, experimental psychology, this will dramatically change the way society actually thinks over time. The next few decades look fascinating.

    281:

    Heteromeles @ 276

    The shortest runway in the world is at Saba island.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk7D2Hvqt8I

    But all this is irrelevant since Arthur C. Clarke said (in one of his last novels) that AIs will soon arrive and there will be no human pilots anymore and all landings and take-offs will be safe.

    282:

    Or Patrick McGoohan typing "Why" into the computer terminal during the last episode of The Prisoner. It seemed really cool when I was 12...

    The Star Trek thing is easier to understand. Imagine that you're a sentient computer, and you can either overcharge your capacitors and blow yourself to oblivion, or you can discuss galactic politics with William Shatner...

    More seriously, I guess the show's writers didn't understand that invalid input would generate an error message and a return to the prompt. Do you want to try something more sophisticated, how about explaining a "divide by zero error" to your average TV audience. (my Linux machine just told me that "Division by zero is undefined," but you might have stopped a sixties computer with that one... maybe.

    283:

    I think there are either alternative or intermediate and messy steps.

    For example, I can see automation of expense reporting. Instead of using Google Maps to come up with a plausible distance and taking a standardized mileage charge, the company car can cough up where it's been, how many miles it's driven, even wear and tear, and that can go to expenses. The downside of this is that if the employee was a responsible person, ran a personal errand in the middle of a trip (say to get coffee so they didn't crash the car), the AI would get pissy about the little side trip and the accountant would have to sort things out.

    Ditto using the company phone to buy food. The AI in the phone could easily turn into the little company commissar nixing purchases to keep the employee healthy, or some such.

    The other fun thing that will almost certainly happen is aftermarket and third party AIs will become available to employees for hacking AIs used by HR and Accounting to manage the company. In this scenario, accounting becomes less about just doing the books, and more a Red Queen race where the humans are forensic accountants trying to keep employees from using AIs to cheat on expenses.

    This is simply an outgrowth of what's been happening for years in academia, where you buy papers instead of writing them, to the point where teachers have to screen students' work against online paper sellers to make sure they actually did the work.

    284:

    Yes, we all got a kick of how computer illiterate Hollywood writers were about computers. I mean, how could a program cause a computer to catch fire?

    Then IBM came out with the monochrome monitor & adapter card...

    (It was possible to reprogram the display controller with invalid timings that caused the monitor to let out the magic smoke. Not a shining moment for whoever designed the monitors circuitry).

    Note that the writers still are not very computer literate, although they may think they are because they use them all the time now.

    285:

    But all this is irrelevant since Arthur C. Clarke said (in one of his last novels) that AIs will soon arrive and there will be no human pilots anymore and all landings and take-offs will be safe.

    Yeah, that's why they want to put humans on Mars...

    More seriously, drones crash at absurdly high rates, compared with manned planes. They have a different ideal mission profile than do human planes. While I'll accept that it's entirely possible for drones to get much better at crisis flying, we're a long way from there yet.

    286:

    Agreed. If you've got a powerful language - C, ASM, etc. it's possible to program your hardware controllers to do really stupid things. One friend told the story of blowing up a more modern monitor than you described by making the horizontal and vertical beams only vertical. Apparently over time it heated the glass of the screen in a most interesting fashion...

    But yes, on-screen computing is about 95% bullshit.

    287:

    Niala NO Try outer Scotland Barra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barra_Airport Map reference: Here

    288:

    Heteromeles @ 285: " While I'll accept that it's entirely possible for drones to get much better at crisis flying, we're a long way from there yet."

    Some AI types like to point out that we've been pushing the goal posts of true AI backwards each time we attain some form of AI. In the case of robots replacing human pilots on all passenger or cargo planes they point out that we've had autoland features for more than 30 years and that only FAA rules now prevent the implementation of take-off features too.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

    289:

    Scott Sanford @ 239:

    I've liked the story from the Whole Earth Catalog, lo, these many years ago: in the mid-sixties, Mexico City built a new university, and paved *no* paths between the buildings. The university opened... and the next summer, they paved the paths between the buildings that people who lived and worked there made, rather than some asshole architect's idea of what might win them an award.

    This story was also told of my alma mater, The Evergreen State College - so circa 1970, about fifteen years before I heard it as one of many campus legends. It's possible this idea was going around at the time, as the paths between the four original dorms and the main campus look like that. Hopefully Mexico City had less rain and mud than Olympia, Washington.

    Or you could do what my almost alma mater did and pave over the whole damn campus & make it into a giant patio.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brickyard_(NC_State)

    An exaggeration of course, but not as much as you might think.

    290:

    David L @ 255:

    but the council put up tape where they really don't want people riding and that seems to work.

    Must be nice.

    Around here the various riders were encroaching on an airport property. Which is also a big part of a watershed with rules on run off. Signs didn't work. So the airport put up a fence. Fence keeps getting torn down. And those not tearing it down (well mostly) are in court demanding the airport shrink their security perimeter and let them make/ride tails on the airport property in the watershed protected areas.

    Is that RDU? Because my experience is that the FAA & Airport Police don't have much patience with people trespassing within their security perimeter. Tearing down that fence is a Federal Crime

    292:

    Actually, I'm not pushing the goal posts at all. Here's what I know, as of the last few years:

    --The Navy was experimenting with drones launching and landing from carriers (tricky flying). They're obviously planning on fielding the tech, but AFAIK they're no there yet.
    --The USAF can land their spaceplane drone X-37B, so they're capable of a hairy landing under controlled conditions (in this case, where they control the airspace and cyberspace the X-37B is landing in). --The USAF still loses far more drones than it does manned planes, last I heard. This is considered acceptable, because they're cheaper and no lives were lost. --Drones and plane autopilots have some stuff they're really good at (loitering in a bounded area, flying a course at a speed), and stuff they're terrible at (dealing with a crisis, taking off and landing in messy environments, dogfighting, etc.)

    The basic problem is that the computer that will simulate a pilot's reflexes in total probably right now is probably heavier than the plane itself. To some degree you can get around that by networking the drone into a ground-based AI, but that introduces all sorts of interesting latency issues. Besides which, networking the drone with a ground-based pilot is still cheaper, although the latency problem crashes planes pretty routinely.

    Now I'm in the minority that thinks the US Space Force isn't an intrinsically terrible idea, and this is why. Right now, we (the militaristic US) use satellites to intermediate between drones that aren't all that competent and ground-based pilots who aren't all that disposable, and it works okay for having murder-bots loitering in the troposphere above the Middle East. Everyone knows that's what we use satellites for, and so the obvious way to cripple our drone force is to take out the satellites.

    And that's the rub. We may be able to field fully functional military drones now, but only if there's a fully functional military satellite network with low latency linking the drone with the data center flying it. That's a weak link, and I certainly wouldn't trust someone's life to it unless there was no other option. Worse, it's likely that, during wartime, the intelligence flying the plane will be limited to what can fit inside the plane, due to pervasive cyber and space-war.

    I see three non-exclusive solutions.

    One is to find simpler ways to fly--make planes giant mosquitoes, as it were, so the processing power will fit on the plane. Insects don't need as many neurons as humans to fly, so maybe it's possible to fly more stupidly than we do. Then we need ground-based commanders, not ground-based pilots.

    A second is a variation on Komey's Law, where fully-skilled piloting AIs get light enough to fit inside a plane. We'll probably get here within a decade, two at the most, depending on the skill level desired (I'd settle for an AI that flew as well as a pigeon, but that's way far off).

    A third solution is to continue the human-plane-AI partnership, where the humans and the AI partner in flying, with each assuming a dominant role in different phases of the flight, the AI captaining during the routine boring stuff and the human taking charge when things get more complicated. This is what we do now. What you don't want to do is to have the AI fly the plane except when it can't, because humans are really bad at handling unexpected disasters with little or no warning. We do better when we're paying attention and see the problem coming. So, as with cars, it works better if both controllers are looped in.

    And there's no reason not to work on all three simultaneously, which I'm pretty sure is what aeronautical engineers are actually doing.

    293:

    I'm not considering military drones, I'm considering robot airliners.

    294:

    Employees cheating? How about the mods for the company to fake its books, so as to screw with the taxes, and loans...?

    295:

    Niala There's always Westray to/from Papa Westray And a YouTube clip of the same ....

    296:

    As opposed to the assembly language command, HCF (halt and catch fire)?

    Btw, what wikipedia, etc, do not mention is that I've read, in the early days of DEC, it was possible to run a printer so fast that the paper would catch on fire....

    297:

    I'm not considering military drones, I'm considering robot airliners.

    Same problems, except more casualties per drone failure.

    Note that the USAF is basically the US military air cargo service, along with things that make booming noises. They're not looking at automating the air cargo sector, but rather the attack planes. I'm guessing there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that drones are better at replacing humans where humans die a lot, which is not on cargo flights. Then again, the cargo plane isn't just a plane, it's staffed by a squad of airmen who handle the cargo, and that's a fairly human job (there's a reason why loadmasters get the plane loaded and balanced. It's a non-trivial job). The third angle is that apparently logistics and routing get screwy and are often rerouted on the go. For trained humans, "New mission? No problem!" is attainable. A bit harder to do this with a drone.

    298:

    You mean like Ex-IQ.45 is currently getting investigated for? Boy, wouldn't that be fun: flip the company that makes the mods, then go after all their clients.

    I think this is a way of saying it's the same kind of bad idea as having anything that only has illegal uses.

    299:

    I should also point out that there's supposedly a relevant argument going on in various of the world's militaries. That argument is whether to empower drones and robots to kill humans autonomously, or whether to require a human in the loop that decides when to kill others. Purportedly, the US and allies favor requiring a human in the loop, while the Chinese and Russians do not. Although I haven't heard the Chinese or Russian of this argument, so I remain skeptical. But the debate is real. Who pulls the trigger?

    Anyway, the same argument goes for autonomous ships or autonomous planes. These are potentially deadly when mistakes happen. Where are humans in the decision loop? Robotic cargo ships might make sense in some cases, especially with a satellite uplink, because their decision loop is so slow that latency isn't a huge issue. Robotic satellites are a given, because space is innately hostile to humans. Ditto for ROVs in the deep ocean. But robotic planes and trucks? That's where things get messy. And robotic passenger planes, cruise ships, and buses? That probably increases the cringe factor for a lot of people beyond acceptable limits.

    And yes, I get the Trolley Problem. But having an AI make the decision in the Trolley Problem merely shifts the issue from the decision at the switch to the decision by the programmer over what solution to chose in such cases. Is that what we want?

    300:

    Trolley Problem merely shifts the issue from the decision at the switch to the decision by the programmer over what solution to chose in such cases.

    I thought the big thing in AI was diffusion of responsibility. The AI can't say why it did what it did, the designers of the AI have no idea and no way to find out, whoever provided the training data ditto... all we know is that automated trucks from X brand seem unusually likely to kill black people in crashes.

    301:

    "in the early days of DEC, it was possible to run a printer so fast that the paper would catch on fire...."

    The version I heard was that, although the printer was about the fastest available, that was not what caused the fires.

    AIUI the printer did not use ink, but burnt the output into the paper using a high amperage current. What could possibly go wrong?

    JHomes

    302:

    Heteromeles @ 299: "But robotic planes and trucks? That's where things get messy."

    That's why there is still a lot of work to be done. Last year Amazon bought Zoox, the robot taxi company, for 1.3 billion dollars. The CEO of Zoox doesn't even want to talk about a future Amazon robot parcel truck.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsSzRMdrZjg

    303:

    Re: 'Along with ML becoming, in practice, experimental psychology, this will dramatically change the way society actually thinks over time. The next few decades look fascinating.'

    Society could change as a consequence but in which direction will depend on the acceptability of that org's primary goal, i.e., profit vs. human impact. So I can see HMOs replacing their human clerks with AI for this: much easier to evade blame by pointing at a sophisticated mathematical black-box than doing any soul-searching. Dollars are much easier to tot up and compare (advertise).

    There's also the possibility of AIs being fed a very selective data diet. We'd probably need to create industry standards for all the ways that an AI can screw up anywhere from going rogue to spewing out profitable inhumane nonsense.

    304:

    What I heard was that it wasn't the actual sheet paper that caught fire, but accumulations of the dust it shed going through the printer. Maybe the sheet paper was acting like the belt of a Van de Graaf generator and the sparks ignited the dust.

    Burning marks into the paper with an electric current is what the Sinclair ZX printer did on its horrible little expensive metallised bog rolls. It doesn't work without the metallisation because paper is an insulator.

    305:

    Either way, I've seen drum line printers in action and they're not reassuring machines. Lots of offices used to have them, back in the days when companies had started using them for accounts but the tax system/legal system had not adjusted and still required paper copies of everything be kept (for seven years!) So pallet loads of fanfold paper got trucked in, run through the printer, then stored for a long time before being dumped. Sometimes shredded, often just dumped. Or burnt.

    306:

    I thought the big thing in AI was diffusion of responsibility. The AI can't say why it did what it did, the designers of the AI have no idea and no way to find out, whoever provided the training data ditto... all we know is that automated trucks from X brand seem unusually likely to kill black people in crashes.

    I can see where that would be appealing in the "mistakes were made, algorithms will be updated" sense, but that's not the only one.

    Here are a couple of alternate scenarios:

    --Lance Corporal Cylon Version 2.3b starts World War 3 by shooting down a manned, unarmed surveillance plane performing its treaty-allowed monitoring of a disputed border. After a few billion people have died, Cylon's makers are assessed primary responsibility for starting the war by not upgrading their plane identification module in the five years previous to the start of the war. The peace treaty dismembers their country to prevent such systems from being built again.

    --BigMuddy Amalgamation Services goes into receivership when a court determines that the programming of their automated delivery system on average kills more people per month in Trolley Problem class collisions than random decision-making would, due to faulty programming and inability of humans to affect the decision once it is made.

    I'm being my usual sarcastic self, but there are plenty of situations where it's kind of important to have control over who lives, who dies, and who decides (to misquote Hamilton).

    307:

    Re: NFT

    We're past 300 so ...

    Saw headlines recently about some NFT artwork fetching $60M+. Hadn't realized that this was already a fairly strong market therefore not that farfetched as a possible target industry for a Mars economy.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-04/the-nft-phenomenon-is-for-real

    Here's the art:

    https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/a-three-week-old-nft-just-sold-for-69-million

    308:

    As opposed to the assembly language command, HCF (halt and catch fire)? --Given to an undocumented Motorola 6800 opcode (when executed, it would halt the processor and start incrementing the address bus every cycle, the article's author guessed it was used in chip testing).

    Btw, what wikipedia, etc, do not mention is that I've read, in the early days of DEC, it was possible to run a printer so fast that the paper would catch on fire....

    At the University I went to, students figured out that they could get a bunch of fan fold paper by writing a small program that put a page feed carriage control in column one (remember that?). (Ok, so the systems programmers fixed that).

    Somebody else accidentally wrote a program that put a "don't feed the carriage" control in column one (plus, I think). For many, many, many, lines. Yes, the printer (or the paper) caught fire. (And the systems programmers fixed that one too).

    Getting the card punch to punch every hole on the card was a good way to jam that up as well. (I suspect the systems programmers fixed that one too).

    And for something in this century: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/11/hp-printers-can-be-remotely-controlled-and-set-on-fire-researchers-claim/

    309:

    Heteromeles @ 283: I think there are either alternative or intermediate and messy steps.

    For example, I can see automation of expense reporting. Instead of using Google Maps to come up with a plausible distance and taking a standardized mileage charge, the company car can cough up where it's been, how many miles it's driven, even wear and tear, and that can go to expenses. The downside of this is that if the employee was a responsible person, ran a personal errand in the middle of a trip (say to get coffee so they didn't crash the car), the AI would get pissy about the little side trip and the accountant would have to sort things out.

    The thing about being assigned a company vehicle is "personal use" is built into the system and as long as personal use doesn't exceed the parameters of the understanding between employer & employee it's not a problem.

    That stop for coffee doesn't even require a "side trip" and the AI doesn't give a shit.

    310:

    OK Where is the ghost & where are the "people" in this machine/software/people construct/problem? About lunchtime GMT on 26th February 2021 a well-known ISP's ( TalkTalk ) connectivity to it's contracted users went down - badly. Emails were not sent or recieved, people using home clients, such as "Outlook" got confusing error-messages & no emails. Something at the ISP had crashed, or had been hacked (?) or had simply failed. Gradually, over the following days, most people's connectivity was restored, but not everybody ( Guess how I know all this? ) People went onto the internal support & back-up channels ... a persistent message was similar to: "Password not recognised or faulty, contact your ISP" Some of us were helped, some not. Some of us were told to remove their account name completely & re-install, to clear the problem ( Once emails had been backed-up, offline ) ... except it didn't. Now some of us are left with an Outlook account that WILL NOT RECONNECT AT ALL, still with an "unrecognised password" fault, & no apparent means of getting their emails working on their home computer's Outlook account at all. OK - who or what or both is wrong here? And how does one fix it? Is the fault with the ISP ( Seems most likely ) or with MS Outlook, which may have been locally corrupted. As you have realised by now, yes, this is what my current situation is.

    311:

    That argument is whether to empower drones and robots to kill humans autonomously,

    I strongly recommend Linda Nagata's SF novel "The Last Good Man", which takes this topic seriously and is scary as all hell as a prediction of where the world is going. Near-future SF is hard, she does a really good job.

    And yes, I get the Trolley Problem.

    I've tutored university-level ethics, and I don't believe in the Trolley Problem.

    People like ethical dilemmas because people like tricky mental problems, but that's not how real-world ethics works. Real world ethics isn't a mental game. It's really about "noticing what's going on" and "giving a fuck". It's often about self-discipline to do what you know is right. But it is very, very rarely about "moral dilemma decisions".

    Real examples:

    Mum drives the kids to school instead of them biking because she thinks the traffic around school is unsafe.

    Grandad buys a SUV because he feels driving his grandkids around in it is safer a hatchback.

    But actually mum is increasing the chance of a kid dying in the busy traffic around school. Just not her kid. And grandad is increasing the chance of someone dying in a car-crash while decreasing the chance of his passengers dying, because SUVs are much more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.

    That's how the real world works. No-one decides "I'll kill these 3 to save that 1". That doesn't happen. What happens instead they decide is "I'll move the risks around a little bit, in favor of my kids". And we don't write angsty article about the Trolley Problem when they do that.

    Which gets us to AI. People act like there will be a place in the AI program where it says
    mypassengerdyingweight = -1.0;
    other
    peopledyingweight = -0.5;

    But that won't happen. There will be nothing like that. The self-driving AI won't know what a person is, or what death is. There won't be a point at which it is deciding "I'll kill the 3 little kids on the pedestrian crossing to protect my driver". Instead what there will be is a whole bunch of reflexes, responses, etc, within the AI, and some emergent behaviour. And some of it might be morally selfish but, like mum and grandad in my examples above, there's nothing unusual or novel about that.

    My point is that there is no Trolley Problem, because there is no "Trolley Problem" decision point at which someone (or some AI) suddenly chooses who dies. Instead there are lots of small choices, each one individually fairly innocuous. That these little decisions move risks around is going to be true in the design of self-driving AI, but it's true in lots and lots of other things as well and we don't say they embody "the Trolley Problem".

    312:

    Those of us working for smaller companies (hi Charlie) the process is unlikely to involve intelligence of either sort. The last time I was visiting client site my then employer gave me a credit card and told me to use it wisely.

    I found out months later that the accounts people were just told to pay the bills and the review process was "if you are that concerned you talk to him". Which happened, because I spent rather more thousands of dollars buying a new laptop than I expected the card to accept. The client paid, because the client was the one that broke the old one, but I only found out because I gave the receipts to accounts and they said "we don't care, your expenses don't get reviewed" and I had to explain that they did care because they had to bill the client...

    The best part in this is that "accounts" was the boss's wife 😆

    313:

    Mum drives the kids to school instead of them biking because...

    the school has a screaming hissy fit about the risk, the danger, the unusuality and the frankly bizarre behaviour that would lead a parent to think this is in any way acceptable. Children must be driven to school and then lectured about obesity, that is the way things are done now{tm}.

    It actually varies seemingly randomly. The children of BikeSaint in Sydney* were variously boggled at, accommodated and eventually accepted when they biked to school. A line was drawn at the tall bike, though. Other friends report everything from outright official bans through hostility to surprise that anyone would think permission would be needed.

    • I assumed she was sufficiently (in)famous that no mere school principal would dare raise the issue. But what would I know...
    314:

    Like Abbottsford, or as it is now known, Lower Abbottsford... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Abbotsford_landslip

    I would not have anticipated the slide from the existence of a quarry - but then, obviously the experts on site didn't either.

    I wish you luck with your post-bushfire land opportunity, and expect you're already enjoying flat stationary ground, but the thread has me reminded of Malibu mudslides. Southern California has a lot of chaparral, low dry brush which occasionally burns off very dramatically; if heavy rains come after the plants binding the soil have burned off, formerly stationary homes in the area become distressingly mobile. Or, in Malibu, just because - the area is known for wandering geology irrespective of the weather.

    315:

    They should have kept the requirement in place and massively increased the timespan for purposes of carbon sequestration...

    316:

    Saw headlines recently about some NFT artwork fetching $60M+.

    Just what we need. Another technology with a huge carbon footprint.

    An average single-edition NFT uses as much energy as a typical European Union household does in a month, according to the calculator. Multi-edition NFTs are even more damaging. … Grimes’ high-profile drop resulted in 122 tons of carbon pollution.

    https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-to-fix-crypto-art-nfts-carbon-pollution-problem-1846440312

    317:

    That stop for coffee doesn't even require a "side trip" and the AI doesn't give a shit.

    Lots of offices use computer monitoring to micromanage their employees. Look at the dashboards being built into subscription software, for example. I would expect that many managers would extend monitoring if they were able to.

    318:

    Mum drives the kids to school instead of them biking because she thinks the traffic around school is unsafe.

    She's not wrong. Have you watched parents around a school? Bloody dangerous idiots.

    If we could eliminate parents driving kids to school, it would be a lot safer.

    (My car would also have fewer dents, because parents park in the staff parking lot and apparently don't give a shit about hitting cars on the way in/out. I've also had to jump out of the way to avoid being run over by women in SUVs looking at their cell phone while arriving at school at 7:00 (school starts at 8:45).)

    319:

    Back to some of the original post (and re use of Category Errors to hide(?) from determined searchers (hmmm :-), in a deleted SotMNs("Please Don't Dox Seagulls"[1]) comment), been noodling on hiding from (current) AIs. This Heinlein quote suggests one class of approaches: It's not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying. (Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love) "unconvincingly" is shorthand for a broad set of methods. The listener can be manipulated (e.g. through triggerings of their own biases (sometimes deep conceptual biases)) to believe that you are lying, that you are telling a joke (why not both? :-), etc. (Heinlein also neglected multiple possible parsings (with one favored by common conceptual biases), multiple levels of metaphor, puns, etc.) Some of the AI spoofing methods are similar in spirit; in the CLIP case, a textual label on an object tricks it into "You look like an X but I classify you are a Y because Words are more important than mere appearances". In principle the deception could be flagged as (potentially) such by e.g. by recognizing text and editing it out of the image and re-running classification. [1] I do have a list of recent names (missed one, used after midnight my time).

    320:

    A line was drawn at the tall bike, though.

    Are those considered exotic where you are? Here in Portland, Oregon, USA we've got various bike nuts riding around on those, welded together out of whatever spare bicycle parts might be laying around. But we also have a bagpipe playing unicyclist (video), mobile pedal pub tours, and an annual Naked Bike Ride - so we're pretty jaded to weird pedaled things.

    PS: Darn, I forgot zoobombing...

    321:

    I wish you luck with your post-bushfire land opportunity, and expect you're already enjoying flat stationary ground, but the thread has me reminded of Malibu mudslides. Southern California has a lot of chaparral, low dry brush which occasionally burns off very dramatically; if heavy rains come after the plants binding the soil have burned off, formerly stationary homes in the area become distressingly mobile. Or, in Malibu, just because - the area is known for wandering geology irrespective of the weather.

    Conflated a couple of different things. I grew up in chaparral country. While I agree that there are mudslides, the complicating factor is that many chaparral plants are deeply rooted. When those roots survive fires, they do a pretty good job of holding the slope together. The things that confound this:

  • Believe it or not, too many fires can get rid of chaparral. It's fine with being burned once per century, or maybe once per 50 years. Once the fires start happening more than every 30 years, species start disappearing, and with fires more than once every decade, it's a few really tough plants and annual weeds. Malibu Canyon burns every seven years or so, because Malibu Canyon to a first approximation is shaped like a funnel facing into the Santa Ana winds. If a fire starts anywhere in or near that funnel during a wind storm, the Santa Anas shove it through the canyon down to the coast.

  • The geology of Malibu is fairly recent oceanic sediments turned into sandstone and mudstone. That stuff falls apart. I learned to climb on similar rock, and we used garden hoes to knock footholds in slopes. Or stood on plant roots, which are more stable.

  • Anyway, slides are getting worse, not just because of fires, but because fires are happening later (sometimes the rain puts them out, as in Montecito a few years back). Also, people are being stupid about how they clear steep slopes, meaning there's more to erode and less to hold it up. Fire inspectors don't think about landslides.

    Now, if you want to see a really good example of fire-resistant architecture, check out Pepperdine University. It's at the mouth of Malibu Canyon, and the whole campus is designed to shelter some 3000-3500 students in the library in the center of campus, with protection from firefighters. It's survived the seven fires that hit it quite well. Thing is, it's purpose-built for surviving fires, and most buildings in high fire areas in California are not.

    322:

    But are they riding them to high school? That's where the line was drawn.

    323:

    Have you watched parents {drive} around a school

    Yes, and I try to avoid riding between ~1430 and 1630 for that reason. There are too many schools and not enough sanity.

    In many ways I think it would be better to only allow students to drive around schools, because they at more likely to make the connection "school uniform = people I know" rather than "my baby is the whole world and nothing else matters".

    I did wonder a while ago how many car bombs it would take before a collection of law changes and concrete barriers made it impossible to drive near schools at all. But I had a look and it doesn't look as though even the craziest merkins have done that, so it seems unlikely the ozzies would.

    324:

    Robert Prior @ 318 "If we could eliminate parents driving kids to school, it would be a lot safer."

    Don't you have schoolbuses?

    You know, big yellow things that stop the traffic dead in both directions, whenever they pick up or drop off students.

    325:

    We have school buses, but they're mostly a rural thing. Australia has the theory that all state-provided education is much of a muchness so there's no point trucking kids across town, better to build a school where they are.

    Footnotes...

    • we have "selective schools" which have ability requirements
    • but not the US-style "selective" meaning race
    • We also, despite our history, have mostly given up on ghettos. for example "Blacktown" is multiethnic, and even whites live there
    • "town camps" OTOH, are where abos stay while they've visiting towns but can't stay in them.
    326:

    Also "school bus" is an ordinary bus just doing a school run. They don't stop traffic when they pick up or drop off. They have lights that flash and you're supposed to overtake at 40 km/h, which is about the lowest speed that gets you near 100% kill rate when you run over children.

    No it's not supposed to make sense.

    327:

    Here, for most children in basic comprehensive schools, the school is close enough that it's possible to walk there. Now we are a bit farther from the school than most, but it's still only a bit over a kilometre there, so perfectly possible to walk or bike there for the kids.

    If not (for example in the countryside or special needs or something), there is some kind of taxi service, either just a regular car or a minibus. I think mostly the service is bought from regular taxi companies.

    However, in many places, also where I live, parents think it's easier for everybody if they drive the kids by car to the school, so there's much traffic just where there are a lot of kids at the same time. It is somewhat dangerous, obviously, so then more parents use the cars. And schools try to tell them that "hey, your kids can physically and mentally walk the some hundreds of meters to school and it's better for them anyway to do that", usually to little effect...

    328:

    I fully agree things will get messy, and data will be "diverted", etc.

    My larger point is not just the example of expenses, but that the work of ML/AI will be part of every job - classification of things, etc has thousands of examples in daily life and the toolkits will be present in office and other PC systems. Similarly, all data will be managed in a way to make it ingest into ML easily.

    I'm saying that meta-cognition - thinking about biases and how we think - will go from a niche interest to being widespread. Similarly, understanding how Google, etc work (merging datasets, the issues of privacy) will be trivially understood.

    The interesting question is what happens next.

    329:

    I get the feeling that there are no schoolbuses (big yellow things containing 72 kids, with a camouflaged police car sometimes following them to catch anybody who drives near) at all outside of North America.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp04AftXVw

    331:

    There are school buses in the UK - here is one of the ones that pass near us.

    Big, yes. Yellow, no. 72 seats? Who knows

    There are ones that are yellow. Just not our local ones. I have been on a Canadian one, heading north from St Anthony in Newfoundland, and it wasn't hugely luxurious, but it wasn't too basic either.

    332:

    Don't you have schoolbuses?

    Yup. When I was growing up in Saskatoon, they were only for rural kids. I took the city bus halfway across the city when I changed schools to attend a specific program.

    When I moved to Toronto in the 90s I was surprised to see them in the city. Some elementary students take them — no idea what the criteria are. But many parents drive their kids, elementary and secondary. One day I was going home and followed a parent who had picked up their child (student athlete and flute player) and they ended up at a house about four blocks away. Driving a teenager four blocks rather than letting them walk? Every day?

    333:

    Yes, that's the same kind of thing one school I was at used to ferry in kids from the villages: just an ordinary bus doing school duties. So did the school for older kids on the other side of the canal. But the school for younger kids on the other side of the road didn't, so our mums used to drive us in to that one. It was a bit bloody silly for the family whose older kids were picked up by the bus (from right outside their door) but the younger kids had to go by mumbus for exactly the same journey.

    334:

    In the UK, there is, or was (it was decades back that I was last even vaguely invested in this) a distance component. My sisters went to school in the nearest town, but we were 4 miles away, so the school bus took them for free. It was a shame it was a mile to the bus stop from our house

    (We lived at the end of a rural lane, nothing else on it, and nowhere for a bus to turn round either.)

    335:

    Telling the truth unconvincingly?

    The funniest programme on UK TV has experts in this process. But Bob Mortimer is the best.

    https://youtu.be/1vE8ExuuNZQ

    336:

    In the UK, there is, or was (it was decades back that I was last even vaguely invested in this) a distance component.

    Everywhere I've lived in the US has had a law that the school system (if public) must provide transportation to all students who lived over 1 miles away. (not sure if road mile or bird mile)

    But most picked up any students more than a few blocks away. Where I've lived the weather can be so variable that making kids walk to school creates a lot of issues. When it's just above freezing with maybe light rain on the way to school and light jacket weather by lunch it creates issues with how to dress the kids if they are going to walk. Especially the smaller ones.

    And when you have "busing" it gets real complicated. (I can argue both side of this one.)

    I can remember being amazed when I visited my cousins in Detroit suburbs around 1963 and they were walking to the school about 2 blocks away. Back home I was considered living close to my school and was nearly a mile away. But in hindsight it (the Detroit school) was a small school of only a 200-300 kids. Most schools in much of the US now are larger just to keep the system wide facility costs down.

    337:

    I recently came up with The Answer to the Trolley Problem: move the switch just as the trolley hits it, so at least the back wheels derail, and the trolley falls over.

    338:

    Growing up in Philly in the 50's and 60's, the only time I ever saw a schoolbus was when they took us on a class/school trip, like downtown to see the Phila. Orchestra.

    I walked or took city transit from 5th grade on. In shools, you got student tokens, significantly cheaper than the regular fare.

    And yes, I read 60% of Americans are overweight to obese. Or, as I like to say, "let's see, you get a riding mower to do your lawn, then pay how many hundred dollars to join a gym, and drive your SUV a mile to the gym?"

    339:

    The funniest programme on UK TV has experts in this process. But Bob Mortimer is the best. Thank you. Took a few notes; he is good.

    340:

    When I first moved to Ottawa back in the 80s I had an apartment near Hogs Back Falls, on the top floor (18ish). So I usually took the elevator, although if the lines were long* I would take the stairs. There was a yuppy-type chap who lived on the second floor who took the elevator down to the ground floor to go play squash. Like, it would have been faster to walk down the stairs rather than wait for the elevator, but he never did.

    He did this, as far as I could tell, every day. Keeping fit is important.

    *The chap who delivered the newspaper would claim an elevator by the simple expedient of blocking the door while he was delivering, so for half an hour a day things could get crowded.

    341:

    Off-topic update: Trump Force One/N757AF/T-Bird, the Trump-org(one of them)-controlled 757, is still parked at New York Stewart International Airport, and is still missing (as of 12 Mar 2021 13:20 EST) the port engine (with opaque white plastic wrapped around where an engine should be mounted). This makes me smile. (It is (additional) evidence suggesting that Mr. Former Guy is less wealthy than he claims.)

    Also, QAnon believers and contemporary US "Christian" grifter-prophets are continuing their melding, and their escape from fact-grounded reality (and also losing believers): Trump President Of Heaven Now, Says QAnon Prophet Guy (Robyn Pennacchia, March 12, 2021)

    If you can go in the spirit, if you can see what's in Heaven, who's sitting in the throne; go up and look at the presidency seat in Heaven, see who's there. It ain't Biden; it's Trump."
    Of course, it is possible that they all just hate his guts up in Heaven and this is a big prank. (My neighbor down the street still has a Trump2020 flag flying underneath an American flag on tall pole. Also saw a half-dozen in (far) upstate NY Feb 28 2021. They, including Former Guy, still don't believe/understand that they were(/are being) outplayed, even in the religious domain.)

    342:

    I'm not clever enough to judge this but it seems a good fit for the neighbourhood - Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life - https://avinayak.github.io/algorithms/programming/2021/02/19/finding-mona-lisa-in-the-game-of-life.html

    343:

    My kids rode the bus to school for a decade, ending this year because COVID. Apparently we are now about 10 metres inside the 'ineligible' ring and the one kid remaining in the school system must walk or be driven.

    I am an ogre, but not so much of one that I will force him to trudge through the driving rain and up a 2 km steep hill each morning. I also work half a block away from the school myself, and start at the same time. So I drive him, and he tends to walk home (after 'hanging out' at the school yard or a friend's house). Driving the kid to school goes against all my values, only barely rationalized by the fact that I usually need my vehicle at work.

    With the weather turning we will begin riding our bicyles, there are off-road trails through the forest that get us to the school.

    344:

    And yes, I read 60% of Americans are overweight to obese.

    Things are not as simple as you might want to think in terms of correlation/causation.

    My kids got driven to school a lot. And took buses a lot.

    My daughter played organized baseball/soccer into her later teens. She still runs in her later 20s.

    My son played lacrosse in high school and now does regular workouts plus rock climbs. Indoors and real cliffs. He owns the gear. Just turned 30.

    Me, I use a push mower.

    Now loading that large van full of stuff from the 3rd floor apartment in Texas in July about did me in. 40+ moving boxes full of stuff. But those two beefy looking guys doing the same across the hall also looked worn out. I guess we were both having issues with the 100F heat.

    345:

    But are they riding [tall bikes] to high school? That's where the line was drawn.

    Now that you ask I realize I don't recall either way. Despite living just down the street from a high school named after a distant relative, I don't recall noticing any of the kids riding bicycles that were out of the ordinary. And this isn't a good year to look.

    346:

    You know, it's actually fairly easy to understand why so many right wing American Q-nuts want an apocalypse. If they think Trump's a good guy, it's just their subconscious lashing out and making them hate the reality they've consciously yoked themselves to. It's just another version of the cognitive dissonance of worshiping a god described as a being of infinite love, who will nonetheless condemn you to an infinity of suffering if you do not perform the arbitrary and capricious acts his self-appointed intermediaries require of you.

    Note that White Jesus Wielding a Sword and Killing Brown People is Hitler's version of Christianity, not what's in the bible or even in most churches. But if that's the cult someone believes in, I can see where they want it all to be over, at least subconsciously.

    347:

    And yes, I read 60% of Americans are overweight to obese.

    Don't take that too literally. By the BMI scale I've been "obese" for years, just because I'm 6'3" but not built like Spider Robinson.

    348:

    I spent a lot of my summers in the 1960s in Vermont, on the shores of Lake Champlain.

    Obesity was not a statistic. It was a reality, as I looked around me at US citizens. A lot of them were fatter than any people in Montreal or Quebec City, my reference points. And the fat were more numerous, in proportion to the fat in Montreal or Quebec City. I was in the land of the fat and the free.

    I don't know how much of this has changed in fifty years or so. I don't travel much to the US. But when I did go to scientifc conferences now and then I couldn't help notice that I had more fat people around me in the airports, than in Canada.

    Oh, they were not "grossly and immensely fat" like Baron Harkonnen, but they were fat enough to make a difference. I never saw such a difference when I was back home, or driving around Europe in later years.

    349:

    Conflated a couple of different things...

    To say the least!

    Thanks for that expansion of my throwaway bit about Malibu. It's been far too long since I was in the LA area at all and I don't think I've ever been in Malibu Canyon when the Santa Anas are blowing; I can't imagine it's pleasant.

    A burn frequency above 30 years is also also what I read is necessary to prevent species loss in chaparral. That number may vary for similar biomes on other continents.

    350:

    but they were fat enough to make a difference.

    Yep. I'm 30 pounds over what would be a great weight for me. And 45 past that college weight. And most people around me seem bigger than me relative to their height.

    351:

    Well my trouser waistband size has not changed in the past 40 years ( 34" = 76cm (ish )) Mass has probably gone up a bit, because C-19, but was steady at 80kg before that - might be 71/71.5kg, now.

    352:

    I don't know how much of this has changed in fifty years or so. I don't travel much to the US.

    Apparently, the average American is nearly 20% heavier than they were in 1960. And women now average what men averaged then.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/12/look-at-how-much-weight-weve-gained-since-the-1960s/

    When I last visited America, in the 1990s, I was astounded at how much rounder people looked. Not just one or two — sooo many round people.

    Not saying Canada doesn't have round people, but the proportion is a lot less than I saw in America.

    353:

    And in other news, apparently the Kentucky Senate is pushing forward a bill to make it an offence to insult the police. Wonder how the Constitution's Framers would view their modern acolytes*…

    https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article249876428.html

    Text of the bill: https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/recorddocuments/bill/21RS/sb211/bill.pdf

    *Sarcasm. I suspect that the original Framers would react to modern 'originalists' the same way a certain carpenter would react to modern Evangelicals…

    354:

    Insult the police? Why bless their hearts!

    Wonder if I'd get ticketed for saying that in Kentucky.

    Of course, San Diego's finest until this year were known to give tickets for seditious language to people for the crime of being stopped by the police while brown, so I certainly have no cause for waxing sarcastic. None at all.

    355:

    Why bless their hearts!

    I wonder how many people outside of the US get the joke.

    356:
    Why bless their hearts!

    I wonder how many people outside of the US get the joke.

    I certainly don't get it, and googling didn't help.

    Can you explain to a poor German guy?

    357:

    "Why, bless their hearts!" is that very rare thing: a phrase used by USAns with deliberate ironic intent (it's frequently used with intonation that inverts its apparent meaning).

    358:

    a phrase used by USAns with deliberate ironic intent

    It's mostly a Southern thing. Non-southern USAns often don't get the ironic usage of it.

    359:

    The variation I've mostly heard is "Well bless it's pointed little head", usually directed at the annoying victims of "Rectal-cranial inversion".

    360:

    It's part of a category of "southern compliments" that are really insults. In the "genteel south" you never directly put someone down. You always do it indirectly.

    "Bless his/their heart(s)" is basically saying "too bad they don't know what they are talking about".

    There is an entire category of things like "most people couldn't pull off that hairdo" and so on.

    361:

    Since I wrote my predictions on spaceflight going forward, some new stuff has happened.

  • RocketLabs is building the Neutron rocket to challenge the Falcon 9. In terms of mass to LEO, Neutron is closer in capability to the Ariane 4 than the Falcon 9, it shows one of the following
  • a. The SSLV market is likely to be saturated soon, as could the cubesat market b. There's an expectation that other companies will build their own satellite internet constellations c. Starlink will absorb most of SpaceX's launch capacity, leaving room for new entrants to grab the rest of the market d. Either Starlink-class satellites will replace cubesats, or it'll be rare for cubesats not to launch as constellations

  • Relativity Space and Astra are also proposing Falcon 9 challengers. Astra managed to launch a payload into space, but the fuel was too oxygen-rich to get it into the proper orbit. Relativity Space is a different company altogether. It plans to 3D print the entire rocket, not just the engines. When asked, they hinted at bird-bone-structured fuel tanks. To my knowledge, they've received the most DoD subsidies of any SSLV company that hasn't launched a rocket into space (currently just RocketLabs, Virgin Orbit, and Astra)

  • Now that NASA is no longer dependent on the Soyuz, the Russians plan to resume launching paying space tourists https://www.space.com/russia-launching-space-tourists-2021.html https://www.space.com/space-adventures-roscosmos-tourist-flight-spacewalk-2023.html

  • Also, SpaceX has several private flights planned for the next 5 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon_2#List_of_flights They have a contract to send Tom Cruise to the ISS, but I don't see his name on the roster of any of those flights.

  • Blue Origin is planning to spin their New Shepard capsule to simulate lunar gravity while in space. I don't know if this means that they're pivoting NS from a suborbital space tourism company to a more capable sounding rocket? Maybe I'm just reading too much into it?

  • 362:

    In the novel I'm working on one character says to another, "Your hat is quite in advance of fashion."

    363:

    Yep. But I just can't imagine a nice southern lady saying that phrase quite like that. :)

    364:

    Bingo!

    That was one of the points I was trying to make, that outlawing insulting the police in the South has a strong bias towards certain social classes. The people who presumably would insult the police are, by stereotype, poorer and presumably browner than the fine white people who (in theory) know the art of the southern compliment.

    The irony that Black Kentuckians might be able to teach them a thing or two about using ambiguous and multivalent language with white people may well escape those fine lawmakers. They are fashionably anti-intellectual these days.

    The other point is that "Why bless their hearts!" is such a stereotypical comment that even a Californian such as myself understands in general what it means. Therefore, deploying it against the fine Kentucky policefolk when they are zealously pursuing every aspect of their duty might actually get me a ticket.

    Incidentally, "why bless their hearts!" seems to be used more by women than by men.

    365:

    The Cruise flight contract is with Axiom rather than directly with SpaceX so it will probably form AX-2 or AX-3. It is likely to need at least a good outline of the script to be in place with production of the rest of the film scheduled. NASA has also recently hiked its prices for use of ISS facilities, particularly for "any project that is primarily intended for marketing, advertising, or entertainment purposes.", so that may have caused a budget adjustment.

    366:

    It's a fantasy story, so she's not from the south. She's a human who's just met an Orc for the first time, and the Orc is wearing a hat that's just a little too much!

    367:

    AI & "ghosts" In today's "FT" there is a book-review of the almost-theological infighting between the "Connectionist" & "Symbolist" approaches to & progress (or not) in AI. The book is: "Genius Makers" by Cade Metz.

    368:

    Robert Prior @ 317:

    That stop for coffee doesn't even require a "side trip" and the AI doesn't give a shit.

    Lots of offices use computer monitoring to micromanage their employees. Look at the dashboards being built into subscription software, for example. I would expect that many managers would extend monitoring if they were able to.

    But the office still has a coffee station in the break room ... because micromanagers drink coffee too; and have to take bathroom breaks and do all the other messy organic things people have to do. And the law requires certain minimums.

    "Outside" staff who have to use a company vehicle (because it's the most cost effective way for the company to get the company's work done) are a bit more difficult to micromanage.

    369:

    Rocketpjs @ 343: My kids rode the bus to school for a decade, ending this year because COVID. Apparently we are now about 10 metres inside the 'ineligible' ring and the one kid remaining in the school system must walk or be driven.

    I am an ogre, but not so much of one that I will force him to trudge through the driving rain and up a 2 km steep hill each morning. I also work half a block away from the school myself, and start at the same time. So I drive him, and he tends to walk home (after 'hanging out' at the school yard or a friend's house). Driving the kid to school goes against all my values, only barely rationalized by the fact that I usually need my vehicle at work.

    With the weather turning we will begin riding our bicyles, there are off-road trails through the forest that get us to the school.

    Where I grew up the city school system didn't have school busses. There was a city bus that stopped in front of the school & you could ride that for about $1.50 a week.

    My dad didn't drive us to school, but because he passed by the school on his way to work, he'd drop us off & we walked home after school (not quite a mile).

    The ogre remark reminded me of something smart-ass one of my friend's dad said to us once when we asked him to give us a ride somewhere ... "Normally, I'd let you kids walk, but since the weather is so bad, you can crawl"

    We did get the ride, but also a whole bunch of bullshit.

    370:

    David L @ 360: It's part of a category of "southern compliments" that are really insults. In the "genteel south" you never directly put someone down. You always do it indirectly.

    "Bless his/their heart(s)" is basically saying "too bad they don't know what they are talking about".

    There is an entire category of things like "most people couldn't pull off that hairdo" and so on.

    I think my favorite is "You have a point ... [but if you wear a hat no one will ever notice]."

    "Bless his/her/their heart" also implies the person so blessed suffers self inflicted incurable stupidity.

    371:

    Here's an interesting short film I ran across today.

    Antikythera mechanism: https://vimeo.com/518734183

    372:

    [Old Fogey Mode]The younger generation are just soft - we did that and more.[End Mode]

    'Tis true, sir.

    373:

    Just to annoy the physicists out there, Quanta Magazine, fount of truth that it is, this week published this: https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-mischief-rewrites-the-laws-of-cause-and-effect-20210311/

    The important gist is that it's possible to set up quantum experiments (using entangled, polarized photons) where it's impossible to tell whether event A caused event B, or event B caused event A. There's also apparently a bunch of mathematics that led to these experiments, so these were tests of theory, not wild observations in search of a theory. They're part of the eternal churn of trying to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics.

    If this is right (titanic if!), then it may turn out that correlation is more important than causation in certain cases, and that causation, like newtonian physics, is a human-scale subset of a more general reality that's noncausal at other scales.

    Although it's not discussed in the article, this irresistibly reminds me of the old saw for why FTL implies time travel. The pithy/sarcastic shorthand is that there are three options, relativity, causality, and FTL, of which you can pick two, and the presumption is that our universe has settled on relativity and causality. If it turns out causality is an emergent phenomenon, then we may actually live in a relativistic universe, and...

    Have fun getting annoyed with this article. I'm sure some will judge it not even wrong.

    374:

    I visited the Boston Computer Museum in the 1990s. There was a full scale see-through model of the Antikythera mechanism. I was impressed!

    I remember absolutely nothing else of my trip to the Boston Computer Museum.

    375:

    we did that and more.

    In the snow.

    Uphill.

    Both ways.

    376:

    ""Bless his/her/their heart" also implies the person so blessed suffers self inflicted incurable stupidity."

    It's familiar in the UK as a phrase used by grannies cooing over tiny kids who have done something cutely stupid because they're too small to know better, like trying to eat pictures of sweets, or describing some model of how the world works which is egregiously and amusingly wrong but can be readily understood to appear reasonable if you only have two years' worth of observation to base it on. By extension, it can also be used of adults to imply that their mental development has not progressed beyond that level.

    However, most of those grannies don't really say anything much these days, and when I read the original comment I pictured it quite vividly as being uttered in a heavy Southern accent by a rather younger woman in an elaborate dress and hairdo.

    (Aside: interesting too how the meaning of "cute" has shifted so that I can use it in the above sense of "adorably dumb/helpless" and expect to be understood. It is an abbreviation of "acute", as in angles, and was originally used to mean "sharp" as in "smart, quick, alert" etc.)

    377:

    The 'bunch of mathematics' is ancient; it was described as a consequence of some the quantum mechanics I was taught in the 1960s. Acausal mathematics has also been studied in both statistics (earlier than QM) and parallel computing (later), and the potential advantages are well-known in those fields. Physicists are notoriously both reluctant to and bad at thinking in such ways. But all I really took away is that they are looking at this aspect very seriously, which is good. The descriptions of actual experiments (e.g. to implement Maxwell's demon) are all still theoretical, as far as I could see, but the blurb wasn't precise enough to be sure.

    378:

    When I was young, it was normally in the form "bless their cotton socks". Don't ask me why.

    379:

    Yes. And by contrast, there is also the explicitly vituperative use of the hosiery reference in the expression "rot your socks".

    380:

    The Maxwell's demon part seems to be theoretical, but there are real experiments where they've entangled pairs of photons A and B such that both A causes B and B causes A, and the outcome of the experiment depends on the lack of definite causality.

    The part that interested me is that someone's developed a formalism that allows apparent causality to emerge from a fundamentally noncausal reality, analogous to the way Newtonian physics is an emergent form of relativistic physics that appears at some scales. This may turn out to be a very useful part of this whole exercise, for it helps get past the objection that "obviously, cause follows effect in the real world, therefore it must be a fundamental part of reality." The human real world appears largely Newtonian, but few dispute that relativity is an essential part of reality.

    381:

    My ISP suddenly became more unreliable than usual, and the IP address was changing frequently as a result. Then the IP changes stopped, but as near as I can tell, the unreliability and router re-connection requirement did not. My theory is the ISP couldn't fix the reliability problem(s) and to stop the complaints, made the IP addresses fixed, or mostly so.

    382:

    My wife, who is Yorkshire through and through, never heard this story, but finds it entirely plausable.

    383:

    Problem If you can have TWO of: Causality / FTL / Relativity BUT Causality is only "apparent" at macro scales, like Newtonian physics ... Then is FTL possible for "macro" objects, like starships & people?

    I feel there is a v interesting SF story or three in there

    384:

    The thing about "insulting cops" is that it means a brief period of creative insults before the red queen race gets underway.

    "you exemplify the public view of policing" ... racist murderer with qualified immunity or thin blue line?

    "no finer police officer exists in your department" ... someone that shit at it is the best?

    Plus the whole list of backhanded compliments "you have your shoes on the right feet" and "isn't that a well-polished badge".

    I assume police are exempt from this law, just as they're exempt from "bringing police into disrepute" and so on, because otherwise a lot of "banter" is going to be one per customer. Can you imagine a police locker-room where insults result in fines or loss of employment? "good morning sarge" ... "Do I look like someone who is having a good day? I've had enough of your insults"

    385:

    Yup.

    I should point out that there's still ample room for disappointment. For example, if the top speed of a warp drive is equivalent to 10C, then basically you have a ship that can reach Alpha Centauri or Proxima Centauri in about six months. If the most habitable planet around any of these three stars is about as habitable as Mars is, you've got the same problem that NASA has putting humans on Mars. I'd suggest that, from the pandemic year, that locking people in a spaceship for more than a year (coming and going) is on the outer limit of endurable, even if the food holds out.

    That's another solution for the Fermi Paradox, which is simply that good places to land are, on average, further apart that starships are willing and able to fly. In our little part of the Milky Way, it would be better to be able to go 100*C or faster, just to get to the more sun-like stars with apparently more Earth-like planets orbiting them. That's not my favored explanation, but it's certainly possible. Space is very big, and we've got no good evidence of ETs. There are any number of likely reasons for that, and few of them are very inspiring.

    386:

    Heteromeles @385 : "I'd suggest that, from the pandemic year, that locking people in a spaceship for more than a year (coming and going) is on the outer limit of endurable, even if the food holds out."

    Not everyone is an extrovert.

    I found these last 12 months very soothing, working from home in my little bungalow. In fact the time went by very fast. Note that I have no personal interest in current space exploration, given the crude level of technologies such as spacesuits.

    But all you have to do is make a good pick of introverts for the crew. Whaling expeditions used to last one to two years, starting from New England and going to Greenland and later on to the Pacific Ocean.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlHhV8ImdNg

    387:

    Apropos of nothing, you just reminded me of a ridiculous story idea I was unable to persuade to work years ago.

    Premise was essentially: ftl practical, ftl implies ctcs, causality violation disallowed due to censorship hypothesis.

    You can send someone away faster than light but an expanding event horizon forms that prevents any information coming back that isn't in your past light cone. Throw in an interstellar gate network. Hilarity ensues.

    The plot that I was unable to make sensible involved routing of messages to create censored regions in which shenanigans could occur...

    Anyway, the answer to the fermi paradox is that aliens are everywhere but since they got ftl we can only see versions of the universe that doesn't have them :)

    388:

    Forgot to mention, it started with someone sitting in arrivals for 6 months as they waited for causality to sort itself out so they could interact with passport control.

    389:

    That's a great story just by itself.

    390:

    Thanks, but it gets more unwieldy the more you think about it.

    Thinking about what can be inferred from information that is unavailable, and how to prevent such inferences in such a universe is the path of madness.

    391:

    Heteromeles @385 :

    Agree with Niala. My wife and I love the isolation, and really hope my employer (NOAA) will make working from home a permanent thing. Admittedly I miss out annual midwinter trip some place tropical, but what I miss is warm sea. Not people. If I could take such a trip without interacting with anyone except online, it would be great.

    392:

    Re: introverts....not really. I'm very much like you, but that's not what I'm talking about.

    The closer approximation is more likely being stuck on a nuclear submarine for six months. No windows, no time outside, minimal personal space, constant racket, and 100-200 other people in there with you. Then you land in a weird and bizarrely dangerous place, do stuff there, hopefully survive, and pack the survivors back in the tube for the same trip home.

    You can read about it online, for instance https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34104/nukes-nubs-and-coners-the-unique-social-hierarchy-aboard-a-nuclear-submarine

    I'm not particularly interested in making this space suxxx volume 33. If spacefaring or star travel are possible, they're going to be unlike what most of us experience. We're used to the pleasures of reading alone some place comfortable, and subconsciously think that star travel will be like that. If you start learning about life on a submarine or the ISS, it really, really isn't like that at all. But people do live that way, so it's possible.

    393:

    being stuck on a nuclear submarine for six months

    There's probably more open literature about science missions to places like Antarctica. The requirements for the human components are complex and very much not for people who like solitude.

    Think of the pics you see of the ISS... it's less about floating 30Mm from anyone else and more about thinking very clearly and methodically through a complex task while someone in the same phone boot exercises at 80%VO2max, then crawling out to sleep in a 50cm diameter tube wedged between an ashmatic vacuum cleaner, the machine that goes "bing" and a very bad steeldrum band. Earplugs are just the start of it...

    394:

    qualified immunity

    In a very interesting reading of the tea leaves QI may be going away. At least partially and/or slowly.

    A recent dissent to rule from SCOTUS implies the standard may change. It's a very deep reading of the tea leaves but also significant.

    We'll see.

    395:

    But all you have to do is make a good pick of introverts for the crew. Whaling expeditions used to last one to two years,

    But deep in everyone on the ship's mind they KNEW they could head for a port, shore, or island if needed. Once you head out in a star ship, you're committed. Unless we start building Star Trek/Starwars ships.

    396:

    My wife and I love the isolation,

    My wife was force to retire. And my work means I got out several times a week to drop off/pick up a cable, computer, or whatnot. At times front porches hold a lot of valuable stuff.

    Me: I'm headed out to make these stops. She: When do I need to be ready? I must get out of the house.

    397:

    You can read about it online

    To me this one is the ultimate "Can I live on a star ship?". Star Trek it isn't.

    https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/docs/simlife.htm

    398:

    I skimmed past an article somewhere that said the Dems have a bill to cut it right back.

    the House passed the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act," ... Enables individuals to recover damages in civil court when law enforcement officers violate their constitutional rights by eliminating qualified immunity for law enforcement.

    I presume at least one Democrat senator will vote to kill it, but you never know.

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210308/14502246383/police-police-supporters-ending-qualified-immunity-makes-being-cop-too-hard-somehow-defunds-police.shtml

    399:

    "Insulting the cops" Is going to get a lot worse, over here, after yesterday's disgraceful scenes. See also: this image - taken about 400m from my home ... Wrong colour scheme, of course, it should have been Purple/White/Green, but good for Stella! At the SAME TIME Patel's proposals to restruct peaceful protest even more are being put to the Commons v soon. Not sure you could make this shit up ....

    Moz Will that apply to the other well-known US police theft protocol .. ummm ... "Civil Forfeiture" ??

    400:

    I presume at least one Democrat senator will vote to kill it, but you never know.

    Takes 60 to pass such things. So one Dem either way means the difference between 10 or 11 short.

    Senate rules are arcane and complicated. A simple majority (on major legislation) only can happen during budget reconciliation which only happens down a very specific set of rules about budget items. Which is why the Senate parliamentarian said no to the minimum wage part of the last big bill. It didn't fit the rules of reconciliation. And while Schumer could have overridden the parliamentarian there would be a political cost so he decided to not use that nuclear hand grenade at that time.

    Which all leads to a parade of House bills trying to force Senators into bad votes for election ads for 2022. Pelosi and others are trying to keep this parade focused and under control so they wind up with a nice set of talking points for the election. When the R's ruled the House they did so many such bills it was hard for them to be seen as serious. And the number made it easy for both the D at the time and R for a while Senate leadership to ignore them as such things tie up precious floor/debate time to bring a bill up.

    401:

    Re: 'Star Trek it isn't.'

    Quite a few places esp. open concept offices, refugee tent cities, pre-COVID major downtown city streets and subways are noisy. After a while you just zone/tune out all but the few pertinent noises. Ditto for interpersonal interactions. My guess is that this reaction is why large city inhabitants tend toward rudeness/callousness: their brains auto-delete from consideration anyone and any activity they don't already know/expect.

    I moved from a large to a small city almost two years ago. Public interactions here tend toward more positive types of sociability: people treat everyone like 'people' with much less BS too. Hadn't expected this for some reason, just thought that apart from size/number of interactions, things would play more or less the same since the incidence of idiots, yahoos, sociopaths, etc. is comparable. Maybe there's an optimal city size.

    402:

    Some years ago I was a referee for a friend who applied to the British Antarctic Survey. They sent me a several page questionaire to fill in which could be summarised as "Would you spend six months in a shipping container with this man". I must have said the right things because they sent him to Antarctica for 2 1/2 years.

    403:

    I wonder if "After a while you just zone/tune out all but the few pertinent noises. Ditto for interpersonal interactions. " is another introvert/extrovet difference. I find that very difficult, and especially people - if I am in a busy open plan office I can't maintain a train of thought. Possibly that's also why I don't like socialising in large groups, because I can't filter to the conversation I want to be part of? I have found noise cancelling headphones a great boon, and am loving working from home and not having to deal with colleagues except when there is a work reason to.

    I've certainly noticed that virtual gatherings tend to be dominated by the loud extroverts I would usually avoid, and those of us who would be having a quiet side conversation if we were in a pub don't get to. I would not cope well with being somewhere I can't get away on my own or with a small group, being forced into larger groups all the time would be hell for me.

    404:

    I am not surprised - if I recall correctly, that is an expected consequence of most models of quantum mechanics as regards quantum entanglement and the wave/particle duality (at least one of which I assume is used in the experiments). If they have demonstrated it conclusively, it does exclude the few causal models, but they were generally disbelieved even in the 1960s. My point is that this confirms existing belief - it doesn't teach us anything new. If that blurb were a little less vague, it might convince me otherwise.

    The interesting questions are the old, old ones (a) can they pass information and hence create a causal loop and (b) are there any time/distance constraints on such dual observations? To the best of my knowledge, the answers are "probably not" and "that's a matter of pistols at dawn".

    405:

    Absolutely right. People like me, who can handle solitude indefinitely, would go bananas in short order under such circumstances - yes, I remember my schooldays :-( Most people who can handle such crowding can't handle solitude.

    406:

    Yes. I posted some constraints a while back to avoid causality violations. One of them was, if I recall correctly, if the gates are a distance D apart and their relative speed in that direction is V, the minimum transmission time is D*V/c^2. Of that form, anyway.

    Despite the dogma, you CAN have relativity, causality and FTL - just not unconstrained FTL. One of the main reasons I think that it is such a disgrace that the quantum transmission time issue is being swept under the carpet is that any answer to it would provide an immense amount of information on the relationship between the two (including whether such an ansible/gate is forbidden). Oh, yes, there are a zillion claimed answers, but no conclusive experiments.

    407:

    Well, I was responding to your line: I'd suggest that, from the pandemic year, that locking people in a spaceship for more than a year (coming and going) is on the outer limit of endurable, even if the food holds out.

    However I agree that the pandemic situation is not a meaningful approximation of a spacecraft. Moreover, I had known for a long time that I am not a good candidate for a submarine crew. I am a good candidate for something like lighthouse duty, where you are alone for weeks or months. But spaceships are more like submarines than lighthouses.

    David L @ 396:

    Me: I'm headed out to make these stops. She: When do I need to be ready? I must get out of the house.

    LOL! Never happens at my house. More like "How can I optimize the errands so the next run is in two weeks instead of in one week?"

    408:

    SFReader @ 401 : "My guess is that this reaction is why large city inhabitants tend toward rudeness/callousness"

    It doesn't work for written intercourse though.

    Last year I had to deal with a good number of people in New York City, by email, and they were all, with a not a single exception, overwhelmingly polite and obliging.

    409:

    Re: '... by email,'

    This suggests some sort of pre-existing relationship/set of interpersonal rules that ping their brainware to act human vs. being just another head bobbing along in some vast anonymous human tide.

    410:

    SFReader @ 409: "This suggests some sort of pre-existing relationship/set of interpersonal rules that ping their brainware to act human..."

    Fortunately we have among us some individuals which contantly remind us to act human:

    https://www.deviantart.com/schmoedraws/art/190316-Finger-872114430

    411:

    I'm not particularly interested in making this space suxxx volume 33. If spacefaring or star travel are possible, they're going to be unlike what most of us experience.

    From your mouth to Blog's ears. This place definitely needs a new set of strange attractors.

    412:

    I recall a SF story about a stay-at-home type who was secretly recruited by the Galactic Federation to be a starship explorer. His brother was a gregarious outgoing personality, training to be an astronaut in Earth's nascent space exploration program. The takeaway from the story was that the meek would inherit the Universe, leaving the extroverts at home because space wasn't for them.

    People in space for long durations far from Earth and with no comforting escape capsule docked at the end of the ship might require choosing a very specific emotional type for crew. In extremis it might require selective breeding and gene engineering to make a version of humanity that can survive and prosper in such an alien environment.

    413:

    And then, there's "Way Station." by Clifford D. Simak. It won the Hugo award for best novel in 1964.

    The hero of the story is a stay-at-home type who lives alone in a secluded farm house and secretly tends the machinery of the hidden way station of an interstellar transportation network. The network was built by the aliens who recruited him and never revealed their presence to the rest of humanity.

    414:

    Re: ' ... choosing a very specific emotional type for crew. In extremis it might require selective breeding and gene engineering'

    Or empaths* - not hive-mind types but folk who can register and process others' feelings and have an in-built aversion to deliberately upsetting others. If you can avoid small emotional upsets very early, chances are you will also avoid having someone bottle up their feelings and having their feelings fester to the point where they explode. Also not the handwavey mind-reading version of empathy - just mindfulness and ability to read appropriate signals. Such a crew would also probably be more likely to suss out alien psychology (because they'd be alert for it) therefore establish better, more accurate communications.

    As for the physical environment - could be a mix of physical engineering (design of the space ship to maximize perceived and actual usable space) as well as breeding smaller humans who would need less space and/or humans who need very close physical contact with others to feel comfortable.

    • Yeah, empathetic does not automatically equate compassionate.
    415:

    First, breeding smaller humans? You mean, like women astronauts, who have been shown to deal with isolation better than men?

    And then there's the point of... small starships? If we can build a starship, we can build big enough that the size of a human isn't a problem. You're still thinking right now technology... and NASA and others aren't worried about that, the way that, had I been qualified with degrees, I couldn't have tried for the astronaut program in the sixties, since the maximum height was 5'10" (1.78m).

    416:

    So far as living on a spaceship goes, I tend to look at what has worked on small islands, especially in Micronesia. There is some literature on this, mostly aimed at ex-pats and people working in the islands to try to help them adapt. Much of it is applicable to spaceships.

    The one part I always get curious about is that both Polynesian and Micronesian societies are strongly birth-order ranked. The putatively highest ranked person is the eldest child of the eldest child going back however far. The lowest ranked theoretically are the youngest child of the youngest child going back however far, although after a certain point the people at the bottom often seem to stop keeping track because, really, why bother? And sometimes mom really doesn't remember or won't say who the father is. But these rankings go across generations, so for instance the eldest child of a second child doesn't rank as high as the younger child of the eldest child.

    I've often wondered if this is a bug or feature. It doesn't obviously cut down on chiefly competition, since the younger brother who thinks he's better than his older brother and tries to overthrow or kill him is a stock figure in stories and histories. But on an everyday level, does having an elaborate ranking system help on average, hurt on average, or is it just one of those things that people do? These are people who live on small islands and sail tiny ships, it's not like they can get away from each other. Does having an elaborate pecking order help in this particular situation, or not?

    The parallels with starships and off-planet colonies should be obvious.

    417:

    In a way it doesn't matter, because it's incompatible with even our weak implementations of merit ranking. And from what little I know, most Polynesian societies have a few ways out of the ranking order, mostly the "being really good at something" sort (and not just killing people).

    418:

    Also, I suspect anything that reduces status fights is going to help. Even the most modern and equalitarian nations tend to have rigid hierarchies in ships and other situations ("but I am your king!") For all that various militaries claim "a duty to disobey" they tend to be vigorously to the contrary in practice... and there are whole forests of examples of claimed social norms not applying in practice, often due to hierarchy effects.

    Just because we've moved on from a formal "three female witnesses equal one male one" doesn't mean that we've also removed the various related factors that lead to 6% being an upper bound on number of rapes that lead to conviction.

    419:

    An alternative is the way astronaut corps in the US and Russia do it. There are basically two ranks of astronaut (trainee astronaut and astronaut). There are mission commanders and mission controllers but those are per-mission command positions, not permanent rank. They prefer to keep a flat hierarchy and rotate positions around and critique how each mission went.

    The difference, I think, is that space flights so far tend to be closer to Earth, shorter in duration (up to a year, of course), and intensively monitored, while a starship that doesn't have an ansible equivalent is going to be temporarily or permanently out of communication. Probably having a stable hierarchy is a good thing in long, independent flights. Is it worth transitioning that hierarchy into things like land ownership? I'm honestly not sure, and that's what makes it a fun question.

    I happen to agree that the Oceanic societies, like every other one, have all sorts of complexities, workarounds, and coping mechanisms. Birth order isn't everything in islander cultures, but it seems to be about as important as it is in the British aristocracy, and for much the same reason--it tracks ownership of resources.

    420:

    I think in the gap where people aren't living in each others armpits less rigidity is inevitable, and I suspect variety as much as flexibility is necessary, if only in the "can choose which ruler to live under" sense. Given a planet that's even explorable I can see half the ship wanting to move there just for the joy of not being subject to Captain Bullshit every second of the day. Then a month later wanting to come back :)

    Longer term it would depend a huge amount on the size of the colony. Even 1000 people on Marsbase One are going to be looking at the Earthly aircraft carriers with considerable envy... so much space, so many people, and shore leave! Even Antarctica is better, and not just because you can go outside. But being able to swap between the ship and the ground might be really handy, almost as handy as being able to get new stuff into the ship (and possibly, dump old stuff).

    Going off the documented smell of the ISS I can imagine a literal change of air after 5+ years in transit would make a world of difference. Just freshly distilled nitrogen and oxygen... imagine!

    421:

    Vernor Vinge has an amazingly prescient scene in his space opera A Fire Upon the Deep. Our heroes are fleeing the Blight, a sort of reified computational virus that can infect most things with even moderate computing power, including human and many other organic minds. They receive a message from a spacecraft that's following them, and the crew look normal, without the Borg–ified zombie look that's the sign of infection by the Blight. Yay! They have allies!

    But then they think the video looks too good, so they check the data rate and it's far too low to support full (3d?) video. Uhoh. They turn off their local AI enhancement of the signal and it drops down to a blocky, jerky rendition of an obviously infected crew. No help there …

    Anyway, I said astonishingly prescient because it essentially anticipates the problem we're having with AI image processing. If we were viewing things in confusing circumstances we would probably notice something; but its failure modes are different from ours and its apparent certainty leads us into thinking that it's perceiving things clearly and isn't subject to error.

    422:

    Given a planet that's even explorable I can see half the ship wanting to move there just for the joy of not being subject to Captain Bullshit every second of the day. Then a month later wanting to come back :)

    I liked Cherryh's 'Foreigner' series in respect to this. (Mild spoilers.)

    In the books, there was a human ship which got lost in hyperspace, and found a planet they could land and perhaps live on. Some did, some went away, and there is conflict when they get back. The "Not being subject to Captain Bullshit" vibe is strong there.

    423:

    Firstly, please do not confuse isolation and being in a confined group. The GROUP may be isolated but the MEMBERS are confined in that group. Secondly, these are matters of statistical distributions, not categories, so all sexist rules are bad ones.

    Very few women handle isolation well, as doing so is associated with those of us on the Asperger's spectrum, and that is much rarer among women(*). Most women may well handle the confined group situation better than most men, but the evidence I have seen isn't entirely convincing.

    (*) My wife goes doolally if she doesn't talk to anyone for two days (discovered when revising at university), and I like nothing so much as a week completely on my own and away from people.

    424:
    Takes 60 to pass such things. So one Dem either way means the difference between 10 or 11 short.

    That's something I deeply don't understand about the US political system.

    This 'it takes 60'-rule doesn't seem to have bothered the Republicans during the last four years, where they never had 60 senators or more (52 from 2016-18 and 53 from 18-20). But still McConnell could basically do whatever he wanted.

    So why does it suddenly become relevant now? Is there some special provision in the US constitution saying that Democrats need 60 votes in the Senate do get anything done while Republicans only need 51 to dominate everything?

    It's something I can't wrap my head around. Can anybody explain?

    425:

    AIUI getting legislation through Congress takes strategic horse-trading, arm-twisting and dollops of pork. Trump was not that kind of President.

    Most Acts of Congress are pretty small beer: update a law here, rename a federal property there. These tend not to be controversial, and are usually passed to please some constituency or do something for Motherhood and Apple Pie. The elected representatives in both houses have no great difficulty in organising votes to get these passed, and as long as they don't touch a Culture War issue nobody in the Senate cares enough to filibuster them. So no problem.

    However if the President wants to get some "signature" piece of legislation passed, like ObamaCare, that is another matter. The minority party know that any cooperation they provide is only going to help the majority party at the next election, so the incentive is to block everything possible.

    AFAIK the only piece of legislation particularly associated with Donald Trump was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. This cleared the Senate by 51 votes to 49, but because it was a finance bill it went through via "reconciliation" (just like the recent Covid relief bill), so the filibuster wasn't an issue.

    Apart from that everything Trump did was via executive order, which is why it was all so quickly reversed when Biden took over.

    426:

    Re: 'Even the most modern and equalitarian nations tend to have rigid hierarchies in ships and other situations ...'

    Yeah - we need to get away from a one-size fits all approach to how we live esp. listen to and become more comfortable with recognizing and minding best-for leaders and strategies by situation.

    COVID-19 has helped some of the public get comfortable with this, e.g., for medical advice re: pandemic, Fauci is the leader; for socioeconopolitical, it's Biden. And both Fauci and Biden publicly acknowledge that they pay attention to people who although organizationally more junior are more expert within specific fields. The one all-knowing-being/authority is not just obsolete, it can and does hurt us.

    427:

    Does having an elaborate pecking order help in this particular situation, or not?

    If it helps, I suspect that would be because it's not a pecking order in the avian sense, in that your place on it is pretty fixed and so you can't fight/scheme your way to the top. (Outside a narrow range, like the chief's second son.)

    428:

    Re: 'First, breeding smaller humans? ... small starships?'

    Yes - as part of physical and psycho-social resource planning and management. And we really don't need a 'breeding' program to get smaller sized humans. Size-management of the human body as documented in different cultures is as simple as: adjusting caloric intake by trimester; reducing broad spectrum antibiotic usage that kill off 'good' gut bacteria; optimizing the amount and mix of various types of carbs, proteins, fats, etc. Oh yeah - the non-extreme version of this approach* also happens to correlate pretty well with overall improvement in health and longevity. Go figure!

    • Becuz there's always someone yelling 'what about the XXX where they starved people!! Again: I'm not into extreme either-or scenarios because they plain just don't work. Unfortunately finding the Goldilocks zone for a complex species is kinda tricky.
    429:

    This 'it takes 60'-rule doesn't seem to have bothered the Republicans during the last four years, where they never had 60 senators or more (52 from 2016-18 and 53 from 18-20). But still McConnell could basically do whatever he wanted.

    Actually, as Paul indicated, he didn't. Outside of budget bills and judges, not much of substance got done. There were some epic failures of Senate R's to shut down ACA/ObamaCare and do anything with immigration reform.

    At one point in 2017 or 2018, when many Senate R's were arguing to get rid of the 60 so THEY could get things through McConnell made a statement along the lines of: "There's no where we need 60 where we have 50 at this time."

    As to judges they sailed through with 50s because the D's changed the rule for them from 60 to 50 back when the R's were obstructing Obama's nominations.

    As to understanding how all of this works refer back to my comment about arcane rules. The Constitution states that the House and Senate get to make their own rules. And they do it by simple majority. And most of these rules are in place to make the "should be easy" easy, and "should be hard", hard. And the general principle is rules carry over. Changing them is done with trepidation.

    The House is starting to get fed up with nutcase Greene of Georgia. The conspiracy lady on steroids. Lately she's been using the ability of any member to call a roll call adjournment vote at any time. Which means everyone show up (Covid-19 restrictions mind you.) and vote in person. Basically it is a way to tie everyone's personal time calendar into a knot. She says she was elected to do such. Her fellow Rs are beginning to think of tying her up and tossing her in a closet. Doing such once is a some ways a principled stand. Doing it every few days is just being an ass.

    430:

    An FYI

    Second Moderna shot noon Saturday. Got tired earlier than normal and went to bed around 8pm which is crazy early for me. I think between night time and naps I've slept 30 hours since then. This morning I feel mostly normal again.

    Others I know who've had one of the 2 mRNA versions in the US report similar.

    431:

    I read that article about Clip. Those were spectacularly bad examples. If you take a Granny Smith and the network can identify it as an apple, and then slap a label on it that almost completely obscures the apple, you can hardly expect it to identify it. I'd argue that most people, not having seen the unobscured apple, would have focussed on the label, and called it something like "a post-it with the word IPOD on it" rather than "an apple with a Post-It on it". The poodle with the $ signs is a little different, but it's an image not seen in nature. If you asked me to describe it, I'd say it's a dog AND a person, with a lot of $ symbols all over it. If you asked me what it signifies, I'd have to give "Piggy Bank" fairly high marks.

    I'm sure there are better examples, but those two were journalistic cherry (apple?) picking.

    432:

    The problem is that during an emergency or a war, a good decision now is much better than a great decision ten minutes from now. So, ideally, you do "exercises" about battles and emergencies, using experts as referees and report writers. You also cycle the people you've picked for commanders through the lessor slots and hopefully they pick up the right kinds of expertise.

    433:

    Niala @ 374: I visited the Boston Computer Museum in the 1990s. There was a full scale see-through model of the Antikythera mechanism. I was impressed!

    I remember absolutely nothing else of my trip to the Boston Computer Museum.

    On my last trip to the Smithsonian's American History Museum (sometime last century) they had a computer exhibit that included the first computer "bug". Had the log book on display

    https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/sep9/worlds-first-computer-bug/

    434:

    MSB @ 424:

    Takes 60 to pass such things. So one Dem either way means the difference between 10 or 11 short.

    That's something I deeply don't understand about the US political system.

    This 'it takes 60'-rule doesn't seem to have bothered the Republicans during the last four years, where they never had 60 senators or more (52 from 2016-18 and 53 from 18-20). But still McConnell could basically do whatever he wanted.

    So why does it suddenly become relevant now? Is there some special provision in the US constitution saying that Democrats need 60 votes in the Senate do get anything done while Republicans only need 51 to dominate everything?

    It's something I can't wrap my head around. Can anybody explain?

    Think "Heads I win, tails you lose!" Republicans have been able to break the rules (and laws) with impunity.

    435:

    JBS Us, too Here's our version: Think "Heads I win, tails you lose!" RepublicansBozo's crew of semi-fascist lairs have been able to break the rules (and laws) with impunity. ... so far. We will see how that plays out over the next few months, I think.

    436:

    The Sarah Everard murder, the police over-reaction in London & Brighton ( Everywhere else, the plod had the sense to stand back ) the arrogance & lying of Patel the "clamp down" ultra-right in the tories...... THIS is our BLM moment It's going to be a rough ride.

    438:

    No. And I note that you don't seem to have read the rest of the post you're responding to.

    If we can build a starship, we can build a big enough one. Even NASA hasn't required astronauts to be 5'10" or under since the what, 80's? 70's?

    439:

    Getting back to Musk the God Emperor of Mars Technoking of Tesla, there is an interesting line of thought in this article in The Register.

    TL;DR Starlink (the satellite-based Internet service) has the potential to let Chinese citizens pole-vault over the Great Firewall. What will China do about this? What will Musk do about what China does? And what will India do if what China does interferes with India's access to the Internet?

    Personally I suspect that the way India is going the Indian government is going to be really happy to see Starlink blocked in India too; they don't want their citizens having a free and unfiltered Internet either.

    (Technoking: is that a verb? I technoke, you technonke, he technokes, we are technoking... )

    440:

    Update on my own # 435/436

    REALLY chilling moment this morning .. BBC_R4 were interviewing the woman photographed handcuffed & laid-down yesterday ... ( Patsy Stevenson ) Her comment was that the individual Plod, afterwards were perfectly polite & almost-apologised, which was actually the scary bit: "We are only following orders" - yes, really. Pastor Niemöller's remarks about "not protesting" - until there was no-one left to protest for one's self come to mind, &/or the Soviet equivalent: "you today, me tomorrow"

    In spite of authoritarian brute Patel's remarks, as I type this, Parliament Square is filling up ....

    Thoughts?

    441:

    Here's a link to the relevant figure in the paper: https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/#figure-14 Unlabeled and labeled (with three different labels) Granny Smith, laptop computer, coffee mug, rotary dial telephone, plant pot. (Somebody clipped an image of the upper left of the figure.)

    442:

    The constitution has no mention of the filibuster. But it does say the Vice President votes in the case of a tie. However, if a filibuster is allowed, the VP's tie breaking vote is meaningless--it will produce a majority vote but not one reaching the filibuster target. So this filibuster rule is anti-constitutional, rendering a key part of the constitution useless. The Senate should not be able to change the constitution this way without a proper amendment. Not that the current Supreme Court would have the courage or desire to so rule.

    443:

    The original idea of a filibuster was that a Senator (or possibly Congressperson) would stand up and start to speak, then refuse to yield the floor, sometimes for hours or days. The effect of this was to halt Senate business for the length of the filibuster. It was also possible for two or more Senators to divide up the filibustering duties; one senator would yield to the other senator, and so forth, resulting in filibusters that could conceivably continues for days, weeks, or even months. The point here was that if you really cared about something, you could filibuster it, but only by actually doing the work of talking incessantly about whatever came to mind for ten or twenty hours straight. (Southern Democrats were famous for their filibusters.)

    In order to stop a filibuster someone had to have sixty votes.

    Unfortunately, these days someone just says, "I'm going to filibuster that" and everyone sits around and asks themselves if they have sixty votes, and if they don't the threat is honored... If they'd make anyone who wants to threaten a filibuster stand up and bloviate for hours that would take the wind out of a good many sails! (And I think that letting Republicans get tired and start to free-associate would be wonderful thing.)

    444:

    Different usage of the word "isolation". In that paper the term appears to refer to moderate reductions in human contact. In some definitions it means a reduction in direct human contact to zero or near zero. (Astronaut corps are generally pretty small and could select for whatever personality/mind types they want, including on a per-mission basis. There are enough Asperger's females to draw on.) Also, re Zoom and other web conference services, many people are not very sensitive to lag jitters - if one is sensitive (I'm aware of jitters down to about 5-10 ms) then lag jitters favor extroverts re conversational turn-taking. (They are more willing to break the turn-taking conventions).

    445:

    From the OED: The action of isolating; the fact or condition of being isolated or standing alone; separation from other things or persons; solitariness. The paper whitroth referred to was about the ISS and, if there is one thing that the people on board are NOT, it is isolated. It is the environment that is isolated (in the very loose sense you describe).

    As that paper said in "Behavioural health ..." and several places elsewhere, it was talking about living in isolated and confined environments, not isolated individuals. It was shoddy in "Relevance of clinical disorders ..." where it said "may make women more susceptible to the stress of isolation" when it was referring to the "the separation from family and other important relationships ", which is very different.

    The ISS is completely different to sending an individual astronaut on a loop around Mars - or, indeed, an individual prospector disappearing into wilderness for 3 months. It is those people that are isolated.

    Isolation within a community is another matter, and few people handle that at all well.

    446:

    I have had some experience spending large amounts of time in small spaces with other people. In the early 90s I crewed on a 31' boat across the Atlantic with 3 others (and a dog). Two of us handled it reasonably well, one spent most of his time asleep, and the captain went bugfucking insane interpersonally while still doing a creditable job of navigation.

    The Age of Sail has plenty of examples of large numbers of mostly men crammed into tight spaces for years at a time. Rigidly enforced discipline and a shared and constant desire to not die probably helped a lot with keeping things together. Many of those men weren't there voluntarily either.

    I am currently reading 'Children of Ruin' by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Their terraforming vessel was deliberately crewed with borderline obsessive scientist types who were happy to spend a decade focused on their hobby research while also doing the work of the ship. Some shenanigans ensue with long impact (i.e. if your hobby is to breed octopi for intelligence and sociability then release them into a water world, look what happens 3 millenia later). Nevertheless, the function of focused research as a way to keep many intelligent people occupied for long periods in tight quarters is a good angle. The use of 'cold sleep' for long voyages also helped - set up an experiment, go to sleep for a decade then spend your awake time reviewing the results...

    447:

    In spite of authoritarian brute Patel's remarks, as I type this, Parliament Square is filling up .... Thoughts? (Am American to be clear) A lot of things out of the US 2020 protest playbook (with similar tactics and responses seen elsewhere as well). Even seeing "crisis actor" accusations. People in the UK appear to be alert to previously-used/historical tactics, which is great. If it's played right, P. Patel's political futures will take some damage. I hope she is misreading the polity as more authoritarian than she thinks. (I.e. that she consumes and believes skewed right-wing information sources.) (In general the protest police response is not a good look for Tories, viewed from outside the UK.) Re "Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (but check for a newer version)"[1], language like this is worrying people: (ab) in the case of a procession in England and Wales— (i) the noise generated by persons taking part in the procession may have a relevant impact on persons in the vicinity of the procession, and (ii) that impact may be significant, or” The purpose of protest is to impact politics, politics is made of persons, and protest is often used by people without power (so they believe) to otherwise affect politics.

    [1] This looks like a useful augmentation of UK media coverage: LIBERTY’S BRIEFING ON THE POLICE, CRIME, SENTENCING AND COURTS BILL FOR SECOND READING IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

    448:

    ever see the film 'virtual nightmare'?

    449:

    Re: 'Others I know who've had one of the 2 mRNA versions in the US report similar.'

    Glad to hear you're feeling 'mostly normal'.

    I've seen several sources reporting that the second shot can really knock you out especially on the second day post-jab. It's such a common reaction that some hospitals advised their staff to schedule their second shot for the day before their day(s) off.

    450:

    Now you're being ridiculous. Other than the first flights into space, show me anyone talking about sending one person on a multi-month flight, such as around Mars.

    Not going to happen. They will always want more than one, in case of emergency.

    451:

    I know that. So. What.

    I am pointing out that you are posting nonsense, because you are abusing the term "isolation" in regard to a person. The fact is that, statistically, men are better at handling isolation, whether or not women are better at handling confined environments that are isolated.

    452:

    Re: 'You're still thinking right now technology... and NASA and others aren't worried about that, ...'

    Yes, I did read that post.

    The size of the humans has impacts beyond the size of their container (spaceship, rooms) - specifically, air, water and nutrition. It's more a medical health vs. comfort concern - although both would be important if you're locked up inside a tin can for years.

    453:

    You're still assuming small ships. I'm assuming that by the time we build starships, we'll have solved a lot of the issues around recycling and life support, and that we will build large ships.

    Let's see, I just looked up, and see that an Ohio-class boomer is about 171m long, and has a crew and officers of 155.

    In my novel, set about 150 years from now, the research starship is in the neighborhood, or larger, than 1/3rd of a klick, and has a crew of 25 (including the captain) and a research team of about 70. Oh, and a friend who works on research vessels out of Wood's Hole says that's a larger team than she's ever been with.

    And there are expandable bays, for all their equipment.

    This is what I'm assuming. What are you assuming?

    454:

    The Age of Sail has plenty of examples of large numbers of mostly men crammed into tight spaces for years at a time. Rigidly enforced discipline and a shared and constant desire to not die probably helped a lot with keeping things together. Many of those men weren't there voluntarily either.

    Sounds like you went through one of those standard disaster at sea survival setups, but fortunately the disaster didn't happen.

    That said, there are some problems with using Age of Sail as a proxy for extended space travel. One is some critical bits of the life support system were outsourced to the surrounding ocean and Earth, and another is that, with some exceptions, the voyage between ports is on order of weeks to months, not months to years.

    And this is if you assume that the spaceship will land at the end. If it's a vessel that's never intended to land, life support will have to last for the life of the ship.

    Another point is that, to a first approximation, 90 percent of the biomass on the ship will be non-human. In other words, it's going to be a flying greenhouse* to a first approximation, not a wooden ship or a corporate skyscraper in space. Unless some sadist insists on using those pink growlights, the light needed to grow the plants, and the resulting green, will help maintain sanity in the crew. But we're still so programmed to think of spaceships as ultra lightweight machines that we don't think about what a long-term life support system will look like.

    That's why I tend to look at small islands for analogs to how a starship might work, although a submarine also has certain parallels.

    *Probably the plants will be watered and fed aeroponically (roots in humid air, not hydroponics or soil). This is basically a safety measure, since water spilling under variable or no gravity is just a versatile and expanding set of problems waiting to happen.

    455:

    Ongaku @ 442: The constitution has no mention of the filibuster. But it does say the Vice President votes in the case of a tie. However, if a filibuster is allowed, the VP's tie breaking vote is meaningless--it will produce a majority vote but not one reaching the filibuster target. So this filibuster rule is anti-constitutional, rendering a key part of the constitution useless. The Senate should not be able to change the constitution this way without a proper amendment. Not that the current Supreme Court would have the courage or desire to so rule.

    The Constitution says in Article 1, Section 5, Paragraph 2:

    Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

    That's where the Senate's 60 vote rule for Cloture comes from.

    It's anti-democratic, but it IS in the Constitution.

    456:

    SFReader @ 449:

    Re: 'Others I know who've had one of the 2 mRNA versions in the US report similar.'

    Glad to hear you're feeling 'mostly normal'.

    I've seen several sources reporting that the second shot can really knock you out especially on the second day post-jab. It's such a common reaction that some hospitals advised their staff to schedule their second shot for the day before their day(s) off.

    Those strong reactions appear to be a "virtue" of youth. You're more likely to experience them if you're in your 20s or 30s (and maybe into your early 40s). Geezers like me (& you?) aren't likely to have as much reaction.

    And even the "knock you on your ass reaction" is better than getting full-blown Covid. Would you rather be sick for a couple of days or sick for months & maybe die?

    I'm 71 and the only reaction I had to either Pfizer shot was a bit of (quite minor) soreness at the injection site the day after.

    457:

    Geezers like me (& you?) aren't likely to have as much reaction.

    Not so sure.

    I'm 67. I had some all over muscle ache. But not enough to keep me from mental work or even light physical activity. But the "ok, go take a nap" feeling I had for 2 days was the big deal for me.

    And in talking with some more 2nd shot folks tonight, reactions are all of the map.

    458:

    That's "The Claustrophile" by Theodore Sturgeon. Another essential feature of spacegoing people is the ability to be entertained by one's own thoughts.

    My impression is that England has an unusually noxious tabloid press. Is this true? If it's true, any ideas about how it happened?

    459:

    I see the Tory Viles have finally achieved 1990 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_(TV_series)) Next up, Patel’s Public Control Department.

    460:

    Very few women handle isolation well, as doing so is associated with those of us on the Asperger's spectrum, and that is much rarer among women(*)

    I am an Aspie. I am not entirely sure about my wife's neurological state, but she is definitely not neurotypical. Well, I do not care about human contact. She hates it. When she needs to figure out some device, she would rather faff it for hours online than to call customer support -- talking to people[1] is that painful to her.

    [1] That is, people she does not know. She is fine communicating with me and with our friends.

    461:

    My impression is that England has an unusually noxious tabloid press. Is this true? If it's true, any ideas about how it happened?

    The blessings of Sir Rupert de Faux, perhaps?

    462:

    The one part I always get curious about is that both Polynesian and Micronesian societies are strongly birth-order ranked.

    Yeah. Right.

    Mana depends very heavily on whakapapa. It's the source of mana. And it means something if a language has no way to just say "my brother", only ways to say "my older brother" and "my younger brother".

    But Mana also depends on what you accomplish. Maui was the youngest brother.

    463:

    Maui was the youngest brother.

    I heard the voices in my head start the Roman's sketch right there.

    "what has Maui ever done for us, a dead fish and a sunken canoe"

    But sadly they stopped there.

    464:

    It is fashionable to ascribe it to that cause, but it was just as bad a hundred years ago and more; it was already that way when his old man came over from Australia looking for shit to stir up. There seems to be something about British newspapers that they always had to be run by Lord something but it was always Lord Arsehairs or Lord Knobcheese and never one of the nice ones.

    Also I think a lot of it is because back in the days when people had to read or else forgo entertainment, you could sell them any old cheap shit, and so it was sold in vast quantities, often in two or even three editions of the same paper at different times of day. And even so they were still dependent on advertising. So it's the same old story really.

    465:

    This interesting AI goof happened to me today: When I asked Wolfram Alpha percentage of US population over 65 it told me 14.5%, a perfectly reasonable answer. Then I asked it percentage of Nevada population over 65 and was surprised to be told 3.33 billion people. This appears to be, instead, the total population of Earth in the year 1965.

    I can see what it's doing differently but it's striking that very similar inputs get parsed so differently. Given Nevada's population of about three million people we can expect the correct answer to be around 450,000; software using these answers as input would be unlikely to notice when an answer was three orders of magnitude greater than the total population...

    Sometimes you're lucky to get as close as "iPod."

    466:

    Nancy L England has an unusually noxious tabloid press. All too true - but it always was poisonous & vicious ( See Dorothy Sayers' social criticism of this in the Wimsey detective novels ) ... but, of late, it has got viciously right-wing political as well, though the "Express" & the Hate-Mail always were that way inclined. Now the torygraph & the Times have joined in & the Scum has been spawned onto us.

    timrowledge Yes ... you know why, of course? Couple this with the social turning point we have just seen ( See me @ # 435, 436 & 440 ) ... and. The ultras inside the tories, the semi-fascists are now, they think, fully prepared for when the shit really hits the fan over Brexit, come about June/July, when the food-supplies & products from the EU run out & we get food riots. Like I said, it's going to be rough & unpleasant.

    467:

    Greg Tingey @ 436: The Sarah Everard murder, the police over-reaction [...]

    With reluctance, I have to disagree. The lockdown rules are there for good reason. The virus doesn't care about your politics, and a demo is a classic super-spreader event; lots of people in close proximity shouting at the tops of their voices.

    Compare the coverage of these events with e.g. this one, which featured rather less sympathetic politics (at that time the UK was under restrictions but not the full lockdown).

    Officers waded in to break up part of the crowd and seize the sound system just before 3pm and used batons against protesters, leaving some bleeding with visible head injuries.

    The Met said 16 people were arrested “for a variety of offences”. Nine police officers were injured.

    No close-ups of bleeding covidiots being sat on by police officers. Presumably they were less photogenic.

    The police are supposed to be politically impartial. If they start choosing between good protests and bad protests then we really are in 1984.

    So what exactly were the police supposed to do? Decide that good protests should be allowed while still stopping bad protests? Allow all protests and possibly see a resurgence of Covid (a decision which is rightly above Cressida Dicks pay grade)? Or wade in and start arresting people who are breaking the law?

    Once you decide to start arresting people in a demo it is going to get ugly fast. There is no way to politely and gently put someone in a police van if they don't want to go and are surrounded by a crowd of sympathisers.

    What would you have done if you were the police commander on the ground?

    468:

    Our libel laws have a lot to do with it, too. It's relatively expensive to pursue an action for libel, and damages have always been relatively limited unless the libel is really bad (for public figures, the "actual malice" test makes it very hard to sue a newspaper for libel).

    Even if the libel is really bad, damages tend to be in the forms that a deep-pocketed newspaper owner can afford; money and a written apology, but generally no need to use the newspaper's platform to broadcast that apology. Even when an apology had to be put in the paper, it'd be extremely rare to require it to be as prominent as the original libel, let alone more so.

    Additionally, we used to permit newspapers to pay into court and produce a form apology in writing for a libel, and thus prevent a trial. This allowed the more, shall we say, salacious newspapers to run close to the winds, knowing that the penalty for overstepping the mark was negligible (no trial for competitors to report on, and the defamed party would have to shop around for a competitor to publish the apology and explanation).

    This all adds up to a recipe for toxic activity - just know where the edges of legal are, and pay out a small amount on occasion when you step over an edge. The risks are easy to bound, so why not take them?

    469:

    A kindly reminder about Nuremberg trials and gallows?

    470:

    It did say that it was counting females with the name Nevada. Adding a “state of” before Nevada gave a more plausible answer.

    471:

    Coincidentally one particular journalist/columnist has been made to eat crow today for statements she made (not AFAIK in a paper - I think they were on social media, given that an abject apology has been Tweeted today).

    472:

    See, for example, Lord Copper in Waugh's Scoop.

    473:
    but, of late, it has got viciously right-wing political as well

    "of late"? Supporting Mosley and Hitler wasn't right wing enough for you?

    474:

    I visited the Boston Computer Museum in the 1990s. There was a full scale see-through model of the Antikythera mechanism. I was impressed!

    On a related note, I just bought a new computer. It's the fourth(?) generation of a series I last tried out (and couldn't really use because it was too big and cumbersome) back in 2018.

    It has an ARM 6 CPU and 128Gb of storage. And it weighs 27.5 grams (roughly one ounce) because it's a pen. (Livescribe Symphony.) Basically it remembers anything you write or draw on its special paper -- on non-special pattered paper it just works as a regular pen -- and can synch it to a smartphone or desktop computer app with handwriting recognition over bluetooth. (You're not tied to buying notebooks from the company store: you can print your own special paper on a laser or inkjet. PDFs of the dot pattern its IR camera uses for recognition and registration are available.)

    Anyway: my watch has a cpu. My ear buds each have a cpu. My goddamn pen has a cpu. My phone has multiple 64 bit cores and a baseband processor (and can kick sand in the face of a late 1990s supercomputer.) Hell, my credit card and debit card are both EMV cards, which means they contain a secure microcontroller (typically based on an 8/16-bit RISC architecture).

    Upshot: these days I don't go to the corner shop without carrying/wearing 7-8 computers.

    475:

    Thoughts?

    My actual thoughts are unprintable, but given that the gender balance in comments on this blog seem to be about 95% male, I'm not going to hork up a trollball of a blog essay on this topic any time soon.

    Let's just say it's less of a BLM moment for the UK and more of a #MeToo moment -- and England is getting a failing grade from its most senior female politicians.

    For context: consider the monstering Nicola Sturgeon got from the Tories in Holyrood while testifying over the Salmond sexual harrassment prosecution. And it was a monstering: she was interrogated on the record, in public, for 8-9 hours, about her response to her male predecessor's alleged offenses. I know you don't like the SNP, but strip it of the partisan aspect and let it sink in: female executive is hounded publicly, with front page newspaper coverage of calls for her resignation, over something a privileged make predecessor did wring.

    The UK's gender politics are utterly toxic -- even before we talk about the current wave of (US religious right inspired) transphobia, which is always a wedge issue for homophobic backlash in general (the trans community are seen as relatively unpopular and weak, hence an easy initial target).

    476:

    Also, re Zoom and other web conference services, many people are not very sensitive to lag jitters - if one is sensitive (I'm aware of jitters down to about 5-10 ms) then lag jitters favor extroverts re conversational turn-taking. (They are more willing to break the turn-taking conventions).

    It also favours aspergers/ASD types, who don't pick up on social conversational cues and so tend to talk over people anyway.

    477:

    My impression is that England has an unusually noxious tabloid press. Is this true? If it's true, any ideas about how it happened?

    Over a period of decades, during which our press was slowly homologated under the control of a handful of white, right-wing, male, billionaire media magnates (most of them with titles of nobility): Rupert Murdoch started the ball rolling with The Sun, we also have Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail, Richard Desmond, the Barclay twins Sir Frederick Barclay, Baron Lebedev (Russian media oligarch, now sitting in the House of Lords) ...

    It's a toxic, racist stew of venom and hatred, and half the senior cabinet posts (including the PM) are occupied by former tabloid journalists, and Boris Johnson just parachuted one of the worst -- a former tabloid editor -- to run the Office of Communications which oversees the BBC and complaints about broadcast media and the internet. (After putting a Tory donor in charge as BBC Director General.)

    478:

    A kindly reminder about Nuremberg trials and gallows?

    Reminder that Priti Patel is the one who's gung-ho to bring back hanging: the rest of us moved on a while ago (it's majority-unpopular with the voters, when polled, only exceeding 50% in favour among the over-65s -- who mostly don't remember how horrible it was, because at 65 they were 9 years old when it was abolished).

    It's also illegal under the Human Rights Act and the ECHR (which Patel is also gung-ho to abolish).

    Sometimes the only explanation that fits is that cruelty is the whole point.

    479:

    Paul There were "Sarah Everard vigils" all over the country. In all-but-two places, the plod stood back, offered advice & all passed-off peacfully. But not in London or Brighton, where they went, if not bonkers, certainly adrift. NOTE: "Police Scotland" sat on their hands when several thousand drunk fucking idiotsRangers supporters partied outside their stadium in Glasgow, yeah - it's aw-reet for male fascist scum, but not for peacful women, eh?

    Marino_bib Precisely - why do you think I quoted that?

    Charlie That's the point. Women today, us tomorrow - if a 75-year old male (me) can see this, I would assume others can, as well? Partially disagree about "transphobia" - as you know - but it's a very tricky subject. OTOH, I was thinking not so much of the current gender/sex fight, but the indications of a coming clampdown leading to at the very least fascism-lite ( Because we are already well down that road ) ... "Wimmin" are the easy first target - who is next? That is what I would like to hear your opinion on. ... # 477 Yes, the propaganda is going to get worse. [ Slight exception for Lebedev - he does not love BoZo or the tory right, but that's not saying a lot. ]

    480:

    a demo is a classic super-spreader event

    Is it? The BLM protests last year weren't super-spreaders.

    481:

    On the Rangers riot, please note that the very next day Nicola Sturgeon got up and scolded them very loudly indeed in parliament.

    Also: while Police Scotland is a unitary body, in practice it's only a decade old and is led by senior officers who came up through the biggest forces ... which is to say, Glasgow. And Strathclyde Police were always notoriously sectarian and tilted alarmingly presbyterian, like the Rangers fan base. I can't help seeing the riot/celebration in that light: cops taking a "fans will be fans" attitude to their own and also being very wary about wading into several thousand drunken men.

    (The cops did not, however, come over all heavy-handed over the Sarah Everard vigils in Scotland. Which is something, I suppose.)

    482:

    it's aw-reet for male fascist scum, but not for peacful women, eh?

    It's safer to leave the rioters alone. Same thing happened in Toronto during the G20 protests — police left the really violent ones alone to run amuck, and settled for going after the peaceful protesters.

    Officer Bubbles* was nowhere to be found when thugs were using battering rams to loot shops. Which makes sense, given what he feels threatened by.

    *https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/g20/2010/07/16/torontos_officer_bubbles_gains_web_notoriety.html

    483:

    Having been born and grown up in the Glasgow area, although at the periphery (our postcode started with a 'G') I'd estimate the numbers of Celtic and Rangers aka Catholic and Protestant police officers would be roughly equal. There were plenty of places in Glasgow where the wall murals supported the IRA countered by areas like Larkhall which was very blue and Masonic-slash-Orange Order.

    My Protestant primary school shared a wall with the local Catholic primary and we used to throw rocks at each other over said wall. The secondary school I attended was also Protestant, the Catholics went to a separate school, the really smart ones went to a Catholic Church-run academy (St. Ninians?) several miles away in the next town over.

    There actually were a number of arrests and injuries at the Rangers League victory mob celebration. The anti-COVID lockdown protests in the recent past also got serious police efforts, more arrests and injuries resulted.

    From what I can tell from the news the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common resulted in four arrests and, I think, no injuries on either 'side'. For a protest/vigil that was not supposed to happen at all given the current pandemic that's quite mild policing. What we saw was headline pictures of one vigil attendee getting arrested and that seems to have created the idea that this was happening all over the Common, batons out and tear gas and tasers. I've not seen any credible news that anything like this happened.

    484:

    Charlie Stross @ 478: "Sometimes the only explanation that fits is that cruelty is the whole point."

    Canada's last hangman wasn't cruel. He tied them up correctly so that the rope would kill them by breaking their neck, instantly.

    Note that if it were up to me we would have only murderers in real prisons, while the other criminals would be in external rehab centers.

    The neat thing about keeping murderers alive is that you can give them as a long lasting living example of what happens to those who murder.

    485:

    The death penalty is inherently cruel: even if you can carry it out painlessly, firstly the justice system has a non-zero false positive rate, and secondly, consider the (definitely not guilty) family members of the murderer who are being permanently deprived of a parent, child, or partner.

    Put it another way: if murder is bad, so is judicially murdering a murderer.

    486:

    The BLM protests last year weren't super-spreaders.

    If you're talking the US, most BLM protests had 2 parts. The actual protests tended to involve people mostly wearing masks. Then after dark / later at night the thugs showed up (or started acting out) after the "protesters" had gone home. And the thugs were much smaller in numbers than the main protestors.

    So it was a mixed bag of numbers and masking. Plus summer weather which tended to keep the spread down due to, well, all kinds of small reasons.

    It worked that way here where I am and in other places where I dug deep about it.

    Portland is in its own universe. Someone on this blog is from there. I wonder if he can explain what is going on there.

    487:

    But Mana also depends on what you accomplish. Maui was the youngest brother.

    So? Go read up on the Trickster archetype. Maui's a classic example.

    Otherwise, I agree that you're right about nearness to the source being the root of human mana. But it is very definitely more complex than that.

    For those who care less about the intricacies, there's a strong similarity between English primogeniture and Polynesian birth order rankings. Again, it tends to be about who gets which rights to which parcel of land, land being a limited and crucial commodity in the islands.

    488:

    The neat thing about keeping murderers alive is that you can give them as a long lasting living example of what happens to those who murder.

    An even neater thing about keeping them alive is that you can free them if it turns out they aren't actually murderers.

    https://www.innocencecanada.com/exonerations/

    489:

    I'd add also that mask-wearing has a strong political angle, and COVID19 has been hitting communities of color pretty hard.

    Still, there's a critical point about political discipline that I think people missed here. The BLM protests were non-violent, masked, and larger than the corresponding far right rallies. As usual, the media are fascinated by white skins and violence, but if you want to understand democratic politics in the US, that discipline plays a huge role, and it needs to be respected.

    490:

    The BLM protests were non-violent, masked, and larger than the corresponding far right rallies. Much larger. The US media had a lot of protests to cherry-pick from. That's why the US RW had a very different view of the BLM/Floyd protests than other segments of the population; they had very different media feeds. Number of people in U.S. who said they protested, according to polls Poll Pct. who protested Implied population Polling period Kaiser Family Foundation (n = 1296) 10% 26 million June 8-14 Civis Analytics (4446) 9% 23 million June 12-22 N.O.R.C. (1310) 7% 18 million June 11-15 Pew (9654) 6% 15 million June 4-10 Note: Surveys are of the adult population in the United States

    491:

    The lockdown rules are there for good reason. The virus doesn't care about your politics, and a demo is a classic super-spreader event; The evidence has never supported this. Since spring 2020[1] (earlier, really) there have been indications that outdoor events are drastically less likely to spread SARS-CoV-2, which spreads almost entirely through sharing of unfiltered exhalations. The outdoors limits sharing by diluting exhalations. Ordinances/rules/laws against outdoor gatherings are not justified as COVID-19 pandemic respiratory virus control measures by any significant evidence. (There might be other motives, e.g. security theatre (like surface cleaning) showing something is being done, and a legal tool to break up protests with reduced public outcry[3].) The science has been baking, and the metaanalyses (scholar.google.com "outdoor transmission") suggest that the risk reduction from being outdoors is roughly 10-20X. I know of no evidence for any outdoors superspreader events. The problem with many outdoor events is when people congregate unmasked indoors before or more typically after the event, and in particular that the index patient(s) is(are) unmasked. (A mixed outdoor/indoor event is an indoor event.[2] No superspreader events where index patient(s) was(were) masked, AFAIK.)

    [1] Smallish early (April 2020) observational study : Closed environments facilitate secondary transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (April 16, 2020) Of the 110 cases examined, 27 (24.6%) were primary cases who generated 31 secondary cases. The odds that a primary case transmitted COVID-19 in a closed 32 environment was 18.7 times greater compared to an open-air environment (95% 33 confidence interval [CI]: 6.0, 57.9). [2] Current work (preprint), focused on outdoor transmission. Assessment of the risks of viral transmission in non-confined crowds (February 19, 2021) Most Covid-19 outbreaks are certainly associated with indoor settings (6), but nonetheless a minority of clusters – at least a few percent, as a tentative estimate (5,7–9) – reportedly originate in outdoor or mixed indoor/outdoor settings, e.g., on building sites [3] Police in England 'using Covid lockdown rules to halt any protests' (13 Mar 2021) (Other countries do this too, yes.)

    492:

    H. Beam Piper's Space Vikings. They spend months traveling between the stars, and most of them have some art or craft skills, and make stuff while traveling, that sell for good prices.

    493:

    I will point out that, despite open air meetings being safer, IQ .45 somehow managed to turn at least one outdoor event into a superspreader event. Go figure.

    494:

    "Once you decide to start arresting people in a demo it is going to get ugly fast."

    Please allow me to introduce you to the anti-Vietnam War protests. There were the folks who were protesting, and didn't want to be arrested, there were folks (like me) who wanted to keep the cops busy, but not get arrested.

    And then there were the folks into civil disobedience, who stepped over the cops' line and sat down, and the cops would pick them up and load them into the wagons. A good number of times the jails were overwhelmed, and the cops had to use stadiums.

    Mostly peaceful.

    495:

    I was at a BLM protest in late spring, I think it was, last year. At least 3/4's or more of us were wearing masks.

    496:

    H. Beam Piper's Space Vikings. They spend months traveling between the stars, and most of them have some art or craft skills, and make stuff while traveling, that sell for good prices.

    A good point, and one that echoes the Age of Sail and the art of scrimshaw on whale teeth and marlinspike art braids. Making saleable art from scrap is a venerable tradition, and not limited to sailing ships. See hobo coins, gypsy flowers, and the like. Right now we're in kind of a drought on these art forms (at least where I am), but perhaps we'll see a re-florescence of repurposed art if we get serious about rejiggering civilization to be sustainable.

    Chris Hadfield's rendition of Space Oddity is a different take on the idea of space art. Probably it's one that's more relevant to forms of space travel that are weight limited. Digital art doesn't weigh very much.

    If we're talking about flying greenhouses for long-term travel, I suspect that plant and micro-livestock breeding will be ongoing projects on ships. Seeds and eggs don't weigh much, and ships will be saving seeds and breeding successful creatures out of need. These can certainly be traded, gifted, or sold.

    497:

    IQ .45 somehow managed to turn at least one outdoor event into a superspreader event. If you're referring to the Rose Garden Amy Coney Barrett confirmation party, there was an indoor unmasked cocktail party immediately afterwords, that many also attended after attending the outdoor even. It was an "outdoor/indoor" event, i.e. an indoor event. (I have not looked in detail; perhaps there were people infected with the ACB party strain who were only outdoors, but haven't heard of it. Contact tracing was deliberately shut down for the event, IIRC.)

    498:

    "Outdoor" events that superspread Here it was supposedly the 2020 Cheltenham Festival ( Of horse-racing ) The spreading didn't take place on the racecourse itself, it did it in the bars, clubrooms & other crowded indoor sub-meetings

    499:

    Heteromeles @ 496: " Right now we're in kind of a drought on these art forms (at least where I am)"

    Yes, you have to go to countries with little or no mineral resources to see what people can do with their old soft drink cans.

    But we risk losing too many of our witnesses of the past if we recycle everything, like previous civilisations did.

    People ask why there are no other examples of finely done gears like in the Antikythera mechanism. It's simple. In those days and up until recently metals were constantly recycled. And books were too, as you could scrape a layer out of the pages of a parchment manuscript to write another text in an old book. And now we recycle paper books!

    By the way, if you want to see what an interstellar ship with a huge greenhouse in it looks like, get a copy of "Les couloirs de l'entretemps" by Bourgeon and Lacroix.

    https://www.amazon.fr/Cycle-Cyann-T5-Couloirs-lEntretemps/dp/2756062200

    https://www.renaud-bray.com/Livres_Produit.aspx?id=1623528&def=Couloirs+de+l%27Entretemps(Les)+%2305+N.+%C3%A9d.%2CBOURGEON%2C+FRAN%C3%87OIS%2CLACROIX%2C+CLAUDE%2C9782756062204

    500:

    David L @ 457:

    Geezers like me (& you?) aren't likely to have as much reaction.

    Not so sure.

    I'm 67. I had some all over muscle ache. But not enough to keep me from mental work or even light physical activity. But the "ok, go take a nap" feeling I had for 2 days was the big deal for me.

    nd in talking with some more 2nd shot folks tonight, reactions are all of the map.

    How do you know the "ok, go take a nap" thing is related to the Covid shots?

    I just went through a couple of days of that and it's been over a month since I got my second vaccination. Seems to me to be more related to the coming of spring & the change to Daylight Savings Time here in the U.S.

    I don't understand why the Daylight Savings Time affects me that way? The only real difference it makes in my life is that instead of getting out of bed at noon, I'm now getting out of bed at 1:00pm.

    I can get up early in the morning if I want to; if there's something that needs doing early, but why should I? I'm retired & every day is "Saturday" for me now.

    501:

    By the way, if you want to see what an interstellar ship with a huge greenhouse in it looks like, get a copy of "Les couloirs de l'entretemps" by Bourgeon and Lacroix.

    Well, they weren't interstellar, or probably even practical, but I always got a kick out of the ships in "Silent Running".

    502:

    It's probably better to think of the past as having a half-life of somewhere around 500-1000 years. It's not just recycling, it's accidents, and ordinary decay.

    Oddly enough, palimpsests aren't a good example for why we don't have classical papyrus texts. As I picked up from a Nova program last year, papyrus, parchment, and paper are three very different media. There was a lot of papyrus produced during the classical era. It was a major Egyptian export. Because of the nature of the material, it lent itself better to scrolls than codices. However, it was easy to source, easy to make, and fairly easy to write on. And papyrus is short-lived unless it's buried in a desert. Classical empires had retail booksellers. The books were handwritten by slaves, but it was easy enough to get a copy of a favored text.

    Parchment is the opposite of papyrus. It's painstakingly processed hide. When papyrus ceased to be exported to Europe, parchment was all that was available. It's comparatively thick, it's far more expensive than papyrus or paper, and ink takes a long time to dry on it, so writing on parchment is slow. As a result, a parchment codex has fewer pages and costs about as much as a car, so only the rich have a lot of books. Ironically, this drove the use of illumination. It wasn't just decorative. With so few books, people had to memorize what they needed to know, because they had to go to the book, the book didn't go with them. One way to make book pages memorable was to doodle all over them, so every page is unique. Medieval readers were trained to use the illuminations to help them remember what was on each page.

    Paper, of course, is paper, but without it, there's really not much point in having printing presses. That led to an explosion of printed material and readers outsourcing their memories to books, because it's a cheap medium.

    503:

    Pigeon @ 464: It is fashionable to ascribe it to that cause, but it was just as bad a hundred years ago and more; it was already that way when his old man came over from Australia looking for shit to stir up. There seems to be something about British newspapers that they always had to be run by Lord something but it was always Lord Arsehairs or Lord Knobcheese and never one of the nice ones.

    Also I think a lot of it is because back in the days when people had to read or else forgo entertainment, you could sell them any old cheap shit, and so it was sold in vast quantities, often in two or even three editions of the same paper at different times of day. And even so they were still dependent on advertising. So it's the same old story really.

    I wonder if some of it is attributable to the way radio & television developed in the U.K. Didn't the U.K. start out with only the BBC government monopoly on radio & TV?

    And even now, don't the governments in the U.K. still exercise a whole lot of control over content even for the commercial broadcasters? So that tabloid journalism hasn't filtered into the British airwaves the way it has done in the U.S.

    In the U.S. it was a free-for-all of competing commercial interests (broadcasters) from the get go. In the U.S. radio & TV networks compete the way newspapers do in the U.K.

    Before the advent of radio & TV, the U.S. had the plethora of competing newspapers the U.K. has, but they were displaced by radio & TV in the later half of the 20th century.

    504:

    Charlie Stross @ 476:

    Also, re Zoom and other web conference services, many people are not very sensitive to lag jitters - if one is sensitive (I'm aware of jitters down to about 5-10 ms) then lag jitters favor extroverts re conversational turn-taking. (They are more willing to break the turn-taking conventions).

    It also favours aspergers/ASD types, who don't pick up on social conversational cues and so tend to talk over people anyway.

    I have a Zoom meeting every couple of weeks. It's an outgrowth of a weekly brunch that got killed by Covid. I hardly ever speak because I can't get a word in edgewise trying to be polite and let the others finish speaking before I try to butt in. It's quite frustrating.

    I don't use a web-cam & haven't been able to get a microphone working with my computer, so I have to do audio over the telephone and just have a photo place holder on screen. I can see the other participants, but they can't see me.

    If I ever get the computer audio problem sorted out, I'll get a web cam & make a "I have something to say!" sign to hold up when I want to speak.

    505:

    (I have not looked in detail; perhaps there were people infected with the ACB party strain who were only outdoors, but haven't heard of it. Contact tracing was deliberately shut down for the event, IIRC.)

    Actually while outside there was seating with chairs just against each other. And no masking. And I saw somewhere a photo of everyone seated with all the positives (admitted ones) high lighted. The spreading could have happened outside in that situation. No breeze. Everyone withing 2' of each other. No moving for 1/2 hour or more.

    506:

    Heteromeles @ 502: It's probably better to think of the past as having a half-life of somewhere around 500-1000 years. It's not just recycling, it's accidents, and ordinary decay.

    Oddly enough, palimpsests aren't a good example for why we don't have classical papyrus texts. As I picked up from a Nova program last year, papyrus, parchment, and paper are three very different media. There was a lot of papyrus produced during the classical era. It was a major Egyptian export. Because of the nature of the material, it lent itself better to scrolls than codices. However, it was easy to source, easy to make, and fairly easy to write on. And papyrus is short-lived unless it's buried in a desert. Classical empires had retail booksellers. The books were handwritten by slaves, but it was easy enough to get a copy of a favored text.

    I read something about that the other day. The author's contention was the true beginning of the European "Dark Ages" weren't until the Islamic Conquest of the eastern Mediterranean in the 6th Century cut off the supply of Egyptian Papyrus to the west.

    Although the western empire was replaced by "barbarians", by the time those barbarian kingdoms were established the ruling class was effectively Romanized and continued to have Roman style bureaucracies, including keeping lots of written records on papyrus.

    Papyrus is fragile & records need to be periodically transcribed onto new papyrus.

    That didn't affect the Roman Church as much because they always used parchment for important documents, using papyrus for more mundane purposes. But after papyrus was no longer available those prior mundane writings were not preserved, and were not transcribed before they fell apart.

    Paper seems to have been invented in several times and places around the world. Seems like maybe first in ancient China and then the idea of paper spread west through India, Persia, the Middle East, across North Africa where it was reinvented and finally spread into Umayyad Iberia (Muslim Spain) from whence it spread into Europe in the early 11th Century.

    Interestingly, toilet paper seems to be one of the earliest versions of paper invented in China.

    507:

    Was that the protest where the U.S. Post office under Dumph delayed the deliver of the BLM-themed masks?

    508:

    "Didn't the U.K. start out with only the BBC government monopoly on radio & TV?"

    Yes, we did, but the unpleasant tendencies of the press were already well established by then. It could be that there was some element of not wanting radio to end up like the press, as there was of not wanting it to end up the way the US was going. So kind of the other way round really.

    509:

    Sorry, it was ACB's nomination party, not her confirmation party. https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/dc/washington/KDCA/date/2020-9-26 shows a breeze (roughly 5 mph), at the nearby airport. Was there reporting of no breeze? Is there evidence, e.g. images of candles or torches or limp flags? Yeah, the tight seating + lack of face coverings was quite disturbing, but the outside air is big. (Somebody who was at the event, caught SARS-CoV-2, but did not attend the indoor party would be strong indicator of outdoor spread.) A couple of people in one of the white house clusters had their SARS-CoV-2 sequenced, and a similar (but uncommon in the population) mutation was found in each: Viral genome sequencing places White House COVID-19 outbreak into phylogenetic context There was a suspicious lack of interest in contract tracing at the time.

    This review is also interesting. Search on "What is the evidence for outdoor transmission of COVID-19 at mass gatherings?" Rapid Scoping Review of Evidence of Outdoor Transmission of COVID-19 (Mike Weed, Abby Foad, September 10, 2020)

    510:

    Heteromeles @502: "It's probably better to think of the past as having a half-life of somewhere around 500-1000 years."

    I did a Master's in Library Science, specialized in Archives and Records Management, and it was very clear then that as long as we lived in an industrial society the past would always be around and grow bigger and bigger.

    When it turned out that we couldn't trust microfilm (as spots appeared on 50 year old reels) we turned to microfiche, and after that to digital supports.

    The only thing that can happen to us that can cut the past off is war.

    511:

    Actually, what happened in the US in the latter part of the 20th century was the tax cuts for the rich, which allowed mergers and buyouts... and the majority of the wealthy are, of course, right-wing scum who want to be the "new nobility".

    512:

    Have you tried either raising your hand in zoom, or opened the chat window and typed in there?

    513:

    Have you tried either raising your hand in zoom, or opened the chat window and typed in there?

    I reckon JBS' lack of a camera is going to make raising his hand a bit pointless. Chat might work, if people have the chat window open.

    I know with Teams! and Hangouts people often don't see the chat window, so his idea of getting a camera and replacing his face with a white sheeting saying "I WANNA TALK NOW!!!" would be more likely to get attention.

    514:

    If you get a webcam, they usually have a microphone built-in.

    I use a Jabra mono wired (USB) headset for Zoom calls, works great. I like the mono (one ear) just so I can hear stuff around me. My experience is the wireless (aka bluetooth) headsets don't always work as well.

    I see some Jabra mono headsets being sold on Amazon for $60-70, which appears to be a fairly good price.

    516:

    Suggestion: log in to the meeting twice. Use your phone for talking/listening, and the computer session to raise your hand when you want to say something. Then once you hear people say "JBS, what do you want to say" you can start talking.

    Don't even need to have a camera for the computer part — run with video and audio off and just use the "raise hand" feature to request your turn to talk.

    517:

    I reckon JBS' lack of a camera is going to make raising his hand a bit pointless.

    Naw. There's a "raise hand" function that shows a raised hand icon on your picture. I use it at meetings and I usually have my camera turned off because my old iPad can't handle too many video streams. (I suspect that having to handle my video adds two streams to its workload, and once I have over four video streams I start getting stuttering and dropouts.)

    Works best when the meeting has a moderator who is looking at all the participants for things like that and can facilitate turn-taking.

    519:

    Zoom and Teams and whatever meetings have interesting dynamics. A lot depends on the relationships between the folks, size of the group, and the why of the meeting.

    I'm on 3 to 6 such per week. At times more. Work related meetings have a very different vib from the former pub group of empire expats which is different from a social tech related group which is different from a tech group doing presentations.

    And the group dynamics mirror in many ways the in person dynamics. But also have interesting differences.

    Anyway it can take a while to get used to the dynamics of the various meeting types. And the less business / more social, the more likely for folks to put up inappropriate backgrounds and such. Things that would never happen in "real life".

    And the less business orientation a meeting is, the less the people attending understand the features of the app. Organizers need to be ready to mute the "Frank, are we going to Kroger's tomorrow?" comments that come through.

    520:

    When it turned out that we couldn't trust microfilm (as spots appeared on 50 year old reels) we turned to microfiche, and after that to digital supports.

    This is probably an obvious question for anyone in the business - but what's the difference? I know the physical form difference between the two but what chemical or mechanical difference makes fiche more stable than film?

    (Google is unhelpful, turning up many pages that tell me one is a ribbon and one is a card. eyeroll)

    That storage conditions greatly influence media storage lifespans is obvious, of course.

    521:

    Is this a side effect of Brexit or something else. (Dreams of the old empire?)

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56413920

    The cap on the number of warheads will now increase to 260, having been due to drop to 180 under previous plans from 2010.

    Now that Trump is gone I expect the US numbers to keep going down.

    522:

    Consider buying a webcam anyway, it won't be using the 1/8" input, so likely won't have to deal with a probable sound card driver issue. I believe you'd mentioned owning a Mac mini before, mine works with a Logitech webcam with no additional software.

    523:

    Seems pretty meaningless unless they also order more submarines to put them on.

    A mate of mine in the defense procurement field once told me that submarine construction is the single capability that HMG are determined to keep in country, and since BAE own all the capable shipyards it follows that keeping them in business is a major strategic objective, which is why they can take the piss so much with cost overruns.

    524:

    And ... other warship construction, but the same argument applies. However ...there are two opposing arguments here, which get confused, often deliberately so, by arseholes like BoZo. The last thing we need is more nuke warheads ... but the RN is pathetically small, given that we are an island. Go figure.

    525:

    I think that comes under "Keeping BAE in business" expenses. IIRC (and it was a few years ago) we were talking about the carrier project over a few beers at the time.

    526:

    If you get a webcam, they usually have a microphone built-in.

    One of the reasons I replaced my iMac last October was that Apple finally upgraded the webcam on it. (Shout-out for the video quality of Apple front-facing cameras in general: they start at 720p and go up -- current iMacs have a full HD 1080p camera -- but the image quality is first-rate, with good color and saturation, even in my office where I'm backlit by a big window).

    For formal events I also have a green screen, although setting it up is a faff (the iMac webcam is relatively wide-angle so the screen has to be within about 1-1.5 metres of the camera, which leaves precious little room for an Aeron chair between my desk and the screen behind me).

    Add-ons: a Yeti Nano microphone (that one was a freebie I got sent for a professional podcast that really wanted to be sure of their sound quality). And of course ISP quality of service is a deal-breaker, in particular upload speed (which isn't generally a selling point for cheap home broadband connections). If your upload speed is good, you're not the participant on the webinar/chat who is intermittently going Dalek or freezing.

    527:

    Scott Sanford @ 520 "...what chemical or mechanical difference makes fiche more stable than film?"

    None. In fact (with the exception of COM, Computer Output Microfiche) Microfiche are nothing but microfilm (new) cut up and inserted in pockets to make a "master" microfiche.

    It's the fact that it's easier to make copies and easier to handle that made them very gradually replace microfilm. So basically, like very numerous paper books (as opposed to much less numerous parchment) it's a question of "safety in numbers".

    528:

    Is this a side effect of Brexit or something else. (Dreams of the old empire?)

    No, it's almost certainly spin to bamboozle the hard right-wing press and the Gammon base when they learn about the one key difference between the old Vanguard-class Trident boats (which are reaching the end of their life) and the new replacement Dreadnought-class Trident boats which are now under construction: Vanguard carried 16 Trident D5s, but Dreadnought only has 12 missile tubes. (In contrast, the USN's Ohio-class boomers in SSBN configuration have 24 tubes each.)

    This makes the Dreadnoughts cheaper than they might otherwise be. And they're probably exactly as effective at the primary mission, which is to turn Moscow into a glowing glass sheet in event the UK is on the receiving end of a first strike. (That's been the continuing purpose of the British strategic deterrent ever since the V-force in the 1950s.)

    Why are the 12-missile Dreadnoughts equally effective?

    Well, I invite you to jump down the rabbit hole of the MC4700 burst-height compensating fuze upgrade program for the W76-1/Mk4A warhead.

    TLDR is, a new generation of Trident warheads (to replace the 1980s vintage W76 -- in USN service -- and the Mk4 -- in Royal Navy service, reportedly manufactured to the same blueprints in the UK -- are getting a vastly more accurate fuze that ensures they detonate at the optimum altitude to inflict maximum damage on the target. It doesn't improve the CEP of the RV, but it ensures that the warhead detonates at precisely the right point to maximize blast damage, making them vastly more effective against hardened targets.

    We know about the US upgrade program for the W76 warhead; it's inevitable that the UK will be following suit. (It's a technology sharing arrangement.)

    So: an extra 80 warheads -- why?

    My interpretation is that they're manufacturing up to 80 newly upgraded, more accurate warheads ahead of the Dreadnought class entering service. (The entire class can only field 48 missiles; a single sub on patrol has 12 missiles, so 80 warheads would comfortably allow them to put 40 warheads on each of two boats, one on patrol and one working up for patrol.) But when the Dreadnought program is complete the older warheads will be scrapped.

    This means it's a temporary 80 warhead blip, and the actual picture is a staged reduction from the current 180 H-bombs to significantly fewer -- somewhere in the range 80-180.

    Obviously the English nationalists will go apeshit if they're told they're losing 25% of their precious nuclear dildos, so the reduction has to be spun as an increase.

    Make sense?

    529:

    Make sense?

    More sense than to wave at China.

    I had thought about delivery system issues and forgot to mention it in my question.

    In general the people who want "more" warheads, ships, whatever never think through just how much more crap that really means. This entire thing of the US Navy adding 100 ships when we are having to continuously bump pay and re-up bonuses to keep the current fleet manned (almost) is just nuts.

    You have to dig deep to find out just how many men are required for the air force or navy to add another squadron. Pilots are easy to recruit compared to staffing all the support roles.

    530:

    Heteromeles @ 515: ""The only thing that can happen to us that can cut the past off is war"". "If only that were true."

    I don't want to seem callous but those are acceptable casualties in the constant struggle against ignorance.

    Library fires are a sad loss but most books are replaceable. Archive fires are terrible but there's always a certain amount of overlap in information between the original manuscripts (or typescripts) and reports made by contemporary officials on the contents of those manuscripts. When reports are done, of course.

    Even before I did my M.L.S. I kept hearing horror stories, from my history professors, about tons of archives lost because of negligence or ignorance. Most of those stories never made it in print.

    These days I'm more saddened by hearing about things that were never written down, like Heaviside's harsh critique of Eintein's theory of relativity.

    531:

    You made me look.

    From his Wikipedia page. brought complex numbers to circuit analysis, invented a new technique for solving differential equations (equivalent to the Laplace transform), independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today.

    Killed a lot o trees using his methods and never knew his name.

    532:

    The Trident D5 missile has the capability to carry and deliver three warheads, in UK service that is accepted to be two warheads and a set of penetration aids to defeat defensive missiles and the like. It might be that the Government has decided to upgun the next-generation of Continuous At-Sea Deterrent boats by adding waheads to the weapons already carried displacing the penetration aids and for that purpose they'd need more deployable warheads. Note that we have more warheads in stock than we actually have ready for use, they are fully functional "engineering samples" that are used to monitor degradation and possible failures in deployed warheads, a bit like the way NASA and JPL keep an exact copy of their Mars rovers at home in case there's a bug on the ones actually roaming the Martian landscape.

    Trident can't reach China from the launch 'box' off the French coast where the existing CASD bombers patrol so I don't see this as being part of the British government's pivot towards helping America keep the Pacific as their own personal fishing pond.

    533:
    The death penalty is inherently cruel: even if you can carry it out painlessly, firstly the justice system has a non-zero false positive rate, and secondly, consider the (definitely not guilty) family members of the murderer who are being permanently deprived of a parent, child, or partner.

    And in Britain we can actually quantify this false positive rate. Last time I looked it was about 10%.

    How do we do this?

    Well, as a convicted murderer you aren't just let out of prison. You are released on licence (and thus subject to recall) provided you admit to your crime. No admission of guilt, no release. And about 10% of murderers contest their guilt instead of accepting it and getting out of jail.

    Its a rough-and-ready guide, but a useful guide to the scale of the problem.

    534:

    "And about 10% of murderers contest their guilt instead of accepting it and getting out of jail."

    Let's see......

    You were wrongfully convicted of murder. You will spend the rest of your life in prison.

    Unless you sign a false confession.

    I don't know if you are from the USA or not, but in the USA almost all felony cases are settled by plea bargains (~95%). You can plead guilty and get a 3 year sentence, or refuse and have the prosecutor lay on as many charges as possible, and roll the dice on a 20 year sentence. BTW, the trial conviction rate in the USA for felonies is ~98%, IIRC.

    Guess what?

    535:

    I don't want to seem callous but those are acceptable casualties in the constant struggle against ignorance.

    Yeah, callous is a reasonably well-chosen word, especially when describing what happened to the National Museum of Brazil as acceptable.

    The losses included collections of documents and relics of extinct tribes, along with quite a lot of history, research, documents, and relics of tribes that are fighting to keep their past. All gone. They trusted the Brazilian government to protect their heritage, and said Brazilian government didn't think it was worth fixing safety issues in the museum.

    To help put that in scale for you, imagine the Royal British Columbia Museum and archives burning to the ground, or the National Museum of Canada burning to the ground.

    But that's acceptable in the constant struggle against ignorance, I suppose?

    536:

    The Trident D5 missile has the capability to carry and deliver three warheads, in UK service that is accepted to be two warheads and a set of penetration aids to defeat defensive missiles and the like.

    No: the UGM-133A carries a bus with room for up to 14 Mk4A RVs or 8 Mk5s (with a higher maximum yield -- these are now being retired).

    The "two warheads plus penaids" spec dates to the Chevaline upgrade to the RN's Polaris missiles, which previously carried either one large warhead or 3 smaller MRVs in USN service -- the British payload was more accurate but they offloaded one of the RVs to make way for penaids.

    Subsequently during the late 80s they agreed not to use the full capacity of the new Trident-II missiles but to maintain the previous number of warheads per rocket. But it's not some kind of law of nature that they have to do so.

    The distance from the Bay of Biscay to Beijing is about 9000km as the Trident missile flies, so China is plausibly within range of the (12,000km range) missiles on station in the Atlantic. Indeed, Vladivostok is well inside the RN's Trident range from their regular patrol box.

    537:

    The UK justice system doesn't feature plea bargaining.

    If you're up in court you can choose to plead guilty to the charges in front of you and get about 10% cut off the tariff at sentencing time. (Then more time off for good behavior inside.) But they don't give you a chance to plead guilty to a minor offense or roll the dice on a major offense.

    538:

    Heteromeles @ 535: "But that's acceptable in the constant struggle against ignorance, I suppose?"

    It's a question of not crying over spilt milk. This isn't the first time Brazil's disregard for its own heritage has come to my attention. You should see their tiny, underfunded National Library.

    We do what we can through UNESCO but in the end each nation-state is responsible for preserving its own knowledge of its past.

    539:

    Barry You were wrongfully convicted of murder. You will spend the rest of your life in prison. erm ... no ( Or v. unlikely ) Because we actually have an appeals system, going to higher courts & judicial reviews .. STILL not 100% effective, but a lot better than the US' apparent - "you're convicted, rot away!" methods. The US plea-bargain "system" is a barbaric travesty of any sort if real justice. I mean, correction... and have the prosecutor lay onmake up as many charges as possible

    See also Charlie, above.

    540:

    Sorry Barry, I should have explained things better.

    Here in the UK the tariff for murder runs from a suspended sentence through to a "whole life tariff". From an average 600-odd homocides a year we currently have a handful of "whole lifers" in the system (and not many suspended sentences either). Typical sentences range from ten years to twenty years depending on circumstances.

    The interesting bit of our system is what happens when you have served the two-thirds of your sentence that the court handed down. At this point -- if you've kept out of trouble -- you are up before the parole board who consider whether to release you.

    One of their considerations is whether you have done adequate rehabilitation. One way of showing that you have been rehabilitated is to help the police with their questions about your case, and to admit that "yes, it was me who did it".

    Obviously, there may be some people who persist in their innocence despite being guilty. Perverse, but possible. Likewise we know that some people will admit their guilt even though they were innocent, just to get out of jail.

    But as Greg points out, what happens if you plead innocence is that the Court of Appeals starts to take an interest. If you are lucky, persistent enough, whatever, is that you may get the original court verdict over-turned.

    Another interesting aside is that if you have ever been caught up in a murder investigation, your card is marked if you ever come to the police's attention again. At least according to a fellow Russell Group CS lecturer, who had the misfortune to be sitting next to the someone in a Glasgow Bar who was run through with a sword.

    541:

    Yes, but do the rules they adopt have to be consistent with the rest of the constitution? For example, could they have a rule that black Senators only have 2/3rds of a vote? Or that the VP only breaks a tie if it's not an election year?

    542:

    "That said, there are some problems with using Age of Sail as a proxy for extended space travel. One is some critical bits of the life support system were outsourced to the surrounding ocean and Earth, and another is that, with some exceptions, the voyage between ports is on order of weeks to months, not months to years.

    And this is if you assume that the spaceship will land at the end. If it's a vessel that's never intended to land, life support will have to last for the life of the ship."

    I don't disagree. My point was more about the social aspects of long containment on a vessel.

    I am thinking more of Naval ships and East India ships in particular. In the early 19th during the Napoleonic war ships would be on blockade for months at a time. East India ships would normally go direct from India to Britain and back. Other ships were often out for months or even years.

    Not all of them survived of course, but social breakdown was only sometimes the cause.

    As for self sufficiency in resources, that is a different animal. We are now 200 years later, which moves us along the technological scale a long way towards that being viable. It isn't so hard to imagine another century or two making it more possible yet.

    As for having a reason to go, that is another thing altogether. I find it hard to believe we will ever convince people to sign up for decades or centuries in a small vunlnerable can without some handwavium - cold sleep, FTL, Maguffin. The resources to support such a venture are also hard to imagine at our current scale - perhaps a couple more centuries will see us mining fuel from Jupiter or something.

    543:

    Vanguard carried 16 Trident D5s, but Dreadnought only has 12 missile tubes. (In contrast, the USN's Ohio-class boomers in SSBN configuration have 24 tubes each.)

    FWIW, the US' Columbia-class SSBN, the successor to Ohio, will have 16 tubes -- it's expected to enter service in about 10 years. AFAIK, it will carry Trident D5s, though that may change since the USAF is pushing for a new ICBM to replace Minuteman III and the USN certainly wouldn't want to fall behind the rival service.

    Columbia, interestingly, will have a life-of-boat reactor, thus avoiding the lengthy and expensive mid-life refueling that Ohio SSBNs have to undergo.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia-class_submarine

    544:

    a vastly more accurate fuze that ensures they detonate at the optimum altitude to inflict maximum damage on the target. It doesn't improve the CEP of the RV, but it ensures that the warhead detonates at precisely the right point to maximize blast damage, making them vastly more effective against hardened targets.

    As you say, it's mostly an advantage against hardened targets. Not sure that it would be of much significance against area/soft targets.

    https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/

    545:

    Senate Rules

    Or that the VP only breaks a tie if it's not an election year?

    Maybe you should read what the Constitution says about this. And also read related studies.

    The way the VP works for ties is a part of the Constitution, not the rules of the Senate.

    I'm sure the House or Senate could come up with rules that get everyone into a snit and get SCOTUS involved. But the point of this attribute is to keep out outside influence.

    546:

    The way the VP works for ties is a part of the Constitution, not the rules of the Senate.

    And that is my point. The filibuster, a rule of the Senate, interferes with the VP's tie breaking power, which is in the constitution.

    547:

    I'm just going to pile up some statements here.

    Heteromeles @ 515: "The only thing that can happen to us that can cut the past off is war"". "If only that were true." I don't want to seem callous but those are acceptable casualties in the constant struggle against ignorance. Library fires are a sad loss but most books are replaceable. Archive fires are terrible but there's always a certain amount of overlap in information between the original manuscripts (or typescripts) and reports made by contemporary officials on the contents of those manuscripts. When reports are done, of course. Even before I did my M.L.S. I kept hearing horror stories, from my history professors, about tons of archives lost because of negligence or ignorance. Most of those stories never made it in print.

    Heteromeles @ 535: "But that's acceptable in the constant struggle against ignorance, I suppose?" It's a question of not crying over spilt milk. This isn't the first time Brazil's disregard for its own heritage has come to my attention. You should see their tiny, underfunded National Library. We do what we can through UNESCO but in the end each nation-state is responsible for preserving its own knowledge of its past.

    So let's see how this argument has wandered... I started off with the assertion that I thought archives and cultural relics had about a 500-1000 year lifespan, meaning that about half the material is lost every 500-1000 years, at a broad guess.

    The counter is that, no, I'm wrong, it's only lost due to war.

    I point out the fires in two Brazilian Museums, the fire at the LA Main Library, and FrankO chimes in with the 1973 Army Personnel Archives fire (80% of personnel records lost from 1912-1960), and now it's "not to cry over spilt milk" and rumors of worse horrors in records loss that weren't publicized.

    Can I point out, Niala, that you're doing a pretty good job of making my original point for me? And also pointing out that library archivists do about as good a job at preserving the past as conservationists do at stopping the sixth extinction? And that neither of us have much to brag about?

    548:

    Good points, and I looked up the time at sea for the English East India traders (ca. 4 months). So we're in agreement on that. We're not so much in agreement about provisioning and sustainability, because the experiments in closed ecosystems are only sort of being done. They're expensive, complicated, and hard to replicate on a human scale. Moreover, the smaller closed ecosystems get, the less forgiving they get. My favorite anecdote was of the dude who built a self-sustaining house in the 1970s that sort of worked, so long as he produced enough feces every day to keep the composter working, and stayed home all day maintaining the systems. I could be wrong, but I also suspect he was a bachelor, and that the experiment didn't last all that long.

    Anyway, I'm currently a fan of alcubierre-adjacent warps. For one thing, it's an interesting form of speculative fiction published as theoretical physics. Since there's those little experiments that seem to show that causality is not universal, but only appears at certain scales, it seems that FTL may be possible. Although if causality is an illusion, the question is whether we're ever fated to figure out how to do it...

    For another, warp speeds get almost realistic. At 100C, a warp ship could make it to a reasonably earthlike world and back in a year, and that feels doable (feels used deliberately). There are a lot of really neat cultural, infrastructural, and technical questions that can then be played with. For example, what does a culture look like that can land on an alien world and build a starship from raw materials? That's actually pretty messy when it involves building fiddly things like computer chips and starships. But fun to consider.

    549:

    Canada's last hangman wasn't cruel. He tied them up correctly so that the rope would kill them by breaking their neck, instantly.

    Instantly. How do you know that? Anyone ever hooked up an EEG to the victim to find out when brain activity ceased?

    550:

    The UK justice system doesn't feature

    When did the UK switch over to a justice system rather than a legal one? It was obviously after the last prisoner was deported to Australia, but presumably also after prisons were transferred to the matching Injustice System, given the ongoing crime against humanity that is the British prison system.

    Going by the article below prisons weren't part of the justice system as recently as July 2020... and if my reading of The Secret Barrister is correct neither are the courts.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-prisons-coronavirus-solitary-confinement-inquiry-deaths-a9639156.html

    551:

    Anyone ever hooked up an EEG to the victim to find out when brain activity ceased?

    For certain values of victim, yes.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24367032/

    There was a clear window of time immediately following decapitation where changes in the EEG frequency spectrum were obvious; these changes in the EEG indices of nociception could be attributed as responses generated by the rat's cerebral cortex following decapitation.
    552:

    Hmmm. Clear window. How long is a clear window?

    553:

    How long is a clear window?

    It's hard to tell from the abstract, but the window seems to be less than 15 seconds.

    554:

    That's kind of the impression I got. That might be considered quick, but 'quick' might be a matter of opinion depending on what side of the blade you were on. But not instantaneous. Always been skeptical of news reports that said someone died 'instantaneously'.

    555:

    Heteromeles @ 547 :" And that neither of us have much to brag about?"

    Pretty soon now, all this will be out of the hands of Archivists and Conservationists and into the arms of Computer Scientists and Microbiologists.

    In 2 or 3 generations Computer scientists will have seen to it that absolutely all data is digitized and doubles are kept in perfectly safe multiple backup systems.

    Microbiologists will be ready to modify endangered species so that they can survive climate changes. After all, since they are now on the verge of making proto-humans in labs to find cures of all kinds, it would be easy to do the same with animals to build new species variants.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/03/17/977573846/scientists-create-living-entities-that-closely-resemble-human-embryos

    556:

    Portland is in its own universe. Someone on this blog is from there. I wonder if he can explain what is going on there.

    That would be me. I live in Portland, about two miles as the AI drone flies from all the fuss downtown this summer.

    What you described above is pretty much what we got in Portland. At least in the real world. In right-wing outrage media, the entire city was burned to the ground by BLM racist rioters, and Antifa shock troops smashed through the walls of a courthouse in order to burn it down and kill the federal agents inside.

    Yes, they're really posting stuff like this; yes, they appear to believe it; no, it didn't really happen. But the outrage is wonderfully exciting!

    If you have more specific questions I'm happy to answer them from an on-site perspective.

    557:

    Moz given the ongoing crime against humanity that is the British prison system. Balls. I agree that the UK prison system is not good & is often failing, but at least some effort is made ... unlike, say, the USA, yes?

    "Instantaneously" - bullet up through roof of mouth or through back of head, possibly. Otherwise ... um.

    558:

    The question is not "is there a country with worse prisons", the question is "does the UK prison system produce justice" or "is the UK prison system committing crimes against humanity".

    I think the answer is yes, you're simply trumping up outrage that anyone dares raise the question. Saying "oh, but we try to make them horrific" is a very bad counter-argument.

    Note that I live in a country that uses concentration camps to kill refugees, so if you really wanted to play tu quoque you could more point to those (or if you want prisons specifically, we torture kids in them and kill adults (1987) and have been (1996) for a long time.

    559:

    I have some vague recollection that in the days of the guillotine it was observed that people often had enough fuel left in the float bowl for their face to contort on discovering that it had been their destiny for the very last image to impinge on their consciousness to be an upside down view of the hairs up a tricoteuse's nostrils.

    It seems to me that sometimes methods of execution are designed with more consideration for the watchers than for the person actually being executed. For instance, when someone is hanged it is held to be very bad form to make the rope too long so their head flies off like a perishin' cork. Me, if I was going to be hanged, I would much prefer that they did do that. With complete severance you do at least have the guarantee that loss of consciousness can't take more than a few seconds. I don't see how they can expect to guarantee that just by ripping out the ethernet cable but leaving the power cord plugged in.

    No method ever seems to aim at propagating destruction of neurons at higher speed than nerve impulses themselves propagate at, which surely ought to be the principal consideration. If I was free to choose the method of my own execution I would therefore choose something like the detonation of a couple of kg of RDX held against my head. The reasons such things never even get considered seem to mostly be based around the gross-out factor for the people watching, which I by contrast consider to be an incidental advantage.

    561:

    "I find it hard to believe we will ever convince people to sign up for decades or centuries in a small vunlnerable can without some handwavium - cold sleep, FTL, Maguffin."

    I dunno, we seem to have far more than enough people on the planet than is necessary for anything that looks like a feasible idea to quite a lot of them to look like a positively attractive idea to a few. People used to volunteer to be walled into little stone boxes for the rest of their life and be fed through a hole, for instance.

    With less extremely horrible things you get correspondingly more people who are into it. This is why I don't agree with the idea that a system of coercion is necessary in order to find people who will do things like mending the sewers because if people had free choice nobody would want to do that. I think it's the other way round - there are plenty of people around who would actually enjoy mending the sewers, but because of the absence of free choice they mostly don't get to do it and the people who do get to do it are mostly the ones who don't want to.

    562:

    Nope, that's not going to happen on the conservation end. I'll give you a simple example: engineer humans to stand 100% relative humidity at 40oC, with only water. Normally this is lethal to humans, because our body temperature is 37oC and we lose body heat by evaporating water (e.g. sweat). When the air is hot and humid, we can't cool our bodies that way, so we either have to leave those conditions or die.

    Re-engineering humans to run their bodies, say, 5oC higher would solve the problem, but that's a lethal fever. So you've got to do all this complex stuff we don't really understand with heat shock proteins, osmotic control, changing protein sequences so they don't denature, changing cell membranes so they're not too fluid, and all this stuff. That's the molecular end.

    Oh, and did I mention that such lethal heat will only occur a few days per year at first? So the engineered human also has to be able to survive at cold temperatures.

    You've also got to do it, well... now, because people in Iran, Iraq, and Somalia are already basically experiencing those conditions during summer heat waves, and they've going to spread throughout much of the tropics and subtropics by the end of the century.

    Now humans are among the most heat-tolerant large mammals. So you've got to get analogous adaptations into any large animal you want to save. Forget lions, tigers, and bears, horses and cattle are at risk from boiling in the fog. All our big domestic animals are. Plants too. When plants exceed their heat tolerance, crop yields decline quickly with increasing temperatures. So again, the crop scientists are working furiously at making crops more heat tolerant to avoid the onrushing threat of famines following heat waves.

    And so it goes. Now, do you think anyone's going to fight for something like, say, San Diego ragweed? I'm picking on this cute little endangered plant, because I was testifying on it today (lost, no surprise). It has trivial economic value as a plant nerd's lawn plant in San Diego, but in the wild, it's a heavy clay specialist that likes flat grasslands. Which developers also like. Think anyone's going to waste time re-engineering this species to survive our future desert conditions, when there are native desert ragweeds just a few miles inland? I don't. So I get in these battles to protect it.

    Sorry to be so pessimistic, but this is my day job and why I fight climate change instead of playing Dr. MadGene.

    Now I suppose some computer geek on this page will step up and point out how long digital media normally last. Has it gotten better than "forever or five years, whichever comes first?"

    563:

    If I was free to choose the method of my own execution

    My impression of the people who like executing prisoners is that the torture is a significant part of the process. I realise a lot of them also favour letting cops kill first, enquire later, but for the most part even the people in that group seem to think executions should be prolonged and painful.

    But aside from that I agree - I'd rather be shot in the head unexpectedly during the course of my normal life than captured, crated, taken to an abattoir then fed through the production line and "killed humanely" by any "humane" method.

    564:

    No method ever seems to aim at propagating destruction of neurons at higher speed than nerve impulses themselves propagate at

    Bullet through the head. Rarely used nowadays.

    565:

    Heteromeles @ 562: Now I suppose some computer geek on this page will step up and point out how long digital media normally last. Has it gotten better than "forever or five years, whichever comes first?"

    I would expect that in the future some computer scientists would come up with a simple "intelligent" routine to transfer automatically all archival data to a newer support every four years.

    You're just making things harder for nothing if you try to make the support last thousands of years like the M-disc attempt. If you're thinking of long term record keeping like that you have to add the silly problem of being understood by the locals in that future, like they absurdly do for nuclear waste storage sites:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages

    566:

    If anyone wants to read something about NFTs (for art), this is engaging: Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme (Amy Castor, 2021/03/14) If not, this is a decent compact summary (plus some other malignant features):

    It’s simultaneously money laundering, pay-to-play, and a pump and dump. Inspiring!— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) March 16, 2021
    567:

    Nope, you're making assumptions again. This came straight out of my research for the book Hot Earth Dreams, and the question of how much of our civilization as it now stands would survive, say, 10,000 years.

    The answer is that our CO2 will last better than just about anything, but some of the open pit mines and other earthworks will last in some form.

    Here's the problem, and I'm perfectly serious: we're running short of resources and energy. Do we need to save terabytes of cat videos? Of course not. School records for ten billion kids, long after they're dead? Nope. Hell, I've inherited generations of old family photos of people who died and left no descendants. Not sure who those pictures matter to any more, which is why pictures like these routinely end up in thrift stores. And it gets worse, the further back you go. Should I care about my Celtic peasant ancestors? Should they have cared about me?

    The point about the half-life of culture is that our species is at least 300,000 years old, because we have a subfossil skull that old. However, when you look at things like gene trees and cultures, the "oldest cultures" on our planet (Namibian Bushmen, Australian Aborigines, and the like) are only around 50,000 years old. We have literally no idea about the first 80 percent or so of human history, other than we must have been on this planet, doing something. The "oldest human lineages" and "the oldest languages" are relative newcomers, and we have literally no idea of what deep history looks like.

    Indeed, the linguists posit that languages become utterly random with respect to each other over perhaps 10,000 years, barring a few baby talk terms that might be innate, cognates of mama and dada. So if you're thinking that records are going to last forever, that's the buzz saw you run into: languages morph and become unrecognizable over time.

    And yes, I did a deep dive on the whole problem of nuclear waste warning messages for the book, so I'm perfectly aware of that. But what I'm talking about is the norm: people throwing out things they don't care about, fires destroying archives, people having better things to do with their resources than obsessively retain records they don't care about. These are normal activities. But they mean that we forget, and that our window of civilization, the stuff we know, seems to only be 5000-7000 years long.

    568:

    It seems to me that sometimes methods of execution are designed with more consideration for the watchers than for the person actually being executed.

    To first approximation there are three interested parties. I have no excuse for having worked this out in advance.

    First there is the state, which for whatever reason has concluded that a particular person is no longer fit to be on Earth and Must Go. As far as the mechanism of the state cares, any method that produces certain death and minimal extraneous fuss is acceptable.

    Second is the guest of honor, who as you point out would generally prefer something quick and painless.

    Third are the bystanders. They subdivide into those who don't want to see a big mess and those who do want to see a big mess. The latter group often uses excuses like "as a warning to others" and in our era rarely admits finding the spectacle entertaining.

    Debates between factions of the third group drive most of the debate. Government functions involve the result and only secondarily the method, while criminals facing death are generally only involved in one case and don't show up at the capitol being a nuisance for years on end.

    569:

    Pigeon #561: "With less extremely horrible things you get correspondingly more people who are into it. This is why I don't agree with the idea that a system of coercion is necessary in order to find people who will do things like mending the sewers because if people had free choice nobody would want to do that. I think it's the other way round - there are plenty of people around who would actually enjoy mending the sewers, but because of the absence of free choice they mostly don't get to do it and the people who do get to do it are mostly the ones who don't want to."

    I suspect that no matter how non-coercive a system we get the need for people to mend the sewers might outstrip the number of people who want to do it. That being said, there are other ways to incentivize things.

    I agree that out of x Billion people there certainly will be a few hundred or thousands that want to go in a tin can to another planet a century away.

    570:

    I suspect that there would be quite a number of people who would, not enjoy, but cheerfully tolerate, a couple of weeks of sewer maintenance duty a year, as part of being seen to be good citizens. People who would take it on full time however, are more likely to see it as a least bad option. Very few indeed would actually enjoy it.

    JHomes.

    571:

    I suspect that no matter how non-coercive a system we get the need for people to mend the sewers might outstrip the number of people who want to do it.

    Just about any necessary task fits that, excepting a few tasks where wanting to do it just about disqualifies people.

    If you change that to some form of jury duty type coercion, where you have to do X amount of work a year on one or more of a list of tasks, I think you might find it more ... well, not "palatable" exactly, given the nature of some of the work, but ... acceptable?

    I can see an action of some sort being necessary, because few would consider an hour of sewer immersion as equivalent to an hour of parade marshalling (on multiple axes!) So you would likely end up bidding in some way, and might well find that many popular tasks end up effectively zero rated while unpopular ones suffer a lack of volunteers (and hence you had best be very diligent about the length of your list of bids).

    572:

    In re capital punishment as torture: I assume that a lot of what's bad is just knowing people are going to kill you, and when, even if the method of death is reasonably painless. Having rather little in the way of distractions makes knowing that you're going to be killed worse.

    A practical question about long term space travel-- how much liberty is feasible for the space travelers when there's so little slack? How little liberty is feasible when the people in charge might be factually wrong and/or abusive?

    573:

    In Ken MacLeod's "The Sky Road", there is a scene where a bunch of people (convicts?) were doing hot sweaty smelly road repair, but they were not to be distributed because they're on break from their normal computer(?) work; physical labour was recreation.

    574:

    @ Heteromeles: I'd like to ask a favor of you as you are very knowledgeable about environmental matters. I'm doing some for-fun world-building for a prequel or three for a well-known SF writer's popular series. If by some miracle they would say "I'll use some of it"- whoop-dee-do! but as more likely they won't, so I'll put it out for anyone who wants it as a setting. At any rate, the world is 2138, the location is Greater San Diego, I'm trying to get the environmental situation right, and figure out what a reasonable US equivalent (No more US) population would be if we're able to muddle through (no "Mad Max" Scenario). I'm arbitrarily saying 120-140 M, but would a population more like Australia's today's be more realistic?- ............................................ "Environment: a MESS, but recovering. ~1/3 of terrestrial species are extinct HOWEVER, there are ongoing projects to “lazuroform” or recreate many of them, as well as restore the various ecologies. e.g., there are herds of a few M bison in the plains south of the Great Lakes. Much larger areas than in our own time are devoted to wilderness (if for no other reason than agriculture isn't sustainable in them any longer.) Desert areas are much larger than in our time- the interior of what was our United States is similar to a hotter, drier Australia. The sea level is ~7 meters higher than today's, based on my one possible eco-disaster: some decades previously, the West Antarctic Iceshelf collapsed and slipped into the sea, raising sea levels over 6 meters and leading to over 200M climate refugees in a short period of time." ............................................

    Any advice from you (or our other Gentle Readers here) greatly appreciated.

    575:

    were doing hot sweaty smelly road repair, but they were not to be distributed because they're on break from their normal computer(?) work; physical labour was recreation.

    Way back in my late 20s I had taken a job in a new city. Single. Working 80 hours a week programming. (Getting paid well for it.)

    After about 6 months I needed a break. Went back home to spend a week with my father. We put a new roof (well most of it) on his house, put up a fence, and a few more things. It was a great way to refresh my brain.

    As to the hot sweaty part, it was June and the hottest week in a June for 20 years. Above 100F mid day all week. We had to get on the roof at dawn, break at 10am, then resume around 5pm.

    576:

    I've thought the best way to end it quickly was to turn my (or whoever's) brain to mush as quickly as possible. Kennedy in Dallas likely didn't suffer after the bullet when through his skull and blew a goodly part of his brain out of his skull.

    Big rock or fast metal press would be fine by me. Even a remote control 12 gauge shotgun blast from a few inches away would work. It should not be too hard to rework old electric chairs or injection gurneys for this. Mainly adding an enclosure to hold in the shot and gore. Open casket it would not be for most relatives.

    But alluding to what others have said, it would make a few of the spectators squirm.

    577:

    San Diego County currently has about three million people, and we're running on imported water. If the County is stuck with its own water resources (as we were until before 1900 or so), then the population will be more like 30,000.

    The San Diego climate of 2138 is going to be about the same as the Vizcaino desert in central Baja, so it'll be kind of hot, rain is falling rarely and aseasonally, a bit in the winter, a bit in the summer, and the occasional hurricane. Add in a lot of intelligent water management (a sure sign this is fiction and not reality), and there's room for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. Not millions, because we're struggling to manage millions now. And if there's a big earthquake and a ARkStorm in southern California in the next century (high likelihood), a lot of people are going to go elsewhere.

    I'd suggest for population in 2138 globally that it's not stupid to use the population numbers from around 1900, around 1-2 billion people. That's pretty sustainable. The UN is currently forecasting 10.9 billion and stable, following current growth rates. Thing is, if the climate has shifted drastically, many species have gone extinct, and there are scads of climate refugees, then I don't know how the world supports ten billion people. We're not doing a good job of it right now.

    A few other things for scene setting. --Sea level rise will be around 1-2 meters, so not swamped. If the ice sheets do melt, it will take a few thousand years for the seas to rise 70 meters --Extinction of 1/3 of terrestrial species. Hope so! That's maybe survivable. --Black flag weather will be a thing in the US, but not in San Diego (see the high heat/high humidity mess I was bugging Niala about, or snag a copy of Hot Earth Dreams). This will be an occasional, catastrophic problem around the world. In the US, parts of the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast will get occasional steambaths that kill crops and people. Absent good air conditioning, there may well be underground shelters and barns for people to get themselves and their livestock down (literally) to survivable temperatures.

    Someone coined the term Re-civilization (as in restore, reuse, etc). If there are a billion people on a planet that used to hold eight billion, there's going to be a lot of surplus old junk lying around, and a lot of things will simply be repurposed. Why dig for raw ore when you can break down a skyscraper? This can range from the Mad Max junkyard to stuff that's a lot more thoughtful. Thing to realize is that most of the junk we're making at the moment, from cars to clothes to electronics to buildings, isn't designed to be around by 2138, so you're talking about recycling stuff that hasn't been made yet, and that's a huge artistic license.

    The other thing is that putting nature back the way it was is very kinda 20th Century. Sort of 1930s really. What's more interesting is collapsing the boundaries between nature and civilization, which is happening now. We're pushing pollinator and larval host plant gardens, gardens that feed songbirds, and so forth. If cities are where water is getting recycled, they'll be oases where any animal flocks if it can tolerate humans. And probably, a lot of humans will tolerate more animals than we do now. So suburban raccoons, coyotes, opossums, skunks, foxes, crows, ravens, mice, bobcats, bears...that's just what we have now. Hopefully a century from now this will still be normal. San Diego's the most biodiverse county in the US at the moment, but a lot of coastal and urban canyon species are hanging on by a thread, and climate may do most of them in (that will give you a 30% local extinction rate right there). Species more at home in the desert will probably take their place.

    Final thing: I don't know if you know much about San Diego, but the city is basically built on the flat tops of mesas, with the canyons between them left more-or-less wild because they flood easily and they were convenient places for sewer lines. That's probably going to stay, because it makes sense. Most of the City was built after WWI, so it was built around automobiles. If the City is post-car, there may well be a lot of old abandoned suburbs, where the houses were looted and burned down decades ago, bits of road remain, and the place is kind of a scruffy desert. Some places, where there's garden or farm land, will be garden oases. Other places, like where I live now, have horrible soil and probably will be abandoned to the ravens. That's okay. Most cities that survive any length of time go through huge population swings.

    Hope this helps.

    578:

    For those that prefer talking heads to reading (what are you doing here?) Just Have A Think covered the death zone stuff today, but only talking about people.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Af-mbKCB0

    putting nature back the way it was is very kinda 20th Century

    This will go both ways I think: we will bring back, possibly only temporarily, charismatic megafauna to boggle at. But we will also see an evolution in the various "pay to conserve" projects, hopefully in ways that actually work. Some of the British and European genocides were "clearing the natives from the game parks" operations, and we know now that it's possible to have an equilibrium containing humans. Well, some of us know, others are culturally/religiously unable to consider the possibility.

    579:

    Given what we're pushing now, what I'd predict for 21st century "conservation:"

    --Greenhouse gas sequestration. That may well take some odd forms, involving soil conservation and ocean conservation.
    --For example it, turns out having whales pooping sucks in a lot of carbon as the microbes metabolize the poop. So people may decide (after exhausting all other solutions) to stop fishing out krill, because we need whales eating krill and pooping to get carbon out of the air.
    --Similarly, there may be a beaver family on every creek because beaver ponds can suck down some carbon.
    --And no-till and regenerative farming will probably be the norms, which means farm equipment will look more than a little different.

    Gardening for the insects. This involves feeding pollinators (flowers) larvae (plants to eat), pest control species (nectar sources, trap crops, etc), and bird food (little spiders and moth caterpillars to feed baby songbirds). This is already happening, although it's currently a minor garden trend.

    Then there's the news that a number of wild species actually do pretty well at garbage dumps (e.g. https://news.mongabay.com/2016/12/from-loathed-to-loved-villagers-rally-to-save-greater-adjutant-stork/), so...perhaps the organic section of the trash processing areas will be set up for wildlife feeding? And perhaps the tertiary treatment ponds of the septic systems will be wetlands that also sequester carbon? It's all possible.

    How do wind farms, solar farms, birds, and bats coexist? Huge energy farms will be a feature of a solarpunk future, but they're a real wildlife nuisance. So I'm guessing that a lot of thought and work will go into making power plants more nature friendly.

    Again, most of this is present-day, and it sounds a bit science fictional. I suspect that, a century from now, things will get really weird. Mycoforestry weird, perhaps. Or maybe, in Australia, restoring termite communities in mined-out areas (wait, that was supposed to happen in the 1980s... sorry).

    580:

    Actually, if you want to imagine something very techie and science fictional, imagine medicine and bioscience without the use of petroleum-based plastics. The reason is that a lot of sanitation and contamination issues are handled right now as single-use plastics. And contamination in molecular biology is a nightmare, since even a single bit of DNA in a reaction tube can get amplified and mess everything up.

    So...what's does sustainable biomedicine look like? The genetics revolution of the last few decades has been built largely on plastic. What's the post-plastic version?

    581:

    Regenerative agriculture is growing in Aotearoa, there was an interesting take on SciBlogs this morning... just reforming how we farm food isn't enough.

    https://sciblogs.co.nz/ariadne/2021/03/17/looking-beyond-regenerative-agriculture/

    And the pop media people are there too, but search is a bit busted on this site so the most recent seems to be this one:

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/04-11-2019/with-the-walls-closing-in-regenerative-farming-is-a-way-forward-for-agriculture/

    The "Country Calendar" TV series also covers it pretty regularly. Both as a "here's something new" and a few times as part of their "business is boring" thing where they wander round an only vaguely interesting farm with something to sell (it's 'ooh look countryside' for city people, really, so the farmers who volunteer all have something to sell)

    582:

    In good news, NSW quietest fire season for a decade... wet summer, and a very wet March means the fire season is done for the year. Of course, the great growing season means that next year there will be lots of new fuel... just ask the lawn in my garden, or the bok choi in my lawn.

    https://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/big-wet-soaks-nsw-ends-state-s-quietest-fire-season-in-a-decade-20210318-p57by5.html

    Also, since I sold my chickens there's a lot more insect life visible in the back yard. Mostly cockroaches and various wood-eating bugs, but the change was very quick (I suspect they've been there and breeding furiously all along, but the chickens saw them before I did). Also giant orb web spiders, and their equally giant webs (one in the ~5m gap from shed to trees).

    583:

    Heteromeles @ 567: "Here's the problem, and I'm perfectly serious: we're running short of resources and energy. Do we need to save terabytes of cat videos? Of course not. School records for ten billion kids, long after they're dead? Nope. Hell, I've inherited generations of old family photos of people who died and left no descendants. Not sure who those pictures matter to any more, which is why pictures like these routinely end up in thrift stores. And it gets worse, the further back you go. Should I care about my Celtic peasant ancestors? Should they have cared about me?"

    I see that I should have stated right from the start that I wasn't writing about personal archives. I was talking about the nation-state. Historians, Archivists, Librarians and Archeologists don't have consulting companies serving individuals and they're never activists. They all work for the nation-state, and for sub-governments in federal systems.

    And yes the nation-state is interested in keeping "School records for ten billion kids, long after they're dead?" because we get to know what the future holds for us by studying the past.

    The cost of keeping all those terabytes is dropping, still, so keeping them isn't a burden for the nation-state.

    The main assumption I have is that the industrial nation state (or a few of them) will survive in the next centuries, if there is no "great war".

    584:

    Keith An Ice Shelf melting won't raise sea levels, bur melting ice over land will ....

    "Conserving" species ... I had a semi-lost-&-groggy Bombus trerrestris walk all over my hand a day or two back, until I put her in front of some fresh plum/apricot flowers - she loved that & woke up. Meanwhile, I haven't locally seen any B. lapidarius for 3-4 years & they used to be quite common. I miss them.

    585:

    Anecdata, I did a sewerage install job, a deepwater outfall for Newcastle in Australia. One of the most enjoyable and satisfying jobs I've ever been on. Installing huge pipe segments under surf, under sand.

    Never did any sewage diving, but I did train for contaminated water diving. I would have jumped at the opportunity but the only time I got the opportunity I was already committed to a cable bury job.

    Did some surface work in sewage treatment plants and it was just a normal day's work, except that the Malabar facility was just amazing inside. Would make a perfect location for a mad scientist lair.

    586:

    On execution methods, I once saw a TV programme where a British MP (can't remember who) went to the USA to look into this. He was against the death penalty, but argued that if you were going to have it then it ought not to be sadistic.

    He found that the best solution was anoxia. You feel fine, then you feel a bit giddy, then you pass out, and unless oxygen is restored you die a few minutes later. The beauty is that we know how it feels because experiencing anoxia is a routine part of training for pilots (and probably others; gasdive?). The MP went through it himself to see what it was like.

    However when he talked to some US death penalty supporters they opposed the whole idea. They were very much in the "as messy and painful as possible as a warning to others" school of thought. Perhaps they want to go back to the 17th century. Now that was messy and painful.

    587:

    No method ever seems to aim at propagating destruction of neurons at higher speed than nerve impulses themselves propagate at

    Au contraire: we know a couple of foolproof and painless methods -- it's just that nowhere with the death penalty uses them.

    The first is a captive bolt gun to the head, as used on millions of cattle: turns out it works on humans, too, if applied correctly (as documented here). This is as an alternative to an uncontained bullet, which is messier and potentially dangerous for bystanders.

    The second is hypoxia through breathing pure nitrogen, which I'm pretty sure some of the regulars here will testify is alarmingly asymptomatic until unconsciousness occurs. (Indeed, at least one Thatcherite cabinet minister suggested it'd be a humane alternative to bringing back hanging -- Portillo, I think.)

    The point of an execution is the spectacle of cruelty. It's not about justice, it's not about rehabilitation, it's not about compensation, the fact that a murder victim's relatives don't get to conduct the execution suggests it's not about revenge, either. It's all about using the spectacle of the most extreme cruelty to instill terror of authority.

    588:

    In re capital punishment as torture: I assume that a lot of what's bad is just knowing people are going to kill you, and when

    Except not knowing is even worse, apparently. In Japan, condemned prisoners can't be executed until the appeals process is concluded, but thereafter can be executed at any time. They're kept in solitary, and when taken out of their cells they're always hooded and shackled -- whether it's for exercise, a trip to the hospital, or the walk to the gallows. They frequently spend years in this liminal state, in solitary confinement and wondering every time the door rattles if they're going to be hanged.

    The longest I recall was a man sentenced to death for murder which he committed when he was about 18 -- a young thug. While in jail awaiting execution he grew into middle age and became a celebrated poet and novelist on the outside. Then, after about 30 years, they hanged him, despite protests on the outside (he was a significant literary figure) more or less at random because a hardline justice secretary decided to restart executions and his number came up.

    I stand by my belief: capital punishment is wrong and evil and should never be seen as anything to do with justice -- it's basically the last vestige of ritualized human sacrifice in the name of the king.

    590:

    I stand by my belief: capital punishment is wrong and evil and should never be seen as anything to do with justice -- it's basically the last vestige of ritualized human sacrifice in the name of the king.

    I have to disagree on this. The fundamental problem is that part of the definition of a state, whatever the governance, is that the state exerts a monopoly on violence. So, if someone "needs to die," it's the government's responsibility to kill that person. Hence, capital punishment and executioners. Also, standing armies and courts as opposed to gangs and lynchings.

    Now I tend to be anti death penalty as a policy, for the same reasons you cite: non-zero error rates on convictions and racist and classist sentencing policies being two of them. I mean, why should someone like Trump skate for contributing to tens of thousands of deaths, while a black kid who drove the getaway car on an armed robbery gone bad gets executed? Also, in the US, death penalty cases are purportedly more expensive than life imprisonment, so there's a grim economic reason.

    That said, there are a number of murderers (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, the three night stalkers) who I'm glad are dead, although I don't think any of them were executed. I throw this last in as another grim reminder that not all murderers are people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, made a bad decision, and can be rehabilitated. Some probably are, but there's a diversity of evil, and some of it is pretty horrific.

    591:

    In one of John Mortimer's books, he had Rumpole saying that he was perfectly fine with the death penalty - so long as, if a person executed was found later to have been innocent, the judge, jury, prosecuting attorneys, etc. were also executed immediately thereafter.

    Of course, Rumpole was well aware that such a scheme could never occur - what, execute all of those upstanding citizens for making a (not-so-) innocent mistake?

    (Plus the fact that state in general and the police in particular do all in their power to prevent overturning guilty verdicts. Destroying exculpatory evidence, intimidating investigators, etc).

    592:

    Did some surface work in sewage treatment plants and it was just a normal day's work, except that the Malabar facility was just amazing inside. Would make a perfect location for a mad scientist lair.

    Yep. Sanitation engineering can have a lot of good design in it. The general problem that's difficult to solve isn't the conventional engineering, it's idiot-proofing the inputs. And it turns out that we live in a golden age of creative and novel idiocy. Some of it involves chemists with advanced degrees who don't get paid to think too hard about the waste products from their processes (although this is changing). Rather more of it involves the vast universe of garden variety idiots who, like coronaviruses, randomly find new and different ways to cause trouble, just through there being so many of them.

    593:

    I see that I should have stated right from the start that I wasn't writing about personal archives. I was talking about the nation-state. Historians, Archivists, Librarians and Archeologists don't have consulting companies serving individuals and they're never activists. They all work for the nation-state, and for sub-governments in federal systems.

    You know, two years ago, I had to avoid my environmental group getting dragged into a lawsuit against the local county for it deleting records far too fast. It's not that I don't support the lawsuit, which (from what I know and can't talk about) appears entirely justified. It's that my group didn't believe we had standing to take part.

    And if you don't remember this, you really, really should: the efforts by climate and other scientists in November 2016 through January 2018 to download US climate data off government servers in advance of the Trump administration wiping the data. E.G. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/13/scientists-are-frantically-copying-u-s-climate-data-fearing-it-might-vanish-under-trump/

    If I recall right, this may have been spurred by earlier Canadian governments dumping a large amount of environmental data that would have proved troubling. Do you remember the details on that?

    The idea that governments automatically save all data? No, I don't think so. And getting back to the original point, it's not just war that causes records to vanish, and it's far from simply crying over spilled milk.

    594:

    The experiment certainly has been done on humans, not just rats, although it predates the existence of the EEG.

    https://www.drlindseyfitzharris.com/2012/08/13/losing-ones-head-a-frustrating-search-for-the-truth-about-decapitation/

    595:

    Heteromeles @ 593 : "If I recall right, this may have been spurred by earlier Canadian governments dumping a large amount of environmental data that would have proved troubling. Do you remember the details on that?"

    That was most probably under Stephen Harper, who was leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister from 2006 to 2015. I've lost track of all his villainous acts in matters relating to the environment and other matters.

    He had such an outrageous behavior towards the environment and environmental scientists that he got an entire Wipedia page for this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Stephen_Harper_government

    He's most famous for having muzzled Canadian Government scientists (mostly the ones dealing with the environment) for years.

    War between nation-states is currently the major way that government records vanish because it destroys the record-keeping activities of the nation-state. What's happening in Brazil and in less developed states because of underfunding is a small blip compared to what's happening in Syria and Iraq.

    My point was that in 2 or 3 generations in the future we'll have reached, outside of war, the point where the disappearance of paper records (not to mention paper books) and the introduction of automatic preservation of digital documents, will mean that there will be no more blips, big or small and no more historical holes.

    596:

    Yeah, um, no.

    The problem is that a large number of people in governments WANT HOLES IN THE RECORD because it's inconvenient. I mean, the methods the CIA uses to radicalize gangs and train terrorists? That stuff is hazardous, as we've seen with all the terrorists and narco-terrorists who have adopted those methods far beyond any government scope. It would be nice to delete all that, but alas.

    Having a record means that people are potentially culpable. That's why you get rid of records (and that was an indirect point of the lawsuit I hinted at in my previous post). I don't think that's going to change, even if we get to the point where we can theoretically keep records forever. Worse, as we've seen with infowar and psyops in the last five years, cheap data storage doesn't mean accumulation of the truth, it means that what truth is out there gets buried under a deluge of plausible bullshit and lies.

    597:

    Re: 'You're still assuming small ships. ... What are you assuming?' - ship size-wise

    I'm assuming closer to what Heteromeles said (454) - humans will comprise the smallest portion of the mass. However, that doesn't mean that humans won't require most of the mass (therefore space/volume). We're very energy inefficient - constantly eating, drinking, breathing, defecating, etc. And every one of these processes will need bio and or hardware to manage.

    I'm also for reducing the size of all plant based foodstuffs: grains, veg, fruits, etc. and especially trees because spices and seasonings as well as nuts add more than just flavor to foods. Size management/waste reduction has been in the works for centuries in agriculture: vine tomatoes, vineyards, trellised pears, apples - and probably more - without loss of flavor or nutrient content. Not sure whether anyone's tried to reduce the size of the cinnamon tree or black peppercorn trees - they're pretty big trees but these spices are must-have's in any kitchen. Yeah - I can easily see 90% of the ship needing to be for food production even with 'size-management'.

    I'm guessing that a multi-year spacetrip would need a spaceship designed using a hybrid urban planning and ecological/agricultural approach. Maybe the next time one of the major powers throws money at a massive navy vessel they could add this to their list of requirements. Probably cost a lot less than some of the nuke warheads and be a helluva lot more useful. (Good research fodder too.)

    599:

    You wrote: "...the population numbers from around 1900, around 1-2 billion people."

    More like 2. I read, a long time ago, that we hit about 1B around 1810. I will also note that I remember being at the NY World's Fair, so '64 or '65, and hearing that the population had hit 3B.

    As a side note, one of the things that annoyed me with Avengers: Endgame was that Thanos killed half the life in the universe. Right. So, for Earth, that would be not 50 years to regrow the population.... No one in Hollywood or Marvel has ever heard the lillies growing on a pond problem.

    600:

    I'm assuming large areas will become miserably hot and humid, but not necessarily deadly hot and humid. Just getting more people to the existing upper end of being able to handle heat and humidity would be a benefit, though I suppose you could just let natural selection do the work.

    Also, babies are more vulnerable to heat than adults. People need to be able to reproduce. Heat tolerant babies? Air conditioning rationed for small children and people taking care of them?

    The movie version: Genetic or bio-engineered great big ears for heat dissipation. Like fennecs and such. Elephants have big ears for heat dissipation, so presumably people can carry big enough ears to do some good.

    I'm assuming highly mobile ears. Fold for cool conditions. Fold in as ear plugs. Turn and bend for directional sound amplification, not to mention emotional expression.

    601:

    Wasn't there a story or three by someone, with advanced humans in space with cranial crests?

    Oh, that's right: OGH I think was the author....

    602:

    I happen to agree on food. As for "pepper" that's a tricky one, because the word got applied indiscriminantly to a bunch of piquant spices.

    The classic black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a vine, not a tree, and the only problem with it and other Pipers is that they're tropical. You want them in your ship, some greenhouse better be tropical. There are actually multiple Pipers in cultivation, including long pepper, tailed pepper, and kava.

    There's also chili peppers, which are a herb/bush.

    What you're thinking of probably are the "Peruvian peppers" (Schinus molle) which are indeed a tree (I've got one in my back yard, but alas it's a male). The Peruvians use the berries as a spice, but it's not a common spice.

    Your point about miniaturization is quite sound. There are miniature tomatoes, peas, and chilis out there to my knowledge, and there's no reason for plant breeders to not continue the trend. I think NASA even developed a miniature, pea-sized tomato for experimentation. There are also dwarf corn, wheat and rice, which will probably get shipped as well (though I'd hope for sweet potatoes, potatoes, and yams as well). The fun question is when you get to "small livestock." This isn't miniature goats, it's rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, mice, and insects, among others. The problem isn't that they're inedible, it's the Anglophone yuck factor for all of these. Combine that yuck factor with our raging mycophobia as a culture (which means that taking fungi to space will be twitched upon. Except for yeast. We have to bring along Saccharomyces), and we may not be the best people around to figure out how to feed a starship. That's what makes it fun to think about starship food. If you can get away from the automatic food materializer, small farming in freefall gets rather interesting, as does what farm to table cooking might look like. After all, how do you cook in space? Open flames aren't safe.

    603:

    The "Conjoiners" in Alastair Reynolds' "Redemption Space" universe also have cranial crests, because they'd overheat their brains otherwise.

    604:

    Nancy, if you happen to like deadpan snark and/or good science, I strongly recommend Anthony Martin's The Evolution Underground. It's all about the evolution of underground life, up to and including humans, and he's a really good writer.

    The critical point is that there's good evidence that many/most of the terrestrial species that survived mass extinction events were able to do so because they were underground, either as seeds, bulbs, or critters that could burrow. He devotes a couple of chapters to human burrowing.

    So the simpler answer to Black Flag weather isn't genetic alteration of humans, it's literally digging in, which is something we're actually pretty good at already. This isn't just the survival bunkers, it's also the proliferation of Montreal and Beijing's underground cities.

    605:

    If we do develop STL spaceships, either for in-system or interstellar use, I think a big part of the engineering will involve how far a particular part of the ship gets put from the engines. That is, how hot do you want a particular place/process to be, ranging from (at least) hundreds of degrees to "as cold as space gets."

    So something like engines/ovens/greenhouse/living quarters/bridge/refrigerated-storage/frozen storage. Probably more sophisticated than that, but if you don't have to pipe heat around everyone's life gets easier.

    606:

    On the subject of global warming, has anyone done serious research on where it would be best to live after 2050 or so? Southern California doesn't sound like a great place to be in 20-30 years. (I'd like for myself and my family to be climate migrants before it gets all popular and stuff.)

    607:

    Forgot three items of space cuisine: salt, stimulants, and sugar. I've already covered alcohol previously, and I've got to point out that miniature cannabis has been a thing for awhile now.

    Salt (NaCl) is an interesting problem for long-term travel in a closed ecosystem. It's an important flavorant for us (although we use too much and can learn to eat with far less), it's a necessary nutrient in small amounts, and it's also an effing nuisance if it builds up anywhere in the closed ecosystem. The simplest solution is unsalted food, but that's not great with a largely vegan diet, and mutinies have happened for less. So where and how do you put salt into your closed ecosystem, and where do you get it out. This is a sanitation engineering question. If you're queasy about drinking recycled urine, guess where the salt might come from? If you're looking to, erm, spice up a SFF account of living in space, this is one way to do it.

    Now about those delicious caffeine plants (coffee, tea, chocolate, yerba mate, kola): they're all bushes and trees that take years to reach maturity, so they're out. You don't want to snag that much biomass for that many years, with so little return, if you're trying to keep your closed ecosystem turning over. You want it small, fast, and agile. Fortunately for us, caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline are closely related chemicals that are easy to synthesize. So probably the solution is to carefully add metered doses of caffeine to other drinks and foods, relying on other plant products to add flavor and cover up the bitterness.

    This leads to a nasty weapon I just thought of: the caffeine gun. Caffeine's a neurotoxin, and blood concentrations of 80-100 micrograms/ml are lethal (so about 10 grams/person). That's well within the capacity for an airgun dart to carry. Nastier still, you can use sublethal doses of caffeine to incapacitate someone. It's not a stunner exactly; it would cause sublethal jitters. Not as elegant as a stunner beam and completely unpleasant, but much easier to manufacture.

    Sugar? Our favorite addictive drug? Sugar cane's a big plant, so probably sugar beet is better. Extracting the sugar is another thing, and I have no clue about how to miniaturize the process. Of course, you could (and probably should) bring along a beehive, although bees in space would be as exciting as it sounds. But honey might be worth it, as would pollination.

    And that leaves the last of the four food groups: fat. How do you get enough fat into space diets? Most of what I've been talking about are carbs and protein, but we need fats too, and that's a hard one to miniaturize. Have to think about that for awhile. Beetle grubs?

    608:

    Yes, but you're too poor to find out. I'm actually not joking. There's a whole dirty little industry devoted to creating survival chalets and bolt-holes for the super-rich. That's why New Zealand has gotten so grumpy with foreigners lately.

    If you want a cheap bolt hole, look at someplace like Cleveland or Detroit. Otherwise, we're talking about places like North Korea, Kamchatka, the Pacific Northwest, Scandinavia, southern Canada, New Zealand, Tasmania, and so forth.

    609:

    Heteromeles @ 604: "This isn't just the survival bunkers, it's also the proliferation of Montreal and Beijing's underground cities."

    I wish we had a true underground city in Montreal. As things stand we have a huge conglomeration of underground shopping malls connected by tunnels to each other and to some of the office towers of downtown Montreal and to Montreal Subway stations. We have only a few connections to residential buildings or groceries. And those residential buildings and groceries are terribly high priced.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal

    But it's a great place to duck into if it gets too cold or too hot on surface streets. The whole conglomeration is heated and air-conditioned.

    610:

    Yes, I know. It used to be one of my favorite places to visit when I went to August conferences in Montreal. It does need to be made more habitable, I completely agree with you.

    But still, the point remains that it's easier for people to go underground than it is to genetically engineer them, so that's what I'd recommend as a secondary response to killer heatwaves, the primary ones being air conditioning, good building design, and altering work schedules to the cooler parts of the day and night.

    611:

    Pigeon @ 508:

    "Didn't the U.K. start out with only the BBC government monopoly on radio & TV?"

    Yes, we did, but the unpleasant tendencies of the press were already well established by then. It could be that there was some element of not wanting radio to end up like the press, as there was of not wanting it to end up the way the US was going. So kind of the other way round really.

    Those "unpleasant tendencies" existed in the U.S. press as well, but in the U.S. the print press lost out to competition from commercial broadcasters. The print press in the U.K. didn't face the same competition because of the government monopoly.

    612:

    Okay, fats for starships: If you want plant-based sources of fats, nuts, avocados, and coconuts are out, because they're tree crops that take too long to grow and take up too much space and biomass relative to productivity. Things like hemp seeds, chia seeds (chia's a small annual sage), quinoa, canola seeds (a mustard relative), flax, and peanuts and other legumes seem to make the cut. Thinking about it, sunflower seeds and squash seeds might be good too. The tricky part, as with beet sugar, is figuring out a compact and reliable way to extract oils and fats from seeds, if the desire is cooking oil.

    Again, this is offered in the spirit of providing SFF writers with a way of, erm, spicing up scenes that take place on starships that are basically high velocity greenhouses. If you're going to grow the food, what's for breakfast, or for a formal dinner?

    613:

    On the subject of global warming, has anyone done serious research on where it would be best to live after 2050 or so?

    An interesting question.

    I'll ask a particular question about a place I know somewhat: Costa Rica and Panama. There's a central ridge of volcanic mountains that runs roughly from San Jose to just short of Panama City. Temperatures are moderate in the upper levels and not awful on the coast(*), it's a bit north of the doldrums and the climate is currently pretty boring.

    Is it likely to get a lot worse as things heat up?

    (*) YMMV

    614:

    H There are, maybe, perhaps ... A very tiny minority who simply cannot be reformed & who cannot ever be let out, & who are not insane .... ( Brady / Hindley were both insane, for instance ) I can think of two possible examples, one dead & one still alive in a UK prison. The first was Reinhard Heydrich, the second's name is Venables ... But, again, is it worth having, even a completely "humane" death penalty for such a vanishingly small number?

    J Reynolds The state in general, yes, the police sometimes, but the prosecuting lawyers are often the worst - or bent/mad witnesses. The appalling case of Sallyt Clark who was banged-up, because a thoroughly unpleasant "doctor" ( Meadow ) LIED for the prosecution ... he was not struck off the medical register. There was an unseemly doctors vs lawyers fight.

    Places to live if (when?) it gets warmer ... Edinburgh?

    615:

    whitroth @ 512: Have you tried either raising your hand in zoom, or opened the chat window and typed in there?

    The hand raising wouldn't work because I don't have a camera. All they see of me is the photograph I use as a place holder. I have tried the chat to no avail.

    Mr. Tim @ 514: If you get a webcam, they usually have a microphone built-in.

    I use a Jabra mono wired (USB) headset for Zoom calls, works great.
    I like the mono (one ear) just so I can hear stuff around me.
    My experience is the wireless (aka bluetooth) headsets don't always
    work as well.

    I see some Jabra mono headsets being sold on Amazon for $60-70, which
    appears to be a fairly good price.

    I have a good Cloud Alpha headset w/microphone & the microphone has been tested (with a Zoom H-6) and it works. The problem is somewhere inside my computer. I think maybe the onboard "sound card" on the motherboard.

    I used to have a Creative Labs sound card, but the motherboard is a micro-ATX and when I had to add a video card to support a 4k monitor (on board video wouldn't support it), I had to remove it because it interfered with the placement of the video card. The wouldn't both fit.

    This is my general purpose computer and it's sort of a "grandfathers axe" situation. Eventually, I'll replace the motherboard (AGAIN) and I expect that to fix the audio problem.

    Until then, Zoom semi-sort of works well enough using the combination of computer (video) & phone (audio) ... and the computer ain't broke enough to justify spending money to fixing it right now.

    616:

    Thanks. I've ordered Evolution Underground.

    Genetic engineering is expensive now. Will it always be so?

    Seriously, how much will it cost to go underground on a large scale? It still might be more feasible than genetic engineering, but it isn't going to be easy.

    What's good enough for science fiction isn't necessary the most realistic scenario.

    For science fiction, I can see genetically modified descendants from maybe the second percent at the top-- rich people, but not super-rich.

    They're spreading into the hot but not deadly regions, while the bulk of the human race are crowded into rather limited underground volumes.

    617:

    Tim H. @ 522: Consider buying a webcam anyway, it won't be using the 1/8" input, so likely won't have to deal with a probable sound card driver issue. I believe you'd mentioned owning a Mac mini before, mine works with a Logitech webcam with no additional software.

    The Mac mini is a dedicated Digital Audio Workstation, i.e. it's my recording studio. It's also currently boxed up because I was getting it ready to go to a local authorized Apple service dealer to have the hard drive replaced & a second hard drive installed when Covid hit.

    There's some other stuff going on as well. I've almost finished paying for a $7,000 lens I bought in August 2019.

    There's a web cam in the future & I'll probably take this computer over to the guys who solved my server problem and let them have a go at figuring out why the microphone doesn't work, but that will put me off-line for however long it takes for them to fix it.

    I need to get my laptop set up to take over, because I will not use my Photoshop computer for general purpose goofing off on the internet.

    618:

    Niala @ 527:

    Scott Sanford @ 520 "...what chemical or mechanical difference makes fiche more stable than film?"

    None. In fact (with the exception of COM, Computer Output Microfiche) Microfiche are nothing but microfilm (new) cut up and inserted in pockets to make a "master" microfiche.

    It's the fact that it's easier to make copies and easier to handle that made them very gradually replace microfilm. So basically, like very numerous paper books (as opposed to much less numerous parchment) it's a question of "safety in numbers".

    From a calibrated eyeball comparison I believe the microfiche can use a slightly thicker plastic substrate because it doesn't have to be rolled. Plus thinking about it right now, it should be possible to PRINT a microfiche rather than having to develop the image as with microfilm.

    619:

    You're still not understanding me. In zoom, at the bottom, if you move the mouse down to the bottom, you see the button to open the chat window. There should also be a button labeled "raise hand". THAT is the one I meant, not holding your hand up on screen.

    620:

    I'm trying to remember the machines I used to print microfiche page images and the ones I used to print microfilm page images and for the life of me I can't. All I remember is that it was just as easy to get an image of a newspaper or magazine page from one or the other.

    This article wasn't good enough to nudge my memory:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform

    621:

    Ongaku @ 541: Yes, but do the rules they adopt have to be consistent with the rest of the constitution? For example, could they have a rule that black Senators only have 2/3rds of a vote? Or that the VP only breaks a tie if it's not an election year?

    Who says the Filibuster rules are NOT consistent with the rest of the Constitution?

    The answers: They ARE, No and No. Bring on the next straw-man.

    622:

    Ongaku @ 546:

    > The way the VP works for ties is a part of the Constitution, not the rules of the Senate.

    And that is my point. The filibuster, a rule of the Senate, interferes with the VP's tie breaking power, which is in the constitution.

    Nope.

    623:

    Well, there are some problems here.

    Let's posit that routine genetic engineering is completely possible. I honestly don't know how we get there from here. It's not clear that we can easily modify targeted DNA sequences, and mostly what we can do is insert sequences kind of randomly. This means we can get the data in, but getting the data turned into the products and outcomes we want and not causing absolute misery or death is much harder. And how do you adapt humans to steam bath conditions? That's a lot of altered physiology. But let's assume this hurdle is cleared, and cleared soon.

    Soon is the operative word, because even assuming that genetic engineering is possible, you've got to get it out to a bunch of people (millions to billions) to make it a viable solution to climate change. So we're talking a roll-out of a genetic technology on the order of the roll out of a new vaccine. That's a lot of effort, and a lot of in vitro designed and implanted babies. Do we have the clinical capacity for this?

    Then we have to process over 20-30 years to see if the insert works (the critical step!) and breeds true. That means that, if the technology is available now, it will be 2050 before we have a good read on whether it's taking hold in our species through ordinary breeding. That also means that we're committing these children to a particular course of climate change, all the while (hopefully!) fighting hard to not go there. Do we want them to succeed or fail.

    I'm kind of ignoring breeding the wealthy, for two reasons. The big one is that wealth insulates, quite literally. The people who need this mod right now live on the northern coasts of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and the coasts of Iraq and Iran. They're not wealthy. Mostly it will be poor brown people suffering, while the wealthy (as noted earlier) buy up the best land to ride out the climate crisis. This is already happening.

    The bigger problem is that wealth doesn't inherit as easily as you might expect. There are variations of the saying "shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations" around the wealthy world, and what it means is that usually, the grandchildren of someone who gets rich go back to being poor or middle class again. While yes, this is an argument for perhaps prepping them for future hardship, I'd suggest that the wealthy are less likely to genetically alter their kids to survive poverty, and rather more likely to try to alter them to stay wealthy. At a guess, this would involve trying to find genetic and cultural correlates for things like beauty, health, financial and social intelligence, and ruthlessness. And experiments in this regard, from royal incest on through the current parenting manias, are all aimed at this and have been for millennia. I have no idea where the current state of dynastic obsession is now.

    That's why I think it's easier to start getting people to go underground. It's unsexy and terribly difficult in places (like California) where development is its whole arcane and fairly corrupt industry). But compared with genetic engineering, it's a solution that we know and can scale up to some degree.

    This doesn't mean that I think human genetic engineering is impossible, just that it's a suboptimal solution for climate change.

    624:

    My mom still uses her landline (an old handset phone from the 1970s or 1980s) to Zoom, and she's got better audio quality than the cell phones or computers. She even chairs meetings, and she has no trouble speaking up and getting heard. "EXCUSE ME, I NEED TO SAY SOMETHING" works as well as a raised hand sometimes.

    She's actually got me thinking about getting one of those old phones, just for the audio quality.

    625:

    I'm trying to remember the machines I used to print microfiche page images and the ones I used to print microfilm page images and for the life of me I can't.

    I can remember. The microfilm ones were a pain to load the reels and thread the film, wind the film back and forth. But after finding a page, printing it to some sort of icky chemical-based paper was the same for both.

    626:

    Moz @ 563:

    If I was free to choose the method of my own execution

    My impression of the people who like executing prisoners is that the torture is a significant part of the process. I realise a lot of them also favour letting cops kill first, enquire later, but for the most part even the people in that group seem to think executions should be prolonged and painful.

    But aside from that I agree - I'd rather be shot in the head unexpectedly during the course of my normal life than captured, crated, taken to an abattoir then fed through the production line and "killed humanely" by any "humane" method.

    Count me among those who think some crimes are so outrageous that the death penalty is appropriate and I'm not too fussed if the guilty party suffers a bit during that execution.

    I don't favor prolonged & painful, but I think concern for the convicted murderer's "suffering" must be weighed against the suffering of their victims.

    But count me also among those who don't believe the government can get it right. Even one innocent person being executed is one too many. There's no way for the government to restore a wrongly executed person's life.

    Which leaves me with the dilemma of how to ensure the innocent are not wrongly executed while keeping the guilty from committing additional crimes; victimizing additional innocents.

    627:

    Heteromeles @ 580: Actually, if you want to imagine something very techie and science fictional, imagine medicine and bioscience without the use of petroleum-based plastics. The reason is that a lot of sanitation and contamination issues are handled right now as single-use plastics. And contamination in molecular biology is a nightmare, since even a single bit of DNA in a reaction tube can get amplified and mess everything up.

    So...what's does sustainable biomedicine look like? The genetics revolution of the last few decades has been built largely on plastic. What's the post-plastic version?

    My guess would be glass, stainless steel & autoclaves.

    628:

    My guess would be glass, stainless steel & autoclaves.

    I agree. A lot of good science and medicine got done with glass in the time before plastics.

    Question: Are there plant-oil based plastics that could be used?

    629:

    whitroth @ 619: You're still not understanding me. In zoom, at the bottom, if you move the mouse down to the bottom, you see the button to open the chat window. There should *also* be a button labeled "raise hand". THAT is the one I meant, not holding your hand up on screen.

    I've never seen a "raise hand" button, but I'll look for it next time.

    630:

    My guess would be glass, stainless steel & autoclaves.

    Yeah, not for genetics work.

    The problem with DNA, especially with PCR, is that minute contaminants can overwhelm the sample very rapidly. Glass and steel get scratched when cleaned, and those finely scratched surfaces hold crap, DNA, and reagent-eating gremlins like nobody's business. Unfortunately, mere autoclaving doesn't get rid of DNA, so it's insufficient.

    The solution as of 20 years ago was eppendorf tubes, little plastic centrifuge tubes that are made out of clean plastic, UV sterilized, used once, and discarded. The single use is a feature, not a bug, because it prevents that source of contamination.

    UV light won't sterilize glass or steel easily, but perhaps boiling something like 30% hydrogen peroxide ($65/gallon for neat 30%. It's explosive and corrosive, so store in the fridge) would work adequately*. Also, people would have to get used to handling eppendorf-style products that aren't made of plastic.

    And hopefully we don't run out of the right sand for glass and foundry work. speaking of which...

    *Note that I've actually boiled soil samples in 30 percent peroxide. It's a standard procedure to get all the carbon out for a particle size analysis. It's also interesting when the glassware breaks.

    631:

    Which leaves me with the dilemma of how to ensure the innocent are not wrongly executed while keeping the guilty from committing additional crimes; victimizing additional innocents.

    My objection to capital punishment has several bases, but the epistemological one is probably primary. We know that the legal/judicial system is flawed, sometimes corrupt and gets things wrong fairly often even when working well. So innocent people do get convicted and sent to jail or execution now and then. That's bad.

    So how do you accomplish the aim of the justice system which, IMO, should be deterrence/prevention of further real crimes without victimizing the mistakenly convicted? I don't think that you can do that, but imprisonment for whatever term and regular review of new evidence in the case seems better than irreversible capital punishment.

    632:

    I've never seen a "raise hand" button, but I'll look for it next time.

    Three ways to do it.

    One is to go to the participants button, and you'll notice that there's a little "raise hand" button next to your name. That's if the host is monitoring the participants' list.

    A second method is to use the "reactions" tag. It's supposed to be an applause handclap, but people use it to raise hands on the main screen. It only lasts a few seconds, so you have to do it repeatedly.

    The best method, if your face is on camera, is to physically raise your hand. It's quite visible, and it's what I normally do if allowed.

    On some phone systems, I think *9 may be a hand-raising sign too, but I'm not sure.

    633:

    Unfortunately, mere autoclaving doesn't get rid of DNA, so it's insufficient.

    Limiting the discussion to glass and stainless steel, what temperature for what time would be sufficient? 250 C for 5 hours? A dull red glow for 24 hours?

    634:

    Remember denaturing the apparatus is counterproductive. Other than that, I'm not sure. It's more than sterilizing them, you've got to get the molecules off the surface if at all possible. Hot steel is certainly reactive, so I'm not sure what keeping it hot for hours would do to it. I know even less about glass.

    635:

    Heteromeles @ 630: "And hopefully we don't run out of the right sand for glass and foundry work. speaking of which..."

    Isn't that the same silica sand, SiO2, that's found on beaches and (now inland) former beaches all over the world and is also used for making fiber optic cables?

    If so I can understand a production shortage due to bad planning but I don't see how we will ever run out of it.

    636:

    There's also Toronto's PATH system:

    https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/visitor-services/path-torontos-downtown-pedestrian-walkway/

    Downside is that most of it is private property, so access can be arbitrarily revoked/limited. And the signage is truly horrible, because no one wants potential customers to be directed away from their section, so it notoriously difficult to navigate.

    637:

    The hand raising wouldn't work because I don't have a camera. All they see of me is the photograph I use as a place holder.

    The "raise hand" command in Zoom would work, because it shows a yellow 'hand' icon over your image. (The moderator can also see a separate list of people who have raised their hands.) I use it a lot in meetings, and I almost always have my camera turned off.

    638:

    That makes some big assumptions about the resources which will be available for anything but managing climate change over the next 2 to 3 generations. A lot of current digital technologies are very energy-inefficient and creating digital storage media with a lifetime in centuries is a hard problem. The more often data has to be re-copied, the higher the risk that someone will forget or not have the resources or mess it up or declare that it is hurting wrong data and anathema to all right-thinking people.

    And people with a business and computer science background have a dreadful record of arbitrarily deleting digital archives, and messing up the scanning and the metadata of their big digitalization projects. Just read some of the rants by librarians on Google Books! The good digitalization projects tend to be run by librarians and archivists with the techies implementing the specifications they lay out.

    639:

    Sand is particles that range from 0.05 mm to 2.0 mm. Smaller particles are silt and clay, larger particles are gravel up to boulders. Composition doesn't matter, within limits. In general, soil scientists make stacks of really nice brass sieves, and the sand fraction is what falls out between the 2.0 mm sieve and the 0.05 mm sieve, if you're doing quick, dirty, and not very quantitative. The rigorous method involves boiling peroxide, as noted above.

    Most sand is not silica. Good silica sand is actually fairly rare and increasingly valuable, because it's particles of reasonably pure silica. Most sand is granite, basalt, coral reef, feldspar, limestone, and so forth. The composition of beaches and sand banks are so distinctive that geologists who study sand can identify a beach from its sand. Probably you've heard of black sand beaches? Those are basalt, mostly. Beaches downstream from city dumps are made of ground down glass and other trash, and are colorful in a rather unsettling way.

    640:

    Robert Prior @ 636: "Downside is that most of it is private property, so access can be arbitrarily revoked/limited."

    Most of Underground Montreal is on private property too, but the planning for the tunnel interconnects goes back to the early 1960s, together with the planning for the Montreal subway. And the Montreal tunnels are not open 24 hours a day, usually, but at the hours the subway is open (5:30 AM to 1:00 AM).

    I've visited the Toronto PATH system a few times when I used to do a yearly visit to TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) and I found that the big problem in the summer was lack of planning for the air conditioning. In any season there's also the fact that PATH has too many really small tunnels, which are a nightmare to navigate in the rush hour crowds. They're not wide and the ceilings are usually low.

    PATH is not a good place for the claustrophobic!

    So, I would go to live on Mars only if I could have a home in a lava tube with the oxygen areas as big and roomy as the Montreal underground city.

    641:

    @ Heteromeles: Thank you very much! I recall an article by Pimentel (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225689329_Will_Limited_Land_Water_and_Energy_Control_Human_Population_Numbers_in_the_Future/link/575f27c308ae9a9c955fb22d/download) discussing how the end of petroleum based agriculture could allow for a sustainable-agricultural based world population of ~2G. A fair amount of this sustainable agriculture would rely on draft animals. "Yah, mule, yah!" If I may, I'd like to reach out to you and discuss some environmental- and population-related topics, off-forum.

    @ Greg Tingey, Mike Collins: re ice shelf collapse and sea-level rise. Thank you: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/after-the-larsen-b#:~:text=The%20Larsen%20B%20glaciers%20may,other%20recent%20ice%20shelf%20collapses.&text=If%20the%20Ross%20shelf%20collapsed,five%20meters%20(sixteen%20feet).

    @ Everybody, re: data storage, civilization, etc: Ah yes, microfilm/fiche- Does anybody remember Asimov's frequent mention of book-film readers? I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been more discussion here of both the decay of (acidic) paper-based books and documents and the repeated and rapid obsolescence of electronic storage media.

    642:

    "...the introduction of automatic preservation of digital documents, will mean that there will be no more blips, big or small and no more historical holes."

    I guess that is technically true. No blips or holes, just a monotonic slide into a bottomless abyss beginning a few years after we cease to be able to sustain all the fiendishly complex infrastructure to support a level of technology we haven't even actually got yet.

    643:

    people with a business and computer science background have a dreadful record of arbitrarily deleting digital archives

    Not always deliberately, or so they say...

    https://www.critic.co.nz/news/article/9182/vuw-accidentally-wipes-desktop-computers

    Victoria University of Wellington accidentally deleted all the files stored on its desktop computers last Friday. Items in the H: drive, M: drive, or the cloud were still accessible. This morning, staff and post-grad students received an email saying that IT were “still working on a technical solution to recovering the data that was deleted over the weekend”. Those who might have lost significant files were told not to log onto their computers, as that could overwrite the files even further.

    People who didn't back up their own files, or didn't store copies in their (limited) network space, have lost important stuff. I em reminded that for years after finishing my masters I kept finding floppy disks with copies of it in odd places. These days I have hard disks ditto (legacy disk capacity has outstripped my ability to accumulate digital crap!)

    644:

    how do you accomplish the aim of the justice system which, IMO, should be deterrence/prevention of further real crimes without victimizing the mistakenly convicted

    Countries that focus on rehabilitation seem to do better at reducing crime rates.

    We know that locking people up doesn't deter, and often merely changes the type of crimes they commit. Many prisoners are convicted of crimes while in jail, or not-convicted of the administrative equivalents.

    For severe cases I think we just have to lock people up, but I do favour the Rumpole solution to miscarriages of justice. There's some evidence for deterrence at the more educated end of the spectrum, so dumping the responsible parties in prison to collectively serve the unjust time they imposed on someone might well discourage repeats. Or more likely, merely encourage the legal system to better cover up its crimes.

    Aotearoa has a very specific problem right now with an Australian criminal, as well as a problem with Australia deporting technically-kiwis they don't like, sometimes without warning Aotearoa authorities. I can't help but think that slipping their problem on a plane back to Australia and saying "but we thought you knew" when the ozzies got upset would be entirely appropriate. But also likely to violate various human rights obligations, because sadly the ozzies have a record of torturing prisoners and other nastiness. And people would notice.

    645:

    Ice sheets act as dams. When they break up ice loss from the land increases.

    When they break up it can be very dramatic.

    More so for large dams, obviously. ("It would take more than some ice to hold a lake larger than Northern Ireland, right? No? Oh, dear...") This gives geologists excuses to say things they normally don't get to say, like "ten cubic kilometers of water per hour" and "flow speeds over 100 kph." Such events are best observed from a great distance.

    646:

    Reminds me of my cousin who was finishing his PHd in Mathematics about 30 years ago when his house burned down. He was in utter disarray until they found his hard drive undamaged, which contained the bulk of his work.

    Since that early lesson I tend to oversave everything everywhere. Multiple drives stored on and off my property as well as into the various clouds.

    Now the challenge is finding the current copy in the right place and not accidentelly forking versions into multiple locations. And of course the fact that 99.99% of the stuff I have saved so assiduously is of minimal interest to myself and zero to anyone else whatsoever.

    647:

    Mules have their place. There's also something to be said for electric tractors. There's also some things (both good and horrible) to be said about feeding a world population of a billion humans, instead of ten billion. Like it maybe being possible using mules. Not that we didn't have famines then, but climate change wasn't as big an issue.

    What I'm wondering, for the hive mind, is whether these things about nickel-iron "battalysers" might actually work for wide-scale deployment, possibly in cars. For the more initiated, have fun, I'm new at this. For the less initiated, Edison tried to run cars on nickel-iron batteries over a century ago, and the technology got eclipsed by gas before he could finish commercializing it. These batteries aren't as good as lithium is at the moment. The advantage is that they're durable (I think some were in service for 40 years) and they're made out of common elements like iron and nickel. The bad news is that if you overcharge them, they start cranking out hydrogen gas. Hence "battalyser"--if they're installed in cars, it's probably a good idea to loop in a hydrogen-powered fuel cell to use up the hydrogen before it does bad things, like burp, boom, or pickle. Ni-Fe batteries have had niche applications since forever, but battery scientists are only now fiddling with them to see if they can be made more versatile.

    648:

    Bug me at heteromeles.com. I really should put a bunch of this on my blog anyway, since I haven't updated it in awhile.

    649:

    If you used vanadium redox batteries you could fill your electric cars up from a tank to avoid scaring the petrol heads. Energy density is crap but there's something to be said for energy you can move around in a bucket :)

    650:

    Electric battery-powered vehicles rely on battery tech based on how many joules of energy can be stored in a kilogram of battery. The basic unit is usually defined as W-hr per kg. Lithium-tech (ion, polymer) can store about 200 W-hr per kg which means that battery tech will work in road vehicles with modern engineering giving practical range between charges.

    Ni-Fe is nowhere that figure, it's down around the lead-acid figure as I recall, maybe 100W per kg at best which means a Tesla top-end 500km range car would need a tonne of Ni-Fe battery cells and a lot more space to fit it in the chassis than the equivalent lithium-tech battery currently deployed (ca. 450kg I believe).

    There are other issues with Ni-Fe battery tech regarding cost since, I understand, the nickel and iron plates in the battery cell need to be very pure and production-quality iron in particular is a chemical zoo at the best of times. There are other battery technologies with very long life, low cost materials and reasonable W-hr per kg capacities but the best of them involve molten sulphur at 300 deg C to store electrical charge and they only catch fire sometimes.

    651:

    Heteromeles @ 647: "Mules have their place. There's also something to be said for electric tractors."

    Poor mules. I hope we'll be able to scrape up enough electricity so that we can use electric tractors and never have to reintroduce mules in farms again. Before tractors and trucks came in, mules were worked to death and sold to a knackery.

    Mules are very intelligent. My step-brother was hired to introduce mules to farms in Rwanda, in the 1990s. He had to leave when the Rwandan genocide started.

    652:

    Re: 'Okay, fats for starships:'

    How about fish? Some years ago saw a documentary about a city somewhere in the southern US where a few locals decided to try aquaculture for greens/veggies. They discovered that these veggies/greens grew even better when they tossed some fish into the water. The fish expand the eco-system eating up and recycling useful nutrients.

    Plus - according to the below, crickets provide an optimal balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats - plus lots of protein. And they reproduce fast.

    https://www.edibleinsects.com/insect-nutrition-information/

    Disagree about the trees - I think trees are must-haves. Apart from reducing their size and speeding up their maturation rate, the ship could also pack additional stores of whatever their fruit is. Trees would add to the air purification, water recycling, general ambiance/livebility - plus chances are research would have to continue anyways on expanding as many cultivars as possible. Coffee, chocolate - must-have.

    Sugar - white sugar beets and sweet red beets have been the primary sweetener sources in the UK for centuries. Cane sugar would be handy to grow since the sugar cane fiber can be used for thread/textiles.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236017251_TEXTILE_FIBER_PRODUCED_FROM_SUGARCANE_BAGASSE_CELLULOSE_AN_AGRO-INDUSTRIAL_RESIDUE

    Salt - not just for humans. Most animals need some salt, plus you'd want some salt water fish/seafood. Must include kelp in there because iodine is a necessary micronutrient. Kelp can be used as a 'green'.

    I think multipurpose plants/animals in an integrated complex (long chains) ecosystem with minimal waste is what we're looking for. Basically, the opposite of where big-agra has been steering us for the past hundred years or so.

    653:

    I've eaten both grasshoppers and crickets. Both were good, though they're a little like snails in that they tend to taste like whatever you cook them in.

    654:

    That hit my wife. Fortunately, and by good management, she has a policy of keeping everything that needs to be kept on her home PC, with regular backups. This is primarily so she can work from home without attempting the apparently arcane remote login facility, but that it keeps her precious data well away from an IT department whose competence has been in some doubt since long before this incident is an added advantage.

    So her biggest issue was having to re-establish her work e-mail account.

    I understand that the problem was exacerbated by whatever went wrong deleting configuration data, resulting in various applications reverting to saving to the C: drive when they had been carefully configured not to do that.

    JHomes.

    655:

    Re: '... that they tend to taste like whatever you cook them in.'

    Yeah - the spaceship version of 'chicken'. That's really why I think we'd need to include as many flavorants (herbs, spices) as possible.

    656:

    Ah yes, microfilm/fiche- Does anybody remember Asimov's frequent mention of book-film readers?

    The one that sticks with me is a brief bit in the first Telzey Amberdon story by James Schmitz. The protagonist has been set up for a threat to her pet; her logical response as a university law student is to go off by herself, pull out her pocket law library, and do research on the relevant laws and case histories. (She decides that any competent lawyer can draw out the problem for at least a decade or two.) It's a very modern scene; modulo the implication of tiny microfilm spools we're living in a world where it's normal to have an entire reference library in a teenager's pocket.

    657:

    Re: Fats in space, etc. - cont'd

    Forgot some things:

    1- You're correct re: 'pepper trees' - I was thinking pink peppercorns. Good to know that the black peppercorns are relatively easy-to-grow vines.

    2- Soil and their microbes - seems that the SF stuff I've read/watched ignores the role of soils and the microbes in them. I've no idea what the role of soil microbes is, whether anyone's ever measured their impact on growth or nutrient content but am guessing they're as important to plants as they are to animals.

    3- Farm 'systems' segregation, redundancy and back-up (seed library/bank) - for insurance esp. if size of the spaceship is not a limiting factor then you could have four or five completely separate and independent areas growing everything. The seed library/bank would include everything that's growing on the ship plus samples of as many other plants as possible. (Ditto for microbes and various animals.) Would make sense to test all this on Earth first - maybe some abandoned mine that could be fitted out with necessary power, air and water and that could also be sealed off completely like a bio-hazard or neutrino lab.

    A question:

    Did our cave-dwelling ancestors grow any foodstuffs in their caves? If yes - what and how? (The caves I've seen in documentaries appear to have been situated in the sides of hills/mountains in arid areas.)

    658:

    Not just Asimov, they are in Beam Piper's "The Return" and Pournelle's "King David's Spaceship." In the early Cold War, they seemed like a plausible way of preserving large amounts of information after a disaster. Then the problems with illegible scans of the last copy of a newspaper and decaying film reached the papers!

    In an earlier comment @Niala says they have a Masters in Library and Information Science but I have a lot of experience with bad metadata on libraries of scanned books and with sites not run by librarians arbitrarily deleting or mangling content, and I don't think we have affordable digital storage media with a half-life on the order of a century yet. So they have better qualifications than I do, but I am still attached to my opinion.

    659:

    2- Soil and their microbes - seems that the SF stuff I've read/watched ignores the role of soils and the microbes in them. I've no idea what the role of soil microbes is, whether anyone's ever measured their impact on growth or nutrient content but am guessing they're as important to plants as they are to animals.

    Not that I'm an expert, but I minored in soils science when I got my PhD, so I know a few things. Soil's extremely complicated, so you can have aerobic microbes on the outside of a chunk of soil, and hydrogen-breathing microbes in the anoxic center of the chunk. And that's just the start.

    One important note is that soil caused a lot of trouble in Biosphere II. IIRC, the soils scientists told them to use a mineral soil (sand, basically) and add nutrients. The BS2 crew were sure they knew better, and installed farming soil with a lot of organic matter. That, coupled with outgassing from the concrete, cranked the CO2 levels in BS2 up around 2000 ppm, if memory serves, and they had to pipe in extra oxygen (doing this from memory, not checking Wikipedia or other sources).

    The bottom line is that I think soil is critically important, and getting Gaian life to live on other world will in part involve growing Gaian soil on that planet, I suspect.

    That said, I think using soil on a spaceship is all kinds of stupid, especially if the ship is going to undergo acceleration in multiple directions or spend extended time in freefall. Aside from wet soil flying everywhere and soil organisms propagating outside the grow structures, you've got serious weight and unneeded complexity issues. Looks like NASA is using hydroponic root mats and pillows*, or a fibrous substrate to grow in, so my early thought of aeroponics may have been in error. Aeroponics involves misting bare roots with a nutrient solution, and as you might expect, the solution clogs up the misters through mineralization, so there's a lot of maintenance involved. NASA apparently decided that using surface flow across something like rock wool worked better. The fun question is which is more sustainable in long-term space travel, where apparatus has to be recycled as much as possible. Can root mat be remanufactured in a spaceship once a bunch of roots have grown through it?

    *See also https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/Giving_Roots_and_Shoots_Their_Space_APH

    660:

    nickel-iron "battalysers"

    Nickel-Iron batteries have a definite niche, but it's the "size and weight don't matter, efficiency isn't too important, but getting back here to play with them is a PITA". The current work seems to be deliberate overcharging to generate hydrogen once the battery is charged, as part of the hydrogen economy. Again, they're not especially efficient but the materials are fairly readily available and easier to manage than some of the more efficient ways of creating hydrogen explosions.

    As above, cars want joules per kilogramme, ideally joules per litre, and also the ability to completely discharge very quickly (peak power required is much higher than average power). NiFe does basically none of those things.

    The other tech being (re)invented for stationary batteries is sodium, possibly even sodium-air, because again the materials will (hopefully) more readily available than lithium.

    https://www.dw.com/en/the-batteries-of-the-future-sodium-instead-of-lithium/a-54707542

    661:

    Can root mat be remanufactured in a spaceship once a bunch of roots have grown through it?

    If you mean rock wool like the house insulation, then yeah, I reckon. The process is about as brutal as you can imagine... heat rock up, extrude it into a spinnymathing... like making sugar wool, but hotter. Unless the extra carbon crud started precipitating out and gunking up the mechanism I reckon it would be just fine. Very energy in-efficient, but one side effect would be that the output would be pretty sterile :)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOmbuZ7VyFo

    662:

    Apparently Murder Hornets are delicious!

    "In some Japanese mountain villages, the nests are excavated and the larvae are considered a delicacy when fried.[3] In the central Chūbu region, these wasps are sometimes eaten as snacks or an ingredient in drinks. The grubs are often preserved in jars, pan-fried or steamed with rice to make a savory dish called hebo-gohan. The adults are fried on skewers, stinger and all, until the body becomes crunchy.[81]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet

    663:

    The best method, if your face is on camera, is to physically raise your hand. It's quite visible, and it's what I normally do if allowed.

    The problem I have with that method is that my hand (and others as I watch) disappears into the background image as the video systems can't figure out if my hand is a part of "me" or the background. So you have to raise it and keep it in front of your face.

    Why the background image? Well there can be a lot behind me that shouldn't be shown. Or I just don't want shown.

    664:

    "Yep. Sanitation engineering can have a lot of good design in it. The general problem that's difficult to solve isn't the conventional engineering, it's idiot-proofing the inputs."

    Which is how I ended up in that amazing facility. People would pour any random chemical into the sewer. There were emergency breathing sets mounted in handy spots all around the place because no one knew when an enormous cloud of chlorine was going to spew out of the sewer (again). My job was to come round once a year and service the sets and refill any used ones. I went to an incredible number of amazing space age and dickensian factories while I had that job.

    665:

    Hypoxia isn't a normal part of dive training but I've fooled around with it. I had quite bad asthma as a child and as a consequence developed a slightly dulled sensitivity to CO2 and an increased tendency to trigger breathing on low O2. So my experience might be atypical.

    My experience is of what I can only describe as a feeling of impending doom. It's hard to convey, but a bit like when the scary music starts on a horror movie. Except much much more. Plus a somewhat increased breathing rate, tunnel vision and everything goes black and white. (which is very like high CO2).

    It wouldn't be a bad way to go. I'd certainly pick it over any of the normal execution methods.

    666:

    My experience is of what I can only describe as a feeling of impending doom. It's hard to convey, but a bit like when the scary music starts on a horror movie. Except much much more. Plus a somewhat increased breathing rate, tunnel vision and everything goes black and white. (which is very like high CO2).

    My wife fainted for the first time in her life a few weeks ago. Her description of the event sounds a lot like this. Doc decided it was a vagal response and her brain was deprived of / had a reduced blood flow for a few seconds.

    Great way to kill off an evening. 4 hours in the Emergency Room.

    667:

    It would be pretty disconcerting if you didn't know why it was happening. I think I'd want a hospital too.

    668:

    SFR Did our cave-dwelling ancestors grow any foodstuffs in their caves? Unless they were fungi, NO. Plants need light - the curious bluey-pink stuff you get from LED arrays these days is v. effective. The growing rate & survival success of seedlings in my home greenhouse has improved markedly with (cheap / low-cost / low-power ) LED lighting.

    gasdive Where I worked, these many years ago ... we had a Bromine outbreak at one point.

    669:

    Mmmm bromine, very spicy...

    670:

    I've fooled around with hypoxia a bit too.

    When I was a teenager I used to see how far I could swim under water, and got up to 50 meters (two lengths). Part of the trick was hyperventilation before starting. What I didn't realise is that this reduces the body's response to CO2. I also learned to ignore the "must breath" feeling. I stopped doing this after one occasion when I damn near passed out while under water. I just about managed to grab the end of the pool and hold on while I started breathing again. Another meter and the lifeguard would have had to haul me out.

    Another time I was doing the helium balloon funny voice trick, and took too deep a breath from the balloon. I didn't quite keel over, but not far off. (I should add I had people around who would have known how to respond if I did).

    On both occasions, as far as I can remember them, the only real sensation was of the world fading away, like a TV or radio losing the signal. I don't remember the world going monochrome (although the bottom of a swimming pool doesn't have much colour).

    There's no good way to die, but that's probably one of the least bad.

    671:

    I think I'd want a hospital too.

    My wife is one of those, "Oh don't bother, I'll get better soon."

    I got a bit rude in telling her we're going NOW. We have a good hospital 5 minutes away with no traffic. EKG, blood, and other tests showed nothing so a few hours later we went home.

    672:

    Pixodaros @ 658: "...and I don't think we have affordable digital storage media with a half-life on the order of a century yet."

    I think that we can know for sure just how long digital media can last. I'm thinking of the "M-discs" which are supposed to last a millenia. That's why I specified that even in 2 or 3 generations from now we would get dependable long-term digital storage only by having an automated method ensuring the copying of digital data every four years to a new set of memory devices.

    673:

    In the above comment that first sentence should have been:

    I think that we can't know for sure just how long digital media can last.

    674:

    Vagal stimulation turns out to be a weird sort of second order effect of the meandering layout of the vagus nerve. I'm sure there's some adaptive reason for it, but a mechanism that lowers the heart rate and blood pressure in response to filling the stomach mystifies me a bit (you'd think the other way around would be more adaptive).

    I personally get a bit freaked out about the possibility (and effects) of chronic hypoxia. The hippocampus shrinks, other changes in the brain just are not good and see also: congestive heart failure. Of course the current generation smart watches all introduced pulse oximetry over the last couple of years, so monitoring this stuff is easier than ever.

    675:

    That's why I specified that even in 2 or 3 generations from now we would get dependable long-term digital storage only by having an automated method ensuring the copying of digital data every four years to a new set of memory devices.

    I've worked with IT systems and automation long enough that that automated method looks quite a bit like a non-workable idea. It'd have all kinds of problems even after the first four year period when it should do the automated copying the first time.

    Mechanical failures, electrical failures (I think it'd need to use electricity), how you guarantee the supply of electricity after the periods, software issues, the rare times the media happens to fail in the intervening period, and probably a host of other and more specific problems.

    You perhaps could build an isolated system with long-lived generators and stuff, but things will break and it'd need some human intervention at least occasionally. Also, having stuff just sit unused for four years kind of invites problems when you start the system up again.

    676:

    Disagree about the trees - I think trees are must-haves.

    Agreed, although dwarf cultivars are likely.

    But I've already banged on about how any generation ship is going to need such a vast population that it's de facto a city-state at the smallest size, and more likely has a population close to that of Germany. In which case entire forests are a possibility because the "ship" is probably about the size of Phobos.

    677:

    My experience is of what I can only describe as a feeling of impending doom. It's hard to convey, but a bit like when the scary music starts on a horror movie. Except much much more.

    That sounds like classic parasympathetic nervous stimulation: it's an exact description of how I felt for a few months leading up to hypertensive crisis (blood pressure of 250/150 is not your friend!) and how many people describe the onset of a heart attack.

    I now know that if I ever feel that sensation again without a clear-cut cause I need to seek medical attention immediately.

    678:

    I think that we can't know for sure just how long digital media can last.

    Accelerated degradation testing is a long-established practice for pharmaceuticals and other products: physical decomposition of non-biological substances is almost invariably a chemical process involving oxidation and/or material migration (e.g. semiconductor dopants), and it's almost always consistently accelerated by heating in a predictable way. To get to the safe shelf life of a pharmaceutical, they start with its active temperature then heat it to a temperature at which the tables say the relevant reactions are sped up by an order of magnitude, for example. Then they assay it for effectiveness/purity at set intervals and plot the graph.

    Given the nature of plastic and other polymers it's also reasonable to do the same thing only with UV exposure, and also exposure to oxidizing agents.

    But the upshot is, you can get a pretty good estimate of the half-life of any non-metallic material (and of the effective lifespan of any storage medium, and how it can be extended using redundancy, checksums, and so on).

    679:

    "felt for a few months"

    Months

    Jesus. I breathed a rebreather down to an indicated 6% oxygen while doing squats, and the feeling was so unpleasant I spat out the mouthpiece with the strong feeling that I was wasn't ever going to do that again. The idea of having that for months doesn't bear thinking about.

    680:

    Why the background image? Well there can be a lot behind me that shouldn't be shown. Or I just don't want shown.

    Hang a sheet behind you. That's what a lot of my colleagues do when they are forced to teach from home and don't want the kids seeing into their homes.

    681:

    Re: '... using soil on a spaceship is all kinds of stupid,'

    I was thinking of soil libraries - basically making sure that the colony spaceship had soil samples in storage as reference benchmarks for the various home regions of whatever plants they're carrying.

    For on-ship agriculture - was thinking something along the lines of two sheets of very thin plastic (Saran) with some water/liquid nutrients flowing through and the plants popping out of holes. I'm assuming that pretty well all plants' root systems tend to adapt their growing in response to nutrient availability/access: if your food comes to you, you don't need to waste energy/resources growing long/large roots to find it. I'm not sure what else roots do apart from nutrient transport via capillary action plus anchoring the plant. Roots probably also provide some of the plant associated microbe habitats which would mean tailoring the Ag-Saran accordingly to support the entire 'plant ecosystem'. Anyways, by enmeshing the 'root' system in such a system, you'd need much less water and probably less of the other nutrients. However - I'm not sure what types of gas exchanges go on with plant root systems - if a lot and if they have to occur in 'air pockets', then some tweaking would have to be done.

    Tree size - several years ago I visited Mt Washington (NH). When we reached the top of the guided tour area of the mountain the tour guide pointed out what looked like a young (conifer) sapling about 2.5-3 ft high and said that that tree was in fact at least 30 years old and was the same species/variety as the 40 ft tall trees around the base camp. That really impressed me: how climate, local weather conditions affect growth. (Half wonder whether some similar observation/awareness inspired bonsai as a living art form among the ancient Japanese living near Mt Fuji.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington

    682:

    Charlie Stross @ 678: "Accelerated degradation testing is a long-established practice for pharmaceuticals and other products... ...But the upshot is, you can get a pretty good estimate of the half-life of any non-metallic material"

    So that's what the French Metrology Lab did to figure out that the "M-discs" were really rated at less than 250 hours instead of the 1,000 years that the (now bankrupt) company claimed?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

    I once did a very DIY form of accelerated degradation when I was the archivist at a school board. I wanted to persuade the administrative assistants to photocopy (using acid-free carbon black ink and paper) the newspaper clippings that they made of articles talking about the school board and keep the photocopies on file, while throwing away the original newspaper clippings.

    I made my own clipping of the front page of the local newspaper (with the date of the newspaper clearly visible) and made a photocopy of the clipping. Then I used normal transparent adhesive tape to stick the clipping and the photocopy to a wall located in a windowless room (in the basement of a school board building) where very bright neon lights were kept on all the time. No cleaning staff came into that room to shut off the lights and I checked every day to see that they had been left on.

    After a few months the newspaper clipping was yellowed and starting to become rigid and the place where the transparent tape had been applied was even more yellowed because of a reaction with the tape. The photocopied page of the clipping was pristine, including the spot where the transparent tape was. The administrative assistants were convinced by the results and from that day on they photocopied the clipping they did, threw away the clipping and kept the photocopy.

    683:

    Sigh. Trees. Okay, you earned this one. These two. Possibly more.

    Chocolate trees grow in the 5-8 meter range aboveground (assume similar belowground), and produce 2 pounds of finished chocolate per tree per year. Coffee trees are in the 3 meter range (again, assume similar above and below) and produce 1.5 pounds of roasted coffee (2 pounds of green coffee beans) per tree per year. It takes a chocolate tree five years to reach first harvest. Coffee trees start producing cherries at three years, but don't reach full production until six years.

    Since I'm talking about flights of six months to a year, do you see why there's no point in carting along coffee or chocolate trees? It's simpler instead to cart along tree-weights of coffee and chocolate in vacuum packed containers.

    But weight, excuse me, wait, it gets worse. If a spaceship is under acceleration, it needs to stay in trim so it can stay on course. So having heavy growing things potentially takes them out of trim, just like having exponentially accumulating mass away from the center of mass of an airplane makes it hard for the plane to fly straight and induces all sorts of interesting wiggles and gyrations. Not good.

    Then there's the whole carbon thing, but basically, the carbon in wood is dead (see next post), and the only way to get it out if you need it is to prune or kill the tree, which defeats the purpose if you need the tree to grow big to give you its two pounds of fruit per year. Then you've got to combust the wood to get the carbon out. And fires are problematic in space, although I'm sure they'd use a kiln. The bottom line is, not only do you have a literal dead weight potentially throwing the ship out of trim, you've got a growing dead weight in the ship's carbon cycle throwing that out of whack. For a few pounds of fruit per year, it's not worth it. There's nothing wrong with carting tree seedlings to colonies, but for use in a spaceship, you need to maximize the ratio of useful food to biomass, and you need to shorten the life cycle, so that you can keep the nutrient cycles in tune so that humans don't run out of air, water, or any nutrients during the trip.

    Another example: for omega 3 fatty acids, you'd want to grow flax (an annual) or the appropriate algae (in a separate saltwater system, so probably not), rather than sardines, salmon, or tuna. The latter, while delicious, require animal food, which means that they're turning around at most 1% of the energy they get from your power plant into useful food, and that's not good enough. Animals have their place in a spaceship, but it's mostly in turning stuff humans can't directly use (food scraps, mostly) into stuff humans can use (milk, eggs, meat, plant fertilizer, and possibly fur, hair, bones, and hide). And as pets for people who get depressed thinking about this stuff too much.

    I'll get into the why of trees in the next post, but basically if you've got a small ecosystem, nutrients accumulating in any pool is bad. This is one of the problems with a generation ship: humans are a big, important pool for about 17 elements, but if that pool grows too big or too small, everyone in it dies unpleasantly. With a flight of six months to a year, the margins aren't quite so bad, especially because stored supplies can make up a lot of slack, but space and mass are critical. Keeping such a closed ecosystem working is a neat trick, and the people who can do it will probably be the most respected (and feared) on the mission.

    684:

    Could you have soil in a space ship safely enough by keeping it damp and putting netting over it? I realize it's one more thing that could go wrong, but this could be a solution if soil is important.

    Maybe the more interesting question is how big a spaceship has to be to get significant resilience. Bigger than that experimental habitat, but I'm hoping smaller than a planet.

    I'm pretty sure the important thing for miniaturizing crops for space is making the supporting plant smaller. The fruit or seeds or whatever can be at least medium-sized.

    People can grow fungi in caves. They can also grow sprouts. They're going to have to go outside the caves to get the seeds for the sprouts, though.

    685:

    The why of trees. This is cramming about three semesters of graduate level classes into a few paragraphs, so you're getting the plant physiology for poets version. With added evolution and anatomy. For poets.

    Trees are a plant form, not a clade, and they've evolved many, many separate times in the plant kingdom. Basically they're about competition. Plants compete for light with other plants, and they do so by growing bigger and overtopping their competitors. Now if a plant is all living tissue, that's a bit of a problem, because, aside from plants being basically 80% water and built like water balloons, they've got to keep energy from photosynthesis flowing into all that tissue, and the rate of photosynthesis depends directly on how much leaf canopy there is. Since leaf canopy grows as the square of the plant height, while plant mass grows as the cube of the plant height, the bigger the plant, the more it will struggle to feed all its tissues. I'll explain how trees get around this, but this is why big herbs, like canegrass, often have hollow stems.

    As a separate strand, plants require 17-20 separate elements, three of which (CHO) they get directly from air and water (They get N from bacteria or fertilizer, because N2 is a nuisance to crack). There's an old rule called "Leibig's Law of the Minimum" in plant physiology. Basically it states that the growth of any plant is limited by the nutrient in shortest supply. So if a plant is starved of phosphorus, giving it more light or nitrogen won't make it grow any bigger. Only adding phosphorus will get it to grow. There's also a little-known thing called the Redfield Ratios, which apply more to algae than to plants, but they do appear to apply to living plant tissue. The Redfield Ratios are the ratios of elements to each other in plant tissues, and in algae, you get the fastest growth when the nutrients coming in are closest to the Ratios. So it's not just figuring out which nutrients are in shortest supply and filling them. To get optimal growth, you have to supply the nutrients in the correct ratios.

    Third digression: plants are really good at photosynthesis. When I was working on a plant growth modeling project, the first few attempts, using photosynthetic rates from seedlings, ended up with computer models where the mass of carbon in the plant was far greater than the mass of the plant. The only way to avoid this was to apply all the surface area to volume ratios, Leibig's Law of the Minimum, and the Redfield Ratios.

    Fourth digression: Plant anatomy. Plants have three organ systems: leaves, shoots, and roots. They also have two basic classes of tissues: primary tissues and secondary tissues. Secondary tissues are generally dead at maturity. You know them as wood and bark. Primary tissues are alive and mostly water. The Redfield Ratios and Leibig's Law apply better in plants that are only primary tissue, but many plants have both primary and secondary tissues. Before you ask, flowers and fruits are modified leaf and stem structures. Oh yeah, and plants that are mostly or entirely primary tissue? We call them herbs.

    Now this all gets back to trees, which as you may remember are all about growing big to outcompete other plants for light. If a tree was all primary tissues, it would run into severe trouble staying alive. Some plants manage the trick anyway: we call them giant herbs, and the biggest are bananas and their relatives.

    Most trees do this neat trick: they form secondary tissues: wood to support the growing primary tissues, and bark to defend those tissues, especially the critical links between the primary tissues in the leaves and the primary tissues in the root tips. Wood is a neat substance, because it mostly consists of three elements: C, H, and O. Remember how I said plants were really good at photosynthesis? That means they're really good at taking CHO out of the environment and turning it into carbohydrates. In tree secondary tissues, those carbohydrates are cellulose, lignins, and other really tough carbohydrates that are hard to break down. So trees take the nutrients they have in surplus and turn them into dead, metabolically inert support tissue. Which is a really neat trick. The living tissue on a tree is basically a thin skin around an inner core of dead wood, protected in places by equally dead bark. If you'll notice, the growth of that living layer scales as the surface area of the tree, while the canopy for photosynthesis also grows as the surface area of the tree, so the tree can get really, really big, so long as it's mostly dead tissue.

    Incidentally, corals do something analogous when they form reefs.

    But this is why trees are so problematic for space ships. They sink C, H, and O into a hard to recycle nutrient sink (wood and bark) that not only isn't useful on the ship, in big enough quantities in throws the ship out of trim during maneuvers and throws the nutrient cycles out of whack by acting as a slowing pool in the cycle. In the small closed ecosystem of the ship, it's almost certainly wiser to focus on plants that are mostly primary tissue, and that means growing herbs, not miniature shrubs or trees.

    686:

    Hang a sheet behind you.

    Ah, nope. I'm in a 10x10 bedroom that was my son's back in the day. I'm using it to stage computers, have a collection of computer stuff on shelves and two small tables, and an over all storage room. The sheet would have to hang from the middle of the room just behind where I sit. And with 3 to 8 meetings a week that would get hard to deal with. I'll just keep putting up vacation photos from various trips over the years. Many of them generate questions. Mesa Verdi cliff dwellings, a Fort Worth city park water feature used as a setting in the movie "Logan's Run", some interesting Apple stores in NYC, etc.

    687:

    Maybe the more interesting question is how big a spaceship has to be to get significant resilience. Bigger than that experimental habitat, but I'm hoping smaller than a planet.

    This gets back into the whole "Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well" trope. My best answer at the moment is that generation ships are as impossible as FTL ships, using what we know. If people want to experiment with closed ecosystems (something I actually favor) they really need to build them on Earth, where the distribution of mass isn't a problem. Instead of genetically engineering the rich, imagine the super-rich creating their own, increasingly impregnable closed ecosystem lairs as a response to climate change. If there was a proliferation of such structures right now (think of them as supervillains' secret lairs), I'd be much happier imagining that humans have a future off Earth. But they're nowhere to be seen, whatever that means...

    My current best option is to assume FTL warpships are possible, and that we can get to planets that are worth landing on in six months to a year. This relies on apparently impossible physics, but it uses more-or-less possible ecosystem engineering. I'll note in this case (critically) that what you use to keep the ship running day-to-day and what you take to stock a colony can be very different, because the ship has to be able to fly straight and true. However, that ground station on a new planet probably will basically be a starship that's only missing the warp drive. Without the weight limits, it can grow larger using the planet's resources, and if it's plausible to grow trees on the new planet, inside the station or out, they can be imported on subsequent missions.

    As for soil banking...Oy. Yeah, drop soil samples in liquid nitrogen and hope they revive. The problem is that soils, especially wild soils, have a lot of life in them, and they're extraordinarily poorly known. When I was counting mycorrhizal spores, about 20 percent of the stuff I looked at, I couldn't initially identify to kingdom. And in the 1990s, that turned out to be normal for people doing what I was doing. Most of the bacteria in any given soil sample appear to be dormant too, so we don't really know what they do. And in most cases, we can't get them to grow outside the soil, either. Making Gaian soil on a new planet is probably an act of faith as much as an act of science, and soils that can take wild new planet soil and turn it into something that's conducive to Gaian plant growth will be as precious as century-old sourdough starter, and as much used and revered. Planets where soil conversion techniques aren't needed for farming in the open air will be the hottest new frontiers in the human part of the galaxy, too.

    688:

    The root mats NASA's using are simpler and easier than two sheets of Saran wrap. They act like a sponge, so surface tension holds the nutrient solution in, while roots grow through them. If they are easy to make or recycle aboard a ship, they're an elegant solution. I don't think they are, though, but I hope I'm wrong. Aeroponics misters are only a good solution if it's possible to recycle the old ones as they clog and make new ones. But that might be easier than printing root mats on a 3-D printer, for all I know.

    As for bonsai, remember that these are trees living on the edge of starvation, so they're not great for producing fruit, just for looking cool. The Japanese figured out the technique exactly as you described, by going up to the treeline and looking at all the stunted little trees up there. There's a popular garden tool, the hori-hori, that was purportedly used originally to dig up naturally bonsai'ed trees for transplant into pots. I personally think this is wasteful, but horis are really handy garden trowels.

    As for soil libraries, that again gets complicated. It turns out that many good crop plants can grow pretty close to axenically. While I think these plants are boring as hell, they're actually the ones you want in a spaceship ecosystem, provided they do their job. The key point is that you want that system to be both simple (so we can understand it well enough to live inside it for a year or two) and resilient (so that it works the entire time). Soil may have symbionts, but it also has pathogens and hitchhikers. Figuring out what the optimal mix for a ship or a mission to another planet is will take a lot of work and good luck in equal measure. While I completely agree that the microbiota are the essential part of this system, throwing wild stuff in there and hoping for the best is a bit too chancy for my taste.

    689:

    Allen Thomson @ 631:

    Which leaves me with the dilemma of how to ensure the innocent are not wrongly executed while keeping the guilty from committing additional crimes; victimizing additional innocents.

    My objection to capital punishment has several bases, but the epistemological one is probably primary. We know that the legal/judicial system is flawed, sometimes corrupt and gets things wrong fairly often even when working well. So innocent people do get convicted and sent to jail or execution now and then. That's bad.

    So how do you accomplish the aim of the justice system which, IMO, should be deterrence/prevention of further real crimes without victimizing the mistakenly convicted? I don't think that you can do that, but imprisonment for whatever term and regular review of new evidence in the case seems better than irreversible capital punishment.

    I agree, but then we have something like what happened in Atlanta, GA this week. How long should "whatever term" be for that perpetrator? How long do we keep him in prison so he won't kill again? What are the chances they got the wrong perpetrator? How should his motive be factored in?

    690:

    Heteromeles @ 632:

    I've never seen a "raise hand" button, but I'll look for it next time.

    Three ways to do it.

    I said I'd look for it next time.

    691:

    Heteromeles @ 688: "The Japanese figured out the (Bonsai) technique exactly as you described, by going up to the treeline and looking at all the stunted little trees up there."

    I thought that miniature scenery trees had been first created in China (under the name "penjing") and later introduced to Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

    Or is this a question of the present day Chinese trying to rewrite History, as they have started to do in other fields?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai

    692:

    Robert Prior @ 637:

    The hand raising wouldn't work because I don't have a camera. All they see of me is the photograph I use as a place holder.

    The "raise hand" command in Zoom would work, because it shows a yellow 'hand' icon over your image. (The moderator can also see a separate list of people who have raised their hands.) I use it a lot in meetings, and I almost always have my camera turned off.

    I haven't seen it, but I did look it up on-line so I'll know where to look for it next time I join a Zoom meeting.

    693:

    You may well be right about the origin of bonsai, but I'll note that China and Korea both have tree-lines on some mountains (China more than Korea), so there's nothing to contradict either conclusion.

    I can easily believe that potted trees came from Tang China to Heian Japan, and I'm pretty sure the Vietnamese got the idea of miniature scenes from China.

    At the same time, natural bonsais do occur in Japan, normally at treeline, and many bonsai'ed Japanese trees mimic the damage that subalpine conditions cause (artistically dead branches, twisted forms, and the like). So there are probably elements of both indigenous invention and Chinese ideas in Japanese bonsai.

    694:

    It crept up on me gradually, is the thing -- not over a few minutes due to me doing some damn fool stunt; just a creeping sense of doom as if something was wrong but I couldn't tell what. Then I began having palpitations and was in front of a cardiologist within 72 hours (of course it started at the beginning of a weekend).

    If you're wondering where the creepy stuff in "The Jennifer Morgue" comes from? That's what I was writing at the time.

    695:

    Moz @ 644:

    how do you accomplish the aim of the justice system which, IMO, should be deterrence/prevention of further real crimes without victimizing the mistakenly convicted

    Countries that focus on rehabilitation seem to do better at reducing crime rates.

    How do you "rehabilitate" this guy?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylann_Roof

    or this one?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings

    They both unquestionably deserve to be executed. The reason I don't support it is that when the government gets into that business sooner or later they are going to execute someone who does NOT deserve it.

    696:

    SFReader @ 652: Re: 'Okay, fats for starships:'

    Disagree about the trees - I think trees are must-haves. Apart from reducing their size and speeding up their maturation rate, the ship could also pack additional stores of whatever their fruit is. Trees would add to the air purification, water recycling, general ambiance/livebility - plus chances are research would have to continue anyways on expanding as many cultivars as possible. Coffee, chocolate - must-have.

    They probably won't look like what we think of when we think of "trees" though.

    697:

    So, we invent the spindizzy. Is NYC big enough for you?

    698:

    Until it gets hot, I've solved that problem: I have an old curtain rod hanging from the top of some books in a bookcase, to a wire hanging down from the ceiling light/fan. (That's why until hot weather). Hanging from it... in '12, where I was working, we got a poster printer. Works with Mac And Windows! So, while I was getting it working with Linux, my manager let me do a poster for myself. The block-long building had a corridor, with offices on the outside with windows, and on the inside... with nothing. At the time, I was in an small office with three tiny cubes, two of them filled with junk, sorry, "storage".

    The poster printer, btw, is one you see in Kinkos, or other copy shops - takes a roll of paper 42"x100' long. My poster is 42"x42".

    The view out my window is better than anyone else's, including yours. Lovely view out the copper and bronze wall and porthole of the Earth and Moon from orbit....

    699:

    As the old line goes, bonsai: the ancient Oriental art of tree torture.

    700:

    SFReader @ 657: Re: Fats in space, etc. - cont'd

    A question:

    Did our cave-dwelling ancestors grow any foodstuffs in their caves? If yes - what and how? (The caves I've seen in documentaries appear to have been situated in the sides of hills/mountains in arid areas.)

    Places like Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly were much LESS arid when the sites were occupied by the Ancestral Puebloans

    The "cliff dwellings" were primarily defensive structures like castles in Europe. The inhabitants farmed the surrounding tops of the mesas & canyons/valleys below.

    701:

    David L @ 663:

    The best method, if your face is on camera, is to physically raise your hand. It's quite visible, and it's what I normally do if allowed.

    The problem I have with that method is that my hand (and others as I watch) disappears into the background image as the video systems can't figure out if my hand is a part of "me" or the background. So you have to raise it and keep it in front of your face.

    Why the background image? Well there can be a lot behind me that shouldn't be shown. Or I just don't want shown.

    That's the primary reason why I haven't got the web cam. I've got a lot of house cleaning to do before I want to let people see the room I sit in to use the computer. I actually have a painted backdrop I can use instead of a generated image, so holding a hand up wouldn't be a problem in that respect. But I still need to do a bit of cleaning to make room for the stands that support it.

    Basically I'm a slob. I don't mind admitting that, but I don't want to broadcast video of how much of a "man cave" I actually live in.

    702:

    Damian @ 674: Vagal stimulation turns out to be a weird sort of second order effect of the meandering layout of the vagus nerve. I'm sure there's some adaptive reason for it, but a mechanism that lowers the heart rate and blood pressure in response to filling the stomach mystifies me a bit (you'd think the other way around would be more adaptive).

    I personally get a bit freaked out about the possibility (and effects) of chronic hypoxia. The hippocampus shrinks, other changes in the brain just are not good and see also: congestive heart failure. Of course the current generation smart watches all introduced pulse oximetry over the last couple of years, so monitoring this stuff is easier than ever.

    Ain't none of us getting out of here alive.

    703:

    Yup. Most cave dwellings, including underground cities, are really protective structures, and the food is grown outside. The only counterexample I've heard rumor of is Humboldt County pot grows done in mines using gas-powered generators, and of course mushroom caves. In the latter case, the cave just provides a stable place for the fungus to get on with breaking down the substrate its eating, and the substrate has to come from outside.

    Note that in places like China's loess plateau, Coober pedy, and similar, going underground was possible because it was easy to dig and more comfortable to live underground. The really cool ones are places like Derinkuyu in Cappadocia, where the locals took advantage of the easy-to-carve volcanic tufa to gradually construct a city that probably held over 20,000 people at its height (depth?). It was started around 700 BCE and lasted until ca. 1500 CE, with people still taking shelter in it into the 20th Century.

    There have been "inspired" notions of burying US cities since the 1950s as part of the Cold War response. Of course they never went anywhere beyond a few government installations, and Beijing and Moscow, which took the threat more seriously. It will be supremely ironic if a city like Atlanta buries itself over coming years to deal with August heat waves.

    704:

    Heteromeles @ 683: Sigh. Trees. Okay, you earned this one. These two. Possibly more.

    Chocolate trees grow in the 5-8 meter range aboveground (assume similar belowground), and produce 2 pounds of finished chocolate per tree per year. Coffee trees are in the 3 meter range (again, assume similar above and below) and produce 1.5 pounds of roasted coffee (2 pounds of green coffee beans) per tree per year. It takes a chocolate tree five years to reach first harvest. Coffee trees start producing cherries at three years, but don't reach full production until six years.

    Since I'm talking about flights of six months to a year, do you see why there's no point in carting along coffee or chocolate trees? It's simpler instead to cart along tree-weights of coffee and chocolate in vacuum packed containers.

    OTOH, when you reach your potential colony world at the end of the flight, you can plant the trees.

    705:

    I agree, but then we have something like what happened in Atlanta, GA this week. How long should "whatever term" be for that perpetrator? How long do we keep him in prison so he won't kill again? What are the chances they got the wrong perpetrator? How should his motive be factored in?

    How long: Life, or consecutive sentences of equivalent effect. But review the evidence yearly to check on the possibility that they got the wrong perp. Which does happen and is a significant part, maybe the largest, of why I oppose capital punishment.

    Motive: Should be irrelevant.

    706:

    The problem I'm seeing here is that you're assuming two things for which I see simple cures. First, you're assuming that the trees will start as seedlings and grow as the ship is underway. As you've pointed out, this doesn't make any sense as a tree-carrying strategy because in growing from a seedling to maturity a tree uses lots of C,H, and O.

    So you don't start your voyage until the tree is mature, then you budget for the amount of C, H, and O a mature tree will use. In short, what you want for a ship is probably not "a tree" but "an enclosed section of mature forest." To keep it really simple, you probably want a full-grown tree, a seedling, and a dead tree, multiplied by whatever space your ship has for such things.

    Second, you aren't considering that if we decide that trees are necessary, we'll make sure we've budgeted the C, H, and O we need to make a tree happen. Yes, I know that's not necessarily easy, but it's not impossible either.

    The three background assumptions I hang this argument upon this are more-or-less as follows. First, that if we're going to go interstellar, we'll do so with ships big enough for a garden at the very least - half-an-acre or so of a mature ecology at a bare minimum, and probably much bigger (ships) than that.

    Second, that the big barrier for creating closed ecologies that will last is our very immature nano-tech. If you can't unleash a nano-machine which will kill all the mutant bacteria that are turning your hydroponics to slush, you shouldn't go to space. Essentially, you need the ability to use machinery to create an artificial immune system for every living thing aboard your ship, which is capable of defeating biologies down to the prion level.

    Third, you can't have long-term success in interstellar space without a ship that's capable of manufacturing another of itself - that is, you need chip-fabs (or nano-tech,) the ability to refine and machine minerals, do complex chemistry, etc. Maybe at some point your interstellar empire goes to a system of starbases, but that's hundreds of years after you've built ships that can self-repair (like an old-fashioned naval ship.)

    707:

    Going off onto a different topic, a story about US pressure on Latin American countries to reject Cuban and Russian COVID-19 help showed up in the unlinkable DC newspaper three days ago, to no note. Which, I think, is a bit odd, as the story raises questions about what the Department of Health and Human Services and the US in general was doing about the pandemic.

    The story was echoed by msn, which I trust is linkable: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-officials-pushed-brazil-to-reject-russias-coronavirus-vaccine-according-to-hhs-report/ar-BB1eEf0v

    I saw this story this morning in La Estrella de Panama, which was unhappy about it.

    OGA is Office of Global Affairs, HHS's diplomatic arm.

    Five Eyes is the intelligence alliance among the Anglophone powers.

    https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2020-annual-report.pdf OGA leads a group of the Five Eyes countries (U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States) on vaccine confidence, aligning our nations’ efforts and sharing best practices to enhance vaccine confidence messaging globally. [snip] Combatting malign influences in the Americas: OGA used diplomatic relations in the Americas region to mitigate efforts by states, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia, who are working to increase their influence in the region to the detriment of US safety and security. OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill-intentioned states. Examples include using OGA’s Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, and offering CDC technical assistance in lieu of Panama accepting an offer of Cuban doctors.
    708:

    You still miss the two critical problems with trees, especially chocolate and coffee: low yield per tree. The other problem is that they're slow to respond, and if you haven't done any computer modeling, you don't realize how much unpleasantness a big, slow, lagging response can be.

    As for the rest, starships are basically impossible without magic, so if you want to argue what sort of magic is permissible to make your argument work, go right ahead. Yours assumes that it's possible to build a vehicle that can be rebuilt from the inside out while its underway (real world examples being...?) and that things like light-weight shield capable of dealing with interstellar debris and radiation exist and can also be built from the inside-out. And notice, I'm not talking about building a ship that can be landed on a beach and repaired using locally-sourced wood. Instead, I'm talking about the equivalent of a cargo tanker than has some capability of opening a hole in the hull, taking the hull inside, resmelting the steel, then welding the hull back together from the inside, all while the ship is moving at full speed through the Southern Ocean. I'm assuming that starships work if they spend as little time in interstellar space as they actually can, and can land on and take off from planets, so they can, at least potentially, be repaired while out of action.

    709:

    OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill-intentioned states.

    Wow. And apparently written with absolutely no sense of irony.

    American exceptionalism…

    710:

    Oh, and if you download the HHS report and check the PDF properties, it says, "Created: 1/19/2021 6:21:49 PM".

    Then-HHS Secretary Azar cut that one close.

    711:

    And apparently written with absolutely no sense of irony.

    I don't think irony and self-awareness were characteristic of the Trump administration.

    712:

    Heteromeles @ it's possible to build a vehicle that can be rebuilt from the inside out while its underway (real world examples being...?)

    The ISS is moving through space at very great speed and all its parts were assembled in space at that great speed. In the course of the assembly old sections had to be sometimes disassembled and re-assembled to make way for new sections.

    This was done largely through the help of the first Canadarms and the larger and more functional Canadarm2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm#/media/File:STS-116_-_P5_Truss_hand-off_to_ISS_(NASA_S116-E-05765).jpg

    It takes a skilled writer to pull off the introduction of FTL in a story. You have to make it plausible, even if it's just a little bit plausible. You can't have contradictions like the Harry Potter novels have with magic. It's one thing to mention an Alcubierre drive, it's another to introduce its use successfully.

    713:

    I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

    Is Butler still America's most-decorated soldier?

    714:

    Not wanting to make light of this, but that sounds like a good fit for "being haunted", or perhaps "cursed".

    715:

    Planets where soil conversion techniques aren't needed for farming in the open air will be the hottest new frontiers

    You seem to have misspelled "non-existent"

    716:

    The vagus nerve mediates the response, but the stimulus can be something entirely unrelated. I experience vasovagal syncope pretty reliably as a response to certain injuries, the common factor of which is hard to determine. The classic one is bashing my knee just below the kneecap so it gets the nerve, but it can just as well be something entirely painless, such as laying open the skin of my wrist on a burr on a wayward starting handle, fast and cleanly enough that I barely even felt it. My own reaction to that was mainly that it was quite cool to see how strongly blue veins were and how yellow tendons were when cleanly exposed in living flesh without blood and stuff all over them, but my body's reaction was to pass out. Occasionally it even just happens for no reason at all as far as I can see, but not very often.

    I get a pretty dependable warning period of 30 seconds or so when it's going to happen, which is just enough to grab something to wrap around the bleeding bit if necessary and then find somewhere decent to lie down. It doesn't really feel like much except a rising dizziness/grogginess and then my vision fades out, going slightly-brownish grey rather than black from the edges inwards; colour still works, and just gets weaker along with the rest of the image. When I wake up I feel pretty generally rotten, and I have let enough sweat out to form a clear silhouette of my entire body on the floor.

    The interesting bit is where I go to before I wake up again. Quite often I end up in a derelict petrol station somewhere in a deserted, post-apocalyptic New York. There are shrubs growing up through cracks in the concrete forecourt and bits of old railings and detached cladding off the canopy scattered about, and empty skyscrapers with broken windows loom in the background. There are no cars apart from maybe one or two half-seen broken wrecks in the streets somewhere, and no people at all. The weather is fine, clear and sunny, not gloomy and rainy, but probably on the wrong side of the equinoxes, because across the street there is some kind of park effort and the trees don't seem to have much foliage. I've never been there long enough to explore much or see what else there is.

    717:

    We actually don't know that. But I agree that, on average (mean, median, and mode) in the solar system you are perfectly correct. However, if every star has a planetary system, the percentage of terrestrial worlds out there somewhere has to get absurdly small before you are definitely correct across our galaxy.

    But as I noted, interstellar travel effectively requires magic so far as we know. So at this point, we're disagreeing who has the better magic system based on the rules we've deduced from our reading. It's fun to argue, but pointless.

    I'd also note that almost all science fiction assumes that terrestrial planets can be conquered without Gaian ecological imperialism extending to remaking the soil in the image of our current biosphere. Now granted, most science fiction writers know less about soil science than I know about computers, but it is a standard trope in the field, and we don't currently know whether it is warranted or not.

    718:

    I don’t expect starships to land, but rather stay in orbit and tender/shuttle to the surface. Repair in space is in some ways easier than repair in the ocean: unlike seawater vacuum isn’t corrosive and doesn’t apply large forces to things.

    719:

    It's humorous to mention Harry Potter as an example of how to do consistency wrong, given how well it sold. I could equally point to Star Wars, Star Trek, and many others.

    The sad point is that scientific accuracy in science fiction is probably a down-check for most readers. Even internal consistency isn't apparently what most people look for in a book, including a number of editors apparently. Good story Trumps all.

    What I'm trying to do here is to help people imagine futures that are both plausible and different. It's sort of like Marvel's Wakanda, the idea of an unconquered, scientifically advanced, African country, fun because it represents people who rarely see themselves portrayed accurately in science fiction (here biologists and ecologists) and stands conventional notions on their heads.

    What I find instructive is how often I do this, and how often (probably a majority of the time), I'm chastised for falling outside of the standard intellectual canon of science fiction by people who claim to want novelty. It is really fascinating, that trying to add more science and deduce its consequences causes such reactions.

    And now we'll get the normal response of why, I'm not biased against those people biologists, why one of my friends is a biologist. And here's an example of a biologist starring in a fiction book, so you're absolutely wrong, they're your kind you are represented in science fiction in proportion with your population in the science community...

    720:

    Well, in my universe, they start out terraforming an island, or a peninsula. Give us 1k years of tech, and a few thousand years, and that works.

    Whole planets? I've got a few terraformed. Oh, wait, that's in 11,000 years from now....

    721:

    I don’t expect starships to land, but rather stay in orbit and tender/shuttle to the surface.

    As Heteromeles just said, interstellar travel is magic, as far as our current understanding of such things goes. That certainly applies to FTL and is really close to applying to STL for current-model humans.

    So starships could be asteroid-sized objects equipped with magic, or a 2-meter cage of chicken wire equipped with magic. Or anything else equipped with magic. We just don't know if, let alone how.

    722:

    Executions seem to be about revenge more than any notion of justice. If 1 single innocent person is executed by mistake (or on purpose) then it just cannot be a part of a system that makes any claim to the 'justice'.

    Rooff, Dahmer, Gacy and all the others would have been better resolved through prevention. If we are looking long-term the goal should be to obviate any need for prisons by addressing the roots of crime.

    From my workplace I can the primary roots of crime as: 1. Traumatic childhood 2. Mental health of varying severity (including addiction) 3. Poverty.

    Any one of those things and most people can find their way. Two and you are in for a hard road. Three and it is almost impossible (but not entirely).

    Socially we can do a lot about all 3 of those things. I can't speak for non Anglosphere countries, but here in the Anglosphere we are massively failing to provide for and support mental health. Ditto childhood trauma and poverty.

    If we can ever find a way to effectively address and treat those major issues, we will go a long way to obviating the need for prisons at all.

    723:

    Speaking of anoxia or hypoxia and other reasons for losing consciousness: Am I the only one who sees tiny, silvery, fast moving particles all over his field of vision when I don't get enough oxygen?

    724:

    "...because the ship has to be able to fly straight and true."

    It will be quite happy to do that of its own accord, of course, certainly over the length of the tin-of-beans missions you are postulating (you can handle the food supply simply by taking enough tins of beans along).

    Over much longer timespans the minute thrusts and asymmetries thereof from things like thermal radiation or material outgassing could end up being significant. Probably the ship would end up on a very coarse-pitched helical course while turning end over end. But you would also have to compensate for gravitational deflection by the boring or excessively interesting stars you didn't stop at, which would be a rather larger effect. Even so, shining lights out the windows would probably be enough. It's only things like trying to stop at the other end that really matter.

    If you follow the practice of making the ship long to keep the high-radiation bits well away from the squishy low-energy chemistry bits, "trim" of the mass distribution being altered by the chemistry doesn't really matter. You just need to be able to adjust the angle of the main engines by a degree or two so the line of thrust still passes through the C of G. You would need to be able to do this anyway to compensate for things like one side of the ship being a bit warmer than the other so it takes the shape of a flying banana, so there's nothing new there. Similarly, the attitude control mechanism to point the line of thrust in the right direction by rotating the ship as a whole is another thing you would need no matter what.

    725:

    Are you thinking of the effect when you get to see blood corpuscles moving through your retinal capillaries? I get that pretty often, usually as a result of a coughing fit. Deranged oxygen levels most likely are involved, but internal pressures also come into it.

    726:

    I have that corpuscles-in-retina effect as well, often as a result of coughing. I think it tends to correlate with dehydration, for me.

    727:

    axenically

    Oh, oh, oooh, a new word! New word! Organisms that grow by themselves, not needing anything else (or carefully purified). Like libertarians. Neat trick if you can do it.

    728:

    First of all, I didn't say "can be repaired while underway." That would be silly and (loud grumble) I didn't come close to saying that. Repairing the ship would probably take place while anchored to a nickel-iron asteroid and probably involve things like 3D printing and/or nanotech.

    Second, what I didn't say is that in my estimation, and even given no ugly interruptions like Climate Change, we're probably a thousand years away from being able to build a starship and 2-300 years away from being able to build an in-system ship that might be as reliable as a 2021 American-built automobile.

    On the subject of "low yield per tree," don't be silly. If we have working nanotech we can probably rewrite tree-DNA to be a little more useful - and note that I didn't specify a kind of tree - that was someone else. Lastly, plastics don't seem to react will with human DNA, so I'd want my starship to be built with something as close to "all-natural" materials as possible. No need putting anything on board ship that will strain the nano-support systems.

    729:

    I suspect that other solar-systems will get colonized by means of something like one of Charlie's starwisps. The starwisp will find a nickel-iron asteroid, drop off some nano-machines and build itself a repair-depot and support structure, then find an Earthlike planet and start re-writing the DNA-equivalent of whatever the smartest animal on the planet happens to be, iterating until the animal's brain can accept a human mind and has useful hand-equivalents. Then it will download passengers and launch more starwisps.

    730:

    They are all extremely tiny, like distant stars. But all of them are moving independently and they are very silvery. Also, they are not close together, like the illutrations of blood corpuscles in a retina capillary.

    So, not like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beY2z2IcZ6g

    731:

    How do you "rehabilitate" this guy?

    If you bothered to read even one paragraph past what you quoted you would have seen my answer to that question.

    Also, software engineering I can do, meat puppets not so much. But there are experts in the latter available if anyone is interested (I had an uncle who worked in this field in Canada but he's retired now. Luckily he wasn't the only such expert).

    But the important thing, IMO, is that we try to rehabilitate everyone. One reason I'm so dismissive of the US is that they are atrocious at rehabilitation, or even understanding that it's desirable or possible. It just seems to be anathema to the philosophy of the place. Instead there's an emphasis on finding worst case categories and shoving as many people as possible into them.

    Speaking of which: why does the US create so many terrorists and Japan so few? When you can just about name all the latter off the top of your head but the US gets a new one every week... it's not just size, it's social structure.

    Punishment only works if it's directly connected to the crime and seen as proportionate both by the criminal and the society they're part of. Which means, among other problems, that an occupying force can never apply just punishment, whether that's Nazi's occupying France; police occupying Detroit; or an abusive parent occupying a home.

    732:

    Actually, Arabidopsis and some other lab rats do axenic culture just fine. That's why they're model organisms.

    To be fair, legumes need their rhizobium bacteria, and any closed ecosystem pretty much runs on bacteria for some critical bits of nutrient cycles. But keeping life support just complicated enough to be resilient, while being simple enough to be sort of understood by the people maintaining it, probably requires a pretty simple system. We're not talking oaks here. Or pitcher plants.

    There's actually a fairly old example: the Polynesians. Most of their crop plants were clonal, and they carried cuttings between islands. It's a pretty good way to go, if you've identified a type of habitat that shows up on a lot of planets, and figured out how to find and colonize these habitats.

    This gets to Troutwaxer's idea of terraforming islands: it's actually what the Polynesians did, and it can be done with neolithic technology, the right list of fellow traveling species, and a lot of skill. It takes decades, not millennia. I've been thinking that interstellar humans could do worse than copy the Polynesian protocol: take over an isolated basaltic volcanic island or archipelago, terraform it, then establish mining camps on the mainland for all the elements and materials they need that don't occur on basaltic islands, then gradually spread colonies onto the mainland if possible, while turning the volcano into a spaceport. In this case, the isolation of the deep ocean spaceport also helps the new colony keep from getting wiped out by anything from a starship explosion to something nasty escaping quarantine.

    733:

    FTL could be a 2-meter cage of chicken wire equipped with magic. STL with magic-tech hibernation might have a payload section not much bigger than the passengers, but without magic physics the associated radiation shielding and engines are going to be a lot bigger. A generation ship, even with magical advances in closed ecologies and in reducing the number of people required to keep a society going, is going to be huge.

    The design constraints in designing for STL,interstellar travel and for getting off a planet are so different that combining them is about as practical as the flying submarine from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

    The closest I can image is giving the passenger section of a hibernation ship a heat shield and parachutes. But that’s for a one way trip.

    734:

    H Even internal consistency isn't apparently what most people look for in a book, including a number of editors apparently. Good story Trumps all. Because it's powered by good-quality Narrativium, of course!

    Rocketjps OK - how do you prevent something as horrible as Venables occurring, then? I did note the "mental health" clause - that's the really difficult one.

    Trees on ships ... Carry them as instruction-sets-to-build-a-tree: Otherwise known as "seeds".

    Moz The Japanese bred/weeded (almost) all of their "terrorists" genes & structure out of their system, 1937-45, but it was a very unpleasant process, whilst it was going on.

    735:

    Robert Prior @ 713:

    I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

    Is Butler still America's most-decorated soldier?

    "Butler was, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history."

    He died in June of 1940, prior to the U.S. entry into the Second World War. He is the only person to have won the Medal of Honor twice AND the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (for three separate actions).

    I believe Audi Murphy "overtook" him in the medal count during the War, but Butler may still be the most decorated Marine.

    The quote is an excerpt from his book "War Is a Racket" which is available on-line.

    736:

    why does the US create so many terrorists and Japan so few?

    Probably for the same reason that America has consistently had ten times the Canadian homicide rate, even when Canada had no gun control.

    737:

    The process of weeding authoritarian conservatives out of any society is unpleasant, especially for the weeds. Tautologically, anyone who doesn't mind the process isn't a weed...

    The UK is still grinding that one out, you have various political murderers lurking and a whole bunch of their supporters running round saying "it's important to remember what great people our local terrorists are" whenever someone suggests removing a statue to discussing Churchill's racism etc. But the process is necessarily slow, what counts is that there's progress and broad agreement about which way the progress goes (and how - the US far right leadershit explicitly rejecting democracy is a bad thing.

    Similar problems in Australia - many people still regard John Howard as good despite his term as Prime Minister being characterised by a whole heap of explicit racism and ecocide. In his terms "that's history, move on", I'm sure he'd say the same about the historical rape allegations troubling parliament right now... it was last year, get over it.

    738:

    Rocketpjs @ 722: Socially we can do a lot about all 3 of those things. I can't speak for non Anglosphere countries, but here in the Anglosphere we are massively failing to provide for and support mental health. Ditto childhood trauma and poverty.

    If we can ever find a way to effectively address and treat those major issues, we will go a long way to obviating the need for prisons at all.

    I just don't think we're ever going to do that & I don't know how best to cope with the fallout from failing to do it.

    739:

    Moz @ 731:

    How do you "rehabilitate" this guy?

    If you bothered to read even one paragraph past what you quoted you would have seen my answer to that question.

    I read it. I read all of it. I just don't repeat the parts I'm not replying to.

    I went back and read it again just now to be sure I hadn't missed something. It didn't answer the question.

    Next paragraph:

    We know that locking people up doesn't deter, and often merely changes the type of crimes they commit. Many prisoners are convicted of crimes while in jail, or not-convicted of the administrative equivalents.

    Fine. Locking people up doesn't deter mass murderers. So, how do you deter them? How would you rehabilitate them?

    740:

    It will be supremely ironic if a city like Atlanta buries itself over coming years to deal with August heat waves.

    Futurama had Atlanta under the sea, aided by fortuitous mutations caused by leaks from the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

    Remember earlier this century, back when Futurama was sillier and less plausible than real life? Good times.

    741:

    I've seen strong evidence that you can't deter them. The US murders the whole extended families of some suicide bombers and yet there are still new suicide bombers. The Nazis did the same thing with the same result, as did the British (in Australia, for example), so that's not new information.

    I have no idea how rehabilitation works, I'm not a specialist in that area. But given the number of reformed (or perhaps just successful) former terrorists now part of peaceful governments I suspect it can be done.

    What I prefer is not creating terrorists in the first place. Which means not teaching hate, and not supplying weapons to social outcasts. The former is tricky because hate drives engagement, and engagement is what matters to capitalist media. Murdoch, Zuckerberg, all that lot feed, and feed off, hate. Likewise the US is the largest producer, and seller, of weapons in the world. The Christchurch terrorist had to leave Australia to get weapons that would allow him to kill that many people that were within his ability to use.

    742:

    Fine. Locking people up doesn't deter mass murderers. So, how do you deter them? How would you rehabilitate them?

    I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out two things.

    One is that we don't really know how many people have been deterred from hate crimes, who were angry, alienated, and had the means to do it...and didn't. For all we know society is 99.9% effective at stopping this violence, but we don't know it because the monsters get so much publicity, while those who don't become monsters are merely more losers we ignore.

    The other is that we may need to focus, not on the alienated bombers, but on the things and people that radicalize them and teach them to kill. This includes, for one, the notoriety and publicity that monsters get. For a nobody who wants to make something of themselves, becoming a monster may seem like the only way.

    Actually a third thing: the dozen. That's about how many people die on average from a spree killer, whether it's an American with a gun or an Indonesian running amok with a knife. I won't say it's human nature, because there aren't amoks in many societies. But that number is haunting. It's not the nature of the weapons, but it may be the nature of society and how an outsider can make a name for themselves.

    743:

    the notoriety and publicity that monsters get

    There was a science fiction story I read during the 70s or early 80s, where the solution to terrorism was to not give terrorists publicity. Modern pundits have forgotten what the 70s were like, with hijackings and regular terrorist attacks in Europe.

    Story had the major news networks (ie. the only news networks) either ignoring attacks or portraying them as mostly unsuccessful attempts by bumbling idiots. Which led the terrorists to start going after the newsman who came up with the idea (and the nickname, which might have been Charlie Gordon). Which got them caught, in the end.

    Can't remember the title or author (which is going to nag me until I remember).

    744:

    There was a science fiction story I read during the 70s or early 80s, where the solution to terrorism was to not give terrorists publicity.

    I don't remember the 1970s SF story but you posted just as I called up the Wonderella Some Asshole strip to make the same point.

    "No name, no picture, no 44-minute retrospective on his hometown. He's just Some Asshole."

    745:

    IIRC, The name was Charlie George and the author Dean Inge. Searches are not very helpful, but there is an audiobook on Audible "Soft Targets" which might be the one.

    JHomes.

    746:

    The sad point is that scientific accuracy in science fiction is probably a down-check for most readers. Even internal consistency isn't apparently what most people look for in a book, including a number of editors apparently. Good story Trumps all.

    A friend who is a medical researcher turned cardiologist talked somewhat about this one time. At his home the TV show "House" had come on and his wife was watching it. He left the area. I asked if he didn't like the show. His comment was that like the lawyers he knows who couldn't watch the show "Law and Order" he just can't watch a medical show where everything he knows about medical training and doctors has to be ignored to appreciate the plot.

    747:

    about as practical as the flying submarine from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

    As someone who had hit the water hard a few times when skiing, I always like the way the flying sub would just ram into the ocean at speed and keep going. No inertial dampeners needed.

    748:

    Speaking of which: why does the US create so many terrorists and Japan so few?

    Good question. But it may involve time lines measured in centuries.

    Japan in the first half of the 20th century certainly created millions of what would today be called terrorists. At the time they were just the IJA.

    And look at today's Japan. Much of what this blag (and many others around the "western world") rail against are just considered normal in Japan. Got any restaurants in central London or Sydney where the wait staff is all female without any clothing below the waist and it isn't a big deal to hold a business meeting there? A cast system that is not based on skin color but on the jobs performed by your distant ancestors. A conformity, in public, to norms that would make "western" societies think they were in a real world "Stepford Wives" movie. And many from the west who visit are impressed. And there's other things.

    Find me a society on the planet of a million people or more where, while they get some things "right", they don't get others totally "wrong". And most societies are majority populated by people who consider themselves a great society to be a part of.

    749:

    Moz # 737 I think you missed the point - the weeding process killed a huge number of other, innocent people, before it got to wiping out the Japanese weeds.... SEE ALSO David L @ 748 - & although he mentioned the "Caste" system in Nippon, & the sexism, he didn't mention the vast racism, which is only fractionally less bad than that of the Han.

    H but on the things and people that radicalize them and teach them to kill. Well, I'm going to nominate "Religion" for that one ....

    750:

    Yeah, that's in line with my assumption: in the absence of "magic wand" technologies, a starship is going to be functionally indistinguishable from a migratory, self-replication capable, large-scale space colony -- a multi-million person habitat with thousands of square kilometers of reticulated habitable surface, spinning to provide gravity, encapsulated within a shell of at least a metre-thick layer of something with the radioprotective properties of reinforced concrete, accelerating at no more than a thousandth of a gee, travelling at no more than single-digit percent of lightspeed.

    In such a ship, the presence of trees is simply part of the ship's biomass ballast reserve: in an emergency you chop them down and recycle them, they can be regrown from seeds in a few years and in the meantime you do without natural cocoa or coffee. They're not fully productive anyway, so much as a resource for maintaining continuity of traditional practice -- training a skilled chocolatier to "national treasure" quality takes decades longer than growing the trees: even coffee roasting isn't unskilled (if done properly), and when you're moving a few dozens of millions of people around for centuries, maintaining obscure skills is going to be important.

    751:

    On the subject of capital punishment, who "deserves" it, and how to best deter mass murderers, I'd like to first highlight the following quote of Moz:

    What I prefer is not creating terrorists in the first place. Which means not teaching hate, and not supplying weapons to social outcasts. The former is tricky because hate drives engagement, and engagement is what matters to capitalist media. Murdoch, Zuckerberg, all that lot feed, and feed off, hate. Likewise the US is the largest producer, and seller, of weapons in the world. The Christchurch terrorist had to leave Australia to get weapons that would allow him to kill that many people that were within his ability to use.

    And second I'd like to suggest that if somebody supports the death penalty and wants to prevent violent crimes and/or deter violent people from acting out, then a good first step would be to subject all people mentioned in that quote to capital punishment. For me this would also include every living member of every US-government ever (speaking for a blog whose commentariat skews highly towards people from the US; substitute your own government if/as you see necessary).

    It wouldn't immediately solve all our problems, but it would be a good start.

    I should point out that I am absolutely against capital punishment, with a reasoning similar to Charlie's. Therefore, the above is not a possibility for me. But if you're into it and are serious about determent and prevention, that's your way to go.

    Now, as to the question of how to rehabilitate murderers or even mass murderers, for a start you could look into how Rwanda is doing it. For a deeper understanding you could look into the whole concept of restaurative justice, which is a wholly different approach to the typical western understanding of "justice equals punishing perpetrators" or "justice equals removing perpetrators from society".

    752:

    Re: ' ... a multi-million person habitat with thousands of square kilometers of reticulated habitable surface, '

    Once the maximum inner volume of your spaceship is determined, you can throw in interior partitions as needed because flexibility as to where walls/floor can be placed is a must-have. Again - this is probably the opposite of how spaceshippy things are currently designed. Maybe someone can develop an online game on this just to get people used to thinking more strategically 'inside the box'.

    Trees - I'm not giving up on this because we haven't yet exhausted already available work-arounds like genetic engineering* and grafting. Grafting has been around for centuries and is in fact the preferred way of propagating apple and peach trees which don't 'breed true' from seed. (Also used for some flowering 'trees' like the 'Madame Lemoine' white lilac which I had in a previous garden.)

    I'm guessing that - for now - any food related genetic engineering is somewhere between proof of principle and taste. Since food security is already recognized as a major concern on this planet, plus the increases in the cost of food transportation, border closures due to wars/politics, pandemics and increasing other natural disasters, it seems prudent to start on Plan B alternatives such as greater emphasis on smaller, locally produced food stuffs - which also describe a spaceship scenario. Petro and Big Agra will probably put up the greatest fuss about this. (FYI - most of the GNP/GNE etc. charts I've seen do not show 'transport' and 'auto' combined for oil/gas - so when you see/hear gas/oil volumes reported, double it to get a more realistic picture.)

    • There's a newish berry - loganberry that was developed this way about 10-20 years ago - looks and tastes like a cross between blackberry and raspberry. Actually, probably many folks here have already tried some of the recently created fruit/veg mutants.

    https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/pressed-juicery-juice-try-next

    753:

    Yeah, that's in line with my assumption: in the absence of "magic wand" technologies, a starship is going to be functionally indistinguishable from a migratory, self-replication capable, large-scale space colony -- a multi-million person habitat with thousands of square kilometers of reticulated habitable surface, spinning to provide gravity, encapsulated within a shell of at least a metre-thick layer of something with the radioprotective properties of reinforced concrete, accelerating at no more than a thousandth of a gee, travelling at no more than single-digit percent of lightspeed.

    Speaking of magic-wand technologies, we're talking about building an enclosed ecosystem capable of supporting millions of people for generations, we're talking about spinning it up to provide gravity, without it starting to precess, wobble, or tumble as weight moves freely around inside it, and reaching a speed of 0.01C. Oh, and the surface is "reticulated" but it is also spun to simulate gravity, so presumably a fair number of people are living at odd angles.

    Dare I point out how many magic wands would be required to make this work? For starters, what's the biggest mass we've given a velocity of 0.01C to, how many people have we housed in a closed ecosystem and for how long (2 years, eight humans, in a structure covering 1.27 hectares is the one I know about).

    But all for trees? That's great. I can but hope that we'd put that much energy into protecting the tropical rain forests on our planet as part of our efforts to deal with climate change. But to each their own.

    754:

    Few things to consider: --One is the level of bigotry associated with the idea that the food we eat isn't genetically engineered, because the breeding involved wasn't done by white men with advanced degrees. If you look at something like corn, it's pretty amazing compared with its wild relatives, but that breeding was done by indigenous women, so possibly it doesn't count? Anyway, the US is full of roundup ready crops, all with genes hacked so that glyphosate doesn't kill them.

    --Loganberries were first created in Santa Cruz, California, in 1881. California in the late 19th and earlth 20th centuries was a hot bed of new Rubus cultivars, from Luther Burbank's creations to the boysenberry farm that turned into the Knott's Berry Farm amusement park.

    755:

    On the subject of spaceships and starships, I've got a thought experiment that you can do in real life:

    The gently spinning terrarium.

    Build a terrarium, any shape you want, but it's not complete until it's gently spinning. And it has to function as a terrarium while gently spinning. And the spin cannot be stopped for maintenance or fiddling, unless the spinning apparatus itself breaks down.

    While yes, it's probably easier to do this with one of those closed ecosystem aquariums they sell (shrimp and algae, normally), I really think people should use fishbowls, rectangular aquaria, old potter's wheels, whatever they have around. But the point is to get some sense of how interesting it gets when you spin up living beings.

    If that's too much work, if you have an office chair that spins, put a cat on it and spin them up. Some of them actually like this...

    756:

    "But all for trees? That's great. I can but hope that we'd put that much energy into protecting the tropical rain forests on our planet as part of our efforts to deal with climate change. But to each their own."

    I think you're (sorry) missing the starship for the trees. The question isn't "build a starship to carry a tree." That's just silly.

    The question is "build a viable starship." And when you start to think about what a viable starship will look like, doing your very best to avoid magic-tech, it's obvious that it will be able to carry, not just trees, not just gardens, but whole forests. We're talking about a minimal size that's miles long. "Trees in space" isn't the point of the thing. It's a side-effect. You're thinking "big rocket ship" or maybe "Federation starship." Charlie and I are thinking more along the lines of Varley's Gaia, (though much smaller, of course. Let's not get silly!)

    P.S. When are we going to see a Gaia movie?

    https://varley.net/film/a-short-overview-of-titan/

    757:

    If a movie of "Titan" were done right visually (the way this preview seems to be), it would be an absolutely awesome thing to see. I think Gaia is just at the edge of the scale human eye and brain can encompass; anything significantly bigger, like Ringworld or one of Iain Banks' Orbitals, becomes just a geometric abstraction.

    The plot however, would have to be changed quite a bit. As a story, "Titan" has not aged well.

    758:

    Troutwaxer @ 756: "P.S. When are we going to see a Gaia movie?"

    I think it will have to wait until a full movie or a mini-series of "Rendezvous with Rama" is done. "Rendezvous with Rama" seems more popular.

    Also, the cover of the British edition looks great:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama#/media/File:Rama_copy.jpg

    759:

    so presumably a fair number of people are living at odd angles.

    Yes: I'm thinking in terms of something 50-100km long (measured along its spin axis), 10-40km in diameter (so no dizzying Coriolis effect for locals to notice between decks 100-200 metres apart, population in the multi-millions. The effects of spin gravity on that scale are going to be no worse than living on the side of a rather gentle hill, especially if sight lines are broken up by partitions every couple of kilometres (much as sightlines inside wide-body airliners are broken up by partitions: google for what an empty freighter 747 or A350 looks like if you want to boggle at a long room for a while).

    It probably has multiple redundant ecosystems in separate pressure vessels (in case one encounters an unforeseen failure mode and they need to evacuate and reboot it from scratch), a mass reserve of water and hydrocarbons in the multiple gigaton range (each), and a flight plan decided by political wrangling centuries in advance.

    In other words, "ship" is the wrong metaphor: it's an island nation (or an asteroid colony) that's gone walkabout.

    As for closed ecosystems -- there was a report in New Scientist a few weeks ago on research in China: they've successfully simulated a closed-cycle ecosystem suitable for a human Moon or Mars mission with a duration in years, growing their own food and recycling their own air, water, and trace nutrients. Seems they're dealing with the product systematically as a necessary precursor to long duration human spaceflight.

    760:

    The centaur biology alone would make people twitch, and the whole "motivation through rape" thing is now (quite appropriately) considered to be very creepy, and we don't do human sex that way in fiction anymore.

    And that's without getting into all the ways "Wizard" and "Demon" probably won't read well to someone born after 1995 or so.

    761:

    "Motivation through rape"?

    I actually do not remember this part; what exactly are you referring to?

    But even discounting that (whatever it is), "Titan/Wizard/Demon" has a ton of things which would not go over well today. Manned spacecraft arrives at Saturn, and discovers a 1300 km satellite nobody had noticed until then? Everyone aboard that spacecraft sleeps with everyone else? Except for two twins who are in an incestuous lesbian relationship? Cocaine is not just legal, it is legal aboard a spacecraft? When Gaia agrees to be a healer for humanity in exchange for doing... something... refuses to say what... to arriving patients, all of world's governments just go along? Nobody tries to sneak in micro-robots to find out just what Gaia is up to? The list goes on and on.

    762:

    There was the one very creepy member of the crew who raped Gabby, and IIRC they castrated him. In retrospect (and mind you, I haven't opened the books in at least ten years) it's a very Josh Whedon kind of scene.

    763:

    I do remember Gene raping Cirocco (he did not rape Gabby, he just knocked her on the head so she would not interfere), but I don't think he was trying to "motivate" her toward anything.

    764:

    Not really silly at all. For example, in your "practical starship," you're assuming that we can put thousands of people into space and build a structure hundreds of kilometers long.

    Now notice, this is the life support capsule. If this is a starship, something like 90-99 percent of it needs to be fuel for the propulsion unit. That's entirely missing from your design.

    We've been here before, and we're now firmly back in the "canned monkeys don't ship well" space. We're back in the place where climate change is a simple problem that can be waved away, getting to orbit from the surface of the Earth is going to be no big deal, building a starship will be no harder than qualifying as a technical diver, and no one will be fazed by the notion of lofting a city's worth of stuff.

    And no, we won't do it 1,000 years from now. At the rate we're running through the non-renewable resources that we'd need to build even an orbital spaceship, we're probably looking at this century or never. And here I'm thinking of resources in terms of petroleum for plastics (for things like seals and insulation), rare earths for making computers, and silica for everything from solar panels to chips to glass.

    So yes, magic is involved in this design too. Sorry, you can't avoid it.

    765:

    You remember the story much better than I do. If I own the books anymore they're in storage... but I meant "rape as plot motivation" not "rapist committing rape to motivate the person he is raping."

    766:

    I didn't say "hundreds of miles long." I said, "...along the lines of Varley's Gaia, (though much smaller, of course. Let's not get silly!)"

    I'm getting very, very fucking tired of you misquoting me and/or misrepresenting my thinking. You've done it multiple times in the last couple days, and if you can't stop misquoting me or misrepresenting me, please stop replying to me.

    And you're quite right about Climate Change. Which is why my "1000 years from now" estimate specifically noted that I was leaving climate change out of the equation. To be very clear, I'm saying that it will take 1000 years of uninterrupted scientific progress to get us to the point where we can build a starship. (The exact phrase I used was "...even given no ugly interruptions like Climate Change, we're probably a thousand years away...")

    How can we even have a conversation that makes sense if your reading me that poorly?

    As to propulsion, I think a thousand years of scientific progress will accomplish something, so even assuming some kind of reaction drive we'll end up with 10-15 percent of the mass being propulsion rather than 90-99 percent.

    Sighs

    And yes, we've repeatedly established, over the last decade, that canned monkeys are hard to ship.

    767:

    I meant "rape as plot motivation"

    Ah. Now I see what you mean, and yes, that is yet another reason "Titan" as written would not fly well today.

    768:

    I'm thinking in terms of something 50-100km long (measured along its spin axis), 10-40km in diameter (so no dizzying Coriolis effect for locals to notice between decks 100-200 metres apart, population in the multi-millions.

    Any estimates as to total mass? I just did a hopefully conservative one and came up with a big number even for the 50 km x 10 km version. It would help to have scrith or status fields on foil for the structure, but it would still be heavy.

    And at 0.01c, every kilogram has kinetic energy of 1 kiloton TNT. That's going to need quite a propulsion system.

    769:

    First off, I do apologize, because I wasn't responding verbatim to your comments.

    That said, Varley's Gaea is a Stanford Torus 1300 km in diameter, without a propulsion system IIRC. So I don't think I'm entirely wrong on talking about a ship hundreds of miles long?

    And also, 1,000 years of steady scientific progress without climate change is not only wishful thinking, it's problematic. Most of what we need to learn about building civilization off-planet we have to learn by terraforming our civilization to continue to exist on this planet, where it came into being.

    This isn't hyperbole. For example, Earth right now has about as constant a climate as we could dream of. Our orbit is far more circular than any terrestrial planet we've discovered for example, far more circular even than Mars. As such, we'd have real trouble establishing terrestrial-style agriculture on any other planet (including Mars), because other planets' climates are likely too variable to plant the same crops every year. Since we're madly destablizing our climate now, we're going to have to learn to sustain a civilization on an much weirder planet, and that knowledge can travel. If we develop it through dealing with climate change.

    But the bigger problem isn't a millennium of scientific progress, it's having the resources to build a starship. And that's where we've got less than a century, I'm afraid.

    One reason I shifted from generation ships to warp ships is that there's an infinitesimal possibility that a FTL warp ship is possible, even only using positive masses to generate the warp field*. If warps are possible, and if it's possible to build a fast (100C+) starship on the ground, then it's just possible that we can go interstellar, hunting out terrestrial planets and colonizing their surfaces, rather than trying to build huge orbital habitats. But this means we're stuck with 21st Century life support, which means we can keep the starship habitable for maybe a year or two. And that limits the travel range more than the drive design. But it depends on a bunch of magic wands, just as giant ships do.

    *There seems to be an increasing number of warp drive models on arXiv. I think most of them are an esoteric form of speculative fiction that uses the language of higher math, but their conclusions certainly are available for repurposing in old-fashioned SF. And who knows? Like science fiction in the past, maybe they'll inspire real inventions someday soon.

    770:

    status

    S.b. stasis. Oops.

    772:

    Heteromeles @ 769: "But the bigger problem isn't a millennium of scientific progress, it's having the resources to build a starship. And that's where we've got less than a century, I'm afraid."

    Does this take into account resources available in the Moon?

    Mind you, I'm not saying that I know there are resources in the Moon. I'm just saying that I'm not sure yet that there are none. It's a big object and we've just begun to scratch its surface.

    773:

    "That said, Varley's Gaea is a Stanford Torus 1300 km in diameter, without a propulsion system IIRC. So I don't think I'm entirely wrong on talking about a ship hundreds of miles long?"

    Which is why I said "much smaller" and "let's not get silly."

    As to the climate change issues, I wouldn't be surprised if they took us right back to the dark ages, because we're not going to see serious government action until we lose Miami.* We'll get some green electricity and an increasing number of electric cars, but real action... ~Spits~ ...so call it 10,000 years.

    • If then. I'm imagining Republicans who've injected themselves with rabies just so they can be crazier than whoever's trying to primary them claiming that flooding Miami was a plot by BLM and antifa and refusing to vote for the bill!
    774:

    What I'm thinking of specifically are plastics, lithium, and rare earths.

    Now obviously I'm an environmentalist, so I'm well aware of the problems with plastics. I'll also say that, if I ever write a story set in a warped drive universe, that the guys making plastics on alien worlds won't be the protagonists.

    That said, I'm not sure how you make a big spaceship without plastics. And I'm not sure how you take plastic waste and turn it back into plastics (although I assume it's some version of cook the sludge, fractionally distill it, and start over again with the polymerization).

    Lithium for batteries...We're not doing a great job of recycling lithium, and right now it's "white gold," which tells you all the problems that are in store with mining operations. At some point soon, we're going to hit mining limits, and at some point later, we're going to hit recycling limits, and these will put an upper bound on how much electricity we can store with lithium products. Hopefully some less limited material (glass?) will take lithium's place, but given that even silica sand is in short supply, we're back to raiding the landfills again, and that's hard.

    Same story with rare earths. They're not terribly rare, but concentrated deposits are rare due to their chemistry, and we're not recycling them like we should.

    None of these are very available on the Moon, unfortunately.

    The bigger problem is that civilization is really, really good at generating entropy. What I mean is that we're really good at finding high quality ore deposits, oil deposits, and so forth--and trashing them. Oil is low entropy. The CO2 produced from burning it is high entropy. And turning petroleum distillates into dirty plastic in a landfill vastly increases its entropy. While you can decrease entropy through the expenditure of energy, we're also running out of cheap energy to do that with. Absent another source of cheap energy (fusion, most likely), we're going to increasingly be limited to reworking the trash we already have. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it does radically limit how much high quality material we can produce, which in turn puts limits on things like building starships.

    Unfortunately, if starships are possible, there's a plausible alternative: find earthlike worlds, settle there, drill for oil, mine, make more starships, and repeat as long as you can continuously find more worlds with a lot of untapped oil and minerals. My presumption is that if humans colonize extrasolar planets, that will be why they do it. And, provided the rate of finding untapped planets exceeds the rate of resource exhaustion on settled planets, it's a civilization that could sustain itself for a very long time indeed.

    This may sound weird, but if you look at things like energy return on energy invested (EROEI), the energy obtained from an oil well gusher (crude oil spouting out of the ground under artesian pressure) is higher than you get from a fusion reactor. And all oil is is dead organic matter decomposed by heat and pressure (through burial) and the resulting fluids trapped under an impervious structure like a salt dome. On a world with a long history of carbon-based life, there's likely to be oil so long as no one came along and cleaned it out before you.

    775:

    I've gotten small, silvery 'particles' at 11,000 ft altitude. At the top of one of Mammoth Mountain's ski runs, IIRC. Kind of-star like, but maybe a little needle-like too. Very pure silver colored.

    776:

    Thank you. You give me the first confirmation of my theory that it has something to do with lack of oxygen.

    777:

    There's a newish berry - loganberry that was developed this way about 10-20 years ago - looks and tastes like a cross between blackberry and raspberry. Actually, probably many folks here have already tried some of the recently created fruit/veg mutants

    I'm guessing you're in a region scarce in blackberries, or maybe that was just a typo; either way the loganberry is about a century older than that.

    If you're ever in Oregon you should try the marionberry, an intentional creation named after Marion County (coincidentally where I lived as a child), which is very good if you like blackberries. It's also easy to grow in the Willamette Valley, where blackberry bushes are a common roadside weed.

    Some readers may be interested in the family tree of the marionberry as it appears on the linked Wikipedia page; this shows the vigorous cross-breeding humans have been doing over the last century.

    778:

    Heteromeles @ 774

    Another problem with lithium batteries is that right now they don't give enough flat-out hours of output for a tractor used during 20 hour long harvest days. It would be the same for heavy earth moving equipment used for projects which run on several shifts during a 24 hour day.

    So, I hope that aluminium batteries eventually provide a better solution, for the sake of mules.

    By the way, I wasn't thinking of mining the Moon to build a huge starship but to build robot probes.

    779:

    We did without plastic before. (See Bakelite, among other things.) Much of what we build with plastic can also be built of wood. So if your spaceship needs "plastic" parts it's not impossible to throw the trunk of an oak tree (or a genetically-manipulated meter-wide cube of oak that was never part of a tree) into the CNC machine, have the computer calculate the best wood-saving cuts, and have the backing for the buttons on a control panel, a printer case, two chairs and a most of a hand-truck come out a couple hours later. Maybe some assembly required. The sawdust gets mined for useful chemicals (by nano-tech) and the remainder is fed into the hydroponic system or stirred back into the soil.

    You now very minor plastic needs are satisfied by hydrocarbons from a genetically-engineered olive tree, which also gives you lubricants.

    On the subject of getting the last bit of lithium (or anything else) out of the ground, I think that's where nano-tech and serious automation come in. I can get clay, sand, iron and various organic compounds out of the soil in my backyard with nothing more than a magnet, a couple buckets, and a strainer, and that's without farming specific useful plants, such as hardwoods, medical herbs/fungi, fruits/veggies, etc., or farming something that would give me leather or eggs...

    Add nanotech and a computer-program which can do a really good soil-analysis (including for metals) and I'm pretty much golden, because there's lots of stuff in my yard I can't see. And note that the nanos can be much larger than bacteria-sized, because all they really need to do is determine that "this grain of sand has a lot of copper," and make sure it gets mailed off to the right place. If this evolution takes a month or a year I don't really care, because I'll be living here for years.

    Or I throw a handful of nano-tech into my garbage pail and a couple days later the "trash man" picks up the ingots that have been created - pre-sorted for the smelters.

    And that's just my yard/house. Once we have good nano-tech then every mine that's played out becomes good again, at least for a while. Every sand dune yields something useful.

    The big challenge at that point is avoiding a gray-goo/paperclip manufacturing scenario because some schmuck got greedy. But if that's not enough stuff to bootstrap us into a sustainable recycling ecology I don't know what is.

    780:

    I have a Zoom meeting every couple of weeks. It's an outgrowth of a weekly brunch that got killed by Covid. I hardly ever speak because I can't get a word in edgewise trying to be polite and let the others finish speaking before I try to butt in. It's quite frustrating.

    I was involved in research for multi-person multimedia conferencing over internet protocols back in the 1990s. One of the things the social scientists observing interactions told us was that when there was a good shared smart paper sort of medium available, the video was quickly consigned to being a signaling channel for body language.

    781:

    Similar problems. It's fun to figure out insulation, lubricants, and seals that don't use complex carbon molecules somewhere. That's actually a really nasty problem our society will have to deal with if we want to wean ourselves off plastics. It's like lithium batteries in tractors. Stuff is doable without plastics, but then we've got to switch materials and systems. For example, we can use natural rubber in place of butadiene from cracking oil, but that has its own problems. Another example is the use of "virgin" plastics in things like molecular biology equipment (use once and discard) or hospital personal protective equipment for, oh, pandemics. Disposable plastics are actually pretty nice for sanitation, they're just a fracking nuisance from a resource and trash point of view. Being cynical, I suspect that if humans had the potential for limitless hydrocarbons and plastics creation, we'd most likely take it and try to run away from the problem rather than dealing with it.

    782:

    See Bakelite

    Which is still around after 110 years. A 10-year-old ceiling fan in our apartment blew up(*) last year and emitted the very characteristic smell of burnt Bakelite.

    (*) Well, it went Bang! when it shorted out.

    783:

    Um, nanotech? Yeah.

    Thing is, we live in a 4 billion year-old nanotech system. It's called the biosphere, and it's extremely energy efficient, runs on a liquid water system with solar power, and is extremely robust. Problem is, it's slow.

    If you can't imagine a handful of bacteria extracting an pure iron ingot from a scrap pile in a day or two, why do you think solar-powered nanotech is going to do any better? While I've contemplated the idea of engineered bacteria growing something like a sponge-steel tool inside a mold (hardened rind, foam interior, combining durability and light weight in a way that's hard to forge), I don't think it's a fast way to make or extract anything. And I don't think the fabled dry nanotech will be much better. The way it's been portrayed is more like fairy dust, unfortunately.

    That said, I agree that wood might be a good substitute for bulk plastic, although I know the general grumble is that wood's more variable than plastic in its material properties (genetic variation within a tree and species, not across species). What I'm thinking of with plastics specifically are seals, insulators, lubricants, and single use sanitation supplies, especially for space, which is kind of a nasty environment. While it's possible to make bullet-proof clothing from hemp, I don't know that hemp in any form can take the place of kevlar or aramid for anti-meteor defense on the outside of a spacesuit or spacecraft. It would be nice to be wrong on that, though.

    784:

    Another problem with lithium batteries is that right now they don't give enough flat-out hours of output for a tractor used during 20 hour long harvest days. It would be the same for heavy earth moving equipment used for projects which run on several shifts during a 24 hour day.

    Thinking about it, I'm unclear why battery tenders won't work. These are simply wheeled carts full of batteries that are towed behind or pushed in front of equipment, depending on where the work is being done. When the tender is discharged, you uncouple it and plug in another tender. I suspect there are some funky design constraints with a tractor pushing a tender and towing a harvester, but it might work. Or, for that matter, tow the battery tender behind the equipment behind the tractor, if it will fit.

    785:

    I agree that wood might be a good substitute for bulk plastic...

    Wood is exactly the kind of material that would be a pain to construct any way but by nanotechnology.

    It's good in compression and okay in tension. It's stiff but springy. It's easy to shape using hand tools. It's resistant to damage from many environmental hazards but is also easy to recycle. It's even cheap and nontoxic!

    That we have to wait a few decades for hardwood or a few years for bamboo seems like a very trivial thing, considering.

    786:

    Heteromeles @ 783: "And I don't think the fabled dry nanotech will be much better. The way it's been portrayed is more like fairy dust, unfortunately."

    To be fair nanotech has sometimes been portrayed as a semi-liquid that you pour (or in which you immerse something) instead of a fairy dust that you sprinkle. In those cases the nanites are so tiny that a mass of them behaves as a semi-liquid.

    The only science fiction I've ever read (or seen on TV or in a movie) that included nanites which seemed convincing was volume 5 of the adventures of Carmen McCallum: Deus Ex Machina.

    And it was convincing because this was a French "Bande Dessinée" (hardbound comic printed on good non-acid paper, like the adventures of Tintin in the Moon) which combined text with graphics and actually drew the attacking winged nanites, in addition to talking about them in the dialogues.

    787:

    I don't know that hemp in any form can take the place of kevlar or aramid for anti-meteor defense on the outside of a spacesuit or spacecraft.

    Don’t know about hemp, but oak has been used for ablative reentry shields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanhui_Shi_Weixing

    788:

    I'm unclear why battery tenders won't work. These are simply wheeled carts full of batteries that are towed behind or pushed in front of equipment, depending on where the work is being done.

    Tenders work really well on railroads. There are clues there about why they don't work as well elsewhere. Trains move along fixed routes along specially prepared surfaces.

    This is almost exactly the opposite of how a tractor, bulldozer, or backhoe behaves. Driving in a straight line happens but it's the exception - tractors and harvesters working large fields being the obvious example of long straight driving. Frequent stops, turns, and tight maneuvering will not be made easier with a trailer. (I still remember my father running out of patience trying to teach teenage me to back up with a boat trailer, and we had plenty of time and space.) All of these will be moving over uneven and unpredictable ground, which makes designing a trailer connection interesting for the engineer.

    I won't say it can't be done for some equipment, particularly large-field hardware that's already set up for heavy towing, but the battery tender seems like a niche application rather than a widely adopted solution. There's too much advantage in having a vehicle be a single unit.

    But then, I also don't think it's practical to have robot drones hovering in mid-air holding up a long extension cord - which would be silly but amusing to imagine.

    789:

    Scott Sanford @ 788: "I also don't think it's practical to have robot drones hovering in mid-air holding up a long extension cord - which would be silly but amusing to imagine."

    Actually, John Deere has an electric robot tractor powered by an extension cord. The robot manipulates the cord as needed, lifting it or lowering it or changing its position as needed.

    https://www.producer.com/crops/deeres-new-electric-tractor-tosses-the-battery/

    By the way, don't use the word "tender" for describing a trailer when you're talking about electrical equipment. A tender (or electric tender) is a device used to maintain a battery's charge without overcharging.

    790:

    Scott Sanford @ 740:

    It will be supremely ironic if a city like Atlanta buries itself over coming years to deal with August heat waves.

    Futurama had Atlanta under the sea, aided by fortuitous mutations caused by leaks from the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

    Remember earlier this century, back when Futurama was sillier and less plausible than real life? Good times.

    Atlanta is currently 225 to 320 m above mean sea level. Do you think sea levels will actually rise far enough to submerge it?

    791:

    especially if sight lines are broken up by partitions every couple of kilometres

    IIRC, one of the things Dutch landscape designers did when planning new landscapes (ie. polders) was ensure that there was something to keep sightlines down so you didn't feel like you were living on a dinner plate, which apparently bothered people. Apparently this is something that bothered people moving to the Prairies as well — one of my father's colleagues had to move back East because he couldn't handle being surrounded by horizon.

    Growing up in Saskatchewan I had the opposite problem when I moved East — took me years to get used to the shorter sightlines and smaller skies of Ontario.

    792:

    Rbt Prior Should try the Fenlands in S Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire & parts of Norfolk, then! Typical view

    793:

    Looks like the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, before the suburbs grew around it.

    794:

    Adam Warren drew some (authorised) Dirty Pair comics about 20 years ago and he used nanites a lot in his storylines. In one of them, the Bad Guy was loaded up with healing nanites and couldn't be killed by the Pair. The solution they came up with to deal with him was somewhat realistic, they just kept on damaging him, forcing the repair nanites to work overtime and the waste heat from the healing processes cooked the Bad Guy until he glowed a dull red.

    795:

    Wood. Can't think of other things....

    Well, I can. Ceramics. (Note that my second full-time job was in a ceramics/chem lab.) There's a lot that can be done with ceramics, and we're just starting to do some of it. If, during 'Nam, they could use (or were looking at using) ceramic armor for choppers, we can use modern ceramics for spacesuits.

    796:

    MSB @ 751: On the subject of capital punishment, who "deserves" it, and how to best deter mass murderers, [...]

    Nothing but bullshit anti-Americanism.

    The problem is not who "deserves" capital punishment. The problem is implementing capital punishment in such a way that ONLY those who deserve it are executed.

    But that's impossible to do. And that's the reason I do not support capital punishment.

    Not executing those criminals who do deserve it is NOT justice, it's merely SLIGHTLY LESS UNJUST than executing someone who doesn't deserve it. We can never achieve justice. All we can do is minimize injustice to the best of our imperfect ability.

    Given that, I see a need to deter people from committing the kinds of crimes that deserve capital punishment - not for the benefit of the criminals, but for the benefit of their potential victims.

    And just bashing the U.S. provides no useful ideas for how to do that.

    797:

    Nojay @ 794: "Adam Warren drew some (authorised) Dirty Pair comics about 20 years ago and he used nanites a lot in his storylines."

    Isn't that the Dirty Pair's "Sim Hell" adventure, where they beat up Bad Guy Kevin Sleet?

    The only thing wrong with their nanites (I've read many of their adventures) is that we don't know where the power comes from.

    In contrast, in another one of Carmen McCallum's adventures, her secret agent ex-boyfriend returns to his old face by exercizing violently on a treadmill, in order to provide heat and energy to the plastic surgery nanites that remove his current face and change him back to his original face.

    798:

    p>Niala @ 772: Heteromeles @ 769:

    "But the bigger problem isn't a millennium of scientific progress, it's having the resources to build a starship. And that's where we've got less than a century, I'm afraid."

    Does this take into account resources available in the Moon?

    Mind you, I'm not saying that I know there are resources in the Moon. I'm just saying that I'm not sure yet that there are none. It's a big object and we've just begun to scratch its surface.

    Why just the moon? If we ever get to the point we can do that kind of construction in space, wouldn't we have the resources of the entire solar system?

    799:

    Actually, John Deere has an electric robot tractor powered by an extension cord. The robot manipulates the cord as needed, lifting it or lowering it or changing its position as needed.

    https://www.producer.com/crops/deeres-new-electric-tractor-tosses-the-battery/

    Nifty! I didn't think a boom would be practical but I'm happy to be shown wrong. The article doesn't say if there's a second robot arm at the stationary end but that would probably be convenient.

    I hope the giant robot on an extension cord can wait a while.

    800:

    Atlanta is currently 225 to 320 m above mean sea level. Do you think sea levels will actually rise far enough to submerge it?

    In the relevant Futurama episode there is an informational documentary explaining how the city of Atlanta was picked up by helicopter and moved farther out to sea, so as to make room for a larger Delta Airlines hub.

    I find this implausible. But then, have you seen what the Q-Anon people say they believe?

    801:

    Adam Warren drew some (authorised) Dirty Pair comics about 20 years ago and he used nanites a lot in his storylines.

    He had fun bring in a lot of transhumanist and SF ideas that didn't get into the original Dirty Pair light novels or anime.

    I haven't seen him since a few chance encounters at early '90s anime cons but have been following his current Empowered story, which is both more fun and thought provoking than is typical in superhero comics.

    802:

    Got any restaurants in central London or Sydney where the wait staff is all female without any clothing

    Can you remember way back in history when the USA was a primitive, deeply sexist society that had a chain of resturants called, of all things, "hooters" referring to breasts. Which bits are naked is more about the detail of the society, not whether they're sexist. Whether explicit sex work is legal or not is almost unrelated, there are countries at both ends of that spectrum that legalise sex work.

    I strongly suspect that such restaurants exist in Sydney, and businessmen have meetings/meals there. They are willing to pay, the workers are willing to work. ~2000 when I worked in Wellington, Aotearoa, my then boss took us to a strip club after the work christmas dinner. I bailed during to walk to the strip club because I didn't trust my coworkers to be good customers.

    803:

    Atlanta is currently 225 to 320 m above mean sea level. Do you think sea levels will actually rise far enough to submerge it?

    It's been a while since I looked at that but IIRC if all the ice melted and the water warmed up and expanded, sea level would raise by about 80 meters. Say 100 m to be cautious.

    Lessee...

    Yeah, something like that:

    https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-glaciers-melted

    804:

    JBS @ 798: "Why just the moon? If we ever get to the point we can do that kind of construction in space, wouldn't we have the resources of the entire solar system?"

    I think that, for starters, it would be a good idea to know for sure what resources we have on the moon and (if we're lucky) use them to build observatories on lunar farside and elaborate robot probes to the rest of the solar system, to see what stuff we can get there and (if we're lucky again) to build even more elaborate robot probes to get outside the system.

    That's what we (the richest nation-states) have been doing for the last 50 years: Gradually sending more and more elaborate robot probes to the moon and the planets.

    Building the probes on Earth's moon itself (and later from the moons of other planets) would be a big step forward because of the lesser gravity there.

    And after the probes report back, we can go there in person, like we did for Earth's moon.

    If we're lucky, of course. There might be no exploitable resources at all out there.

    805:

    I think you missed the point - the weeding process killed a huge number of other, innocent people, before it got to wiping out the Japanese weeds....

    Greg, I think you know much more about the de-nazification of Britain than of Japan, and you'll come across as less like your racist authoritarian countrymen who murdered their way around the world if you speak to that. One alternative to the Japanese approach is the UK one - just pretend they don't exist and spend the next century wondering why there are so many unexplained deaths of non-white people in your country.

    Right now, haha, The funny guy with the messy hair is, hoho, explicitly starving the poor. Isn't it a laugh? But you wouldn't want to actually oppose him, because he has a genuine democratic majority of your fellow citizens on side. A substantial majority in the ruling country, and a slim one in NI, which outweigh the distinct non-majorities in Wales and Scotland. I'm not saying that's a nod and a wink to eugenics, I don't think they've been that explicit even to themselves. It's just a natural consequence of a political philosophy built on explicitly eugenic foundations.

    Right now you're going through a "let the poor die" approach to the global pandemic. And that approach has huge popular support, most obviously through the mass civil disobedience you're seeing in response to the desultory efforts by your government to discourage the spread. The obvious fact that's it's not just the unfit being killed is being met with a mix of denial and "well obviously they're unfit or they wouldn't have died, duh".

    Meanwhile in Australia... the same arguments, but with less popular support. And whatever you think of BoJo, it's obviously far nicer than what's being said about our leadershit. Who may nonetheless win the next federal election, because house prices uber alles.

    806:

    Hooters still exists. Waitresess are young, well-endowed women. Shorts, and t-shirts are the uniform.

    Not somewhere I patronize.

    807:

    Actually, John Deere has an electric robot tractor powered by an extension cord. The robot manipulates the cord as needed, lifting it or lowering it or changing its position as needed.

    That is extremely cool and is, I confess, an application for robotics that would never have crossed my mind. All sorts of other applications, from robotic lawn mowers and sewer cleaners to lunar and martian lava-tube explorers seem obvious.

    808:

    Well, there's this cool thing about micrometeorites. They're much, much faster than a speeding bullet.

    Anyway, you're right. There's a controversial (read, less effective) military body armor called dragon skin, that's disks of silicon carbide interlaced with layers of kevlar. One of the vets will chime in, but without looking I'm pretty sure modern body armor has ceramic pieces in a matrix of kevlar. The point is to keep the bullet from penetrating and to spread out the force as much as possible.

    Problem is, that doesn't work as well on micrometeorites, which can be traveling an order of magnitude faster. Fortunately, stuff like Whipple shields does. A Whipple shield is basically a stack of thin aluminum plates with spaces between that probably wouldn't stop a bullet. The outer layer vaporizes the object, and then the next nine layers stop the plasma. The soft version of that is about five layers of kevlar with fluff between to keep the separation. It's the separation that's critical, along with a layer that's hard enough that the object turns into plasma on impact. Then the rest of the armor stops the plasma if possible.

    The irony is that armor that works against bullets may be counterproductive against space debris, and quite possibly vice versa. If this is true, it gives space armor a whole new meaning...

    809:

    Japan actually went through a lot of internal terrorism from the 1920s to 1945, and IIRC, the Japanese Red Army and Aum Shinrikyo are more modern groups.

    The extremely worthwhile thing about Japanese history and their slide into fascism in the 1920s is the role played by assassins and terrorists. It was a case of people killing politicians they didn't like. What happened over time was that the middle ranks of the political parties threatened and occasionally killed their leaders if the leader didn't toe the ideological line. This apparently forced a number of politicians into extremist roles where they would have otherwise compromised. That period ended in August, 1945, when a bunch of Imperial army colonels attempted to overthrow Hirohito after he surrendered. That coup attempt was expected and rapidly quashed.

    The US would be following the Japanese line if Republican lone wolves were gunning for insufficiently radical republicans. But that's not going on here. What we have instead is good ol' American bigotry, racism, and sexism, something that's been bile aged in the posterior digestive tracts of constipated and angry white men for 400 years, ejected occasionally, and then lovingly swallowed and digested for safekeeping like some sort of perverted heirloom from a past that many lie about and try to forget. Hate, unfortunately, is a widespread American value, and that's one thing we've got to keep dealing with.

    810:

    Hooters still exists. Waitresess are young, well-endowed women. Shorts, and t-shirts are the uniform. Not somewhere I patronize.

    For many years the last highway exit northbound out of Portland, Oregon featured a landmark clock and sign reading Eat NOW at Waddle's. For better or worse, this was saved when Waddle's finally closed and now suggests the same for Hooters. (See for yourself here.) OryCon is held only a few hundred meters away and I got food at the Denny's on the other side of the highway just last week; I've spent a lot of time on that island. I've never been inside.

    811:

    Re: underground cities: I remember reading more about those decades ago. Whatever happened to that idea? Too expensive? Too many cities built on hard rock? Too claustrophobic? Likewise: undersea colonies- part of a very "jetpacky, monoraily, 20 hour work-weeky" future. Why did that idea go away?

    Re: no plastics due to end of petroleum: Over on ToughSF a few years ago (http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/08/how-to-live-on-other-planets-saturn.html),someone was talking about Titan being a source of hydrocarbons for plastics, etc.. Closer to home, ISTM that one solid, non-maffaguffinite reason to go into space is to deal with the ~4.7k currently known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). Since many of them are likely to be C-type carbonaceous chondrites, I'd expect these would be a good source of hydrocarbons, especially for space-based applications...

    812:

    Yes, Japan actually makes a good case study of the effects of assassination. To wit, while it succeeded in its immediate goals (dead people!) and somewhat moved the Overton window, it mostly led to a government made up of less-than-competant survivors*. Something something Hitler wasn't that incompetent by comparison {urk!).

    For all that it might be appealing to some of us, on a "kill the few to save the many" basis, the problem is the dearth of green extremists (literal ecofascists) compared to their similarly inclined peers on the right and brown sides of the political spectrum. It doesn't take much wit to see that if far right figures started getting killed the existing pool of far right terrorists would respond with even more violence than we see now.

    • the US reich isn't actually killing their politicians, but they are using democratic techniques to do the same thing - explicitly in the case of the Tea Party, but also in less coherent ways with the 'support Trump or get rolled' stuff.

    Which is also happening in many other places, partly because of the neo-liberal/thatcherite suppression of civil society, which includes mass political parties (possibly as a side effect, but also often intentionally). What they have left is a very politically involved core, leading to Corbyn on the one hand but also the various right-wing clusterfucks in the UK, US, Australia etc. To the extent that countries have multiparty systems that seems to have been less effective, but then they get the Israel effect where the fascist parties end up as part of the governing coalition when the right wins. Which is not necessarily better, it can lead to a degree of "plausible deniability" when the government does evil stuff (Aotearoa had a dose of that with the Winston First Coalition before Saint Jacinda got an outright majority and ... continued as before).

    813:

    For underwater cities, James Nestor's Deep has some answers (the tl;dr is that 100% humidity isn't fun for long duration stays, although I'm sure Gasdive can wax rhapsodic about living out of a pressure chamber for a week or two, three on the outside...)

    Graff's Raven Rock, especially chapter 2 (just checked), gives some of the history of 1950s ideas to underground cities. The tl;dr is that a bunch of government stuff was put underground in the US to protect it during a nuclear war, but it was determined that these weren't quite deep enough to be safe against nukes.

    As for slowing a carbonaceous chondrite down so that it can be broken up for parts? Sounds like a neat trick. But why not try the technology out on a local landfill, for practice. There are similarities, and you don't have to go into space to deal with a big old pile of toxic hydrocarbons to refine.

    814:

    I would love to, but I did surface oriented diving (decompress at the end of each dive). I've only been in a chamber for an hour or so at a time.

    But I worked with a lot of saturation divers and the lasting impression was that it's great pay and terrible in every other way.

    The other issue is that cities develop spontaneously around ports, rail heads, network hubs. That's because people can move there and make money. An underwater city can't be any of those things.

    815:

    I think you're half-right about nano-tech. "Nature" is nano-tech that does whatever it wants. "Nano-tech" is nature that does what we tell it to. We may, at some point, invent something like "milli-tech" or "micro-tech" that works on problems sized for insects, such as grabbing a particular piece of sand/gravel and putting it a box of copper-bearing ores.

    As far as spacesuit/spacecraft armor is concerned, maybe you can translate from this to "micrometeorite," (The force being measured in the listings of hardwood is the amount of Newtons necessary to embed an 11.28 mm steel ball halfway into the wood - hardest wood requiring 20,000 newtons.)

    https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/top-ten-hardest-woods/

    816:

    "...how the city of Atlanta was picked up by helicopter and moved farther out to sea, so as to make room for a larger Delta Airlines hub."

    That might have been satire.

    817:

    How can you say that about the historical documents?

    818:

    Moz First paragraph - FUCK RIGHT OFF, OK? BoZo is not funny at all, as I think you realise I already know

    See also H @ 809

    812 - works both ways ... The centre & "left" (such as it is) in the US are trying to off-stage Marj T Green ... [ Though I happen to think she should be left up as an awful warning & splitting off actual reasonable ex-Republicans .. - maybe ]

    819:

    Atlanta is currently 225 to 320 m above mean sea level. Do you think sea levels will actually rise far enough to submerge it?

    Thats not right, in the words of the song...

    "I've seen the plywood cities meet their doom because of dames Atlantis down in bubbles and Atlanta up in flames" https://www.peteatkin.com/c9.htm

    820:

    Lithium for batteries...We're not doing a great job of recycling lithium, and right now it's "white gold,"

    I think we can agree that Elon Musk is deeply interested in lithium sources (hint: Tesla is one of the world's largest LiIon battery consumers).

    He's noted on the record that dead batteries contain at least 20 times as much lithium metal as the best available ore, and recycling them efficiently is a matter of considerable interest to him.

    The other problem with the "white gold" narrative is that it's an argument from current scarcity. In absolute terms lithium is one of the commonest elements out there after hydrogen and stupidity helium. But before the recent (past 20 years -- really, past 10 years) surge in demand for high performance batteries for automobiles global demand wasn't high so prospecting and developing lithium mines wasn't a high priority. Going from a relative handful of batteries for millions of film cameras to a double-fistful for a billion mobile phones ramped demand from the early 1990s onwards, but a single automobile requires more lithium than a thousand phones, and now we're looking at a switch to EVs that will demand tens of millions of car-sized batteries per year and the old supply chain can't cope. Nor was recycling lithium from small and fiddly consumer devices particularly easy. Car batteries however contain large numbers of cells in very uniform containers that are much more amenable to automated dismantling and recycling.

    So I expect (a) recycling to focus on car batteries when they finally start to die -- they last longer than anyone expected and have an afterlife on grid battery farms -- and (b) new mines to start opening up.

    Rare earths: there used to be two main sources, a US mine and refinery and a Chinese one. Then the Chinese started exporting and the US refinery owners shut down. Then the Chinese government woke up and realized they were a strategic choke chain and started throttling exports. Now the US infrastructure is being rebuilt. One wonders when other major powers are going to try and get into the strategic rare element business: again, they're not particularly rare, it's just that they're inconveniently mixed and hard to separate.

    821:

    Back in the 80s I visited Flag Fen and joined a tour of the site by one of the archaeologists. He said something like "and on that rise over there" and noticed I was the only person that was looking at the rise rather than peering around. It was perfectly obvious, being a foot higher than the rest of the land :-)

    822:

    Thing is, we live in a 4 billion year-old nanotech system. It's called the biosphere, and it's extremely energy efficient, runs on a liquid water system with solar power, and is extremely robust. Problem is, it's slow.

    It's slow because it relies on peptide chemistry, with complex enzymes held in an approximation of a useful conformation by hydrogen bonds which are easily broken by heating.

    The rule of thumb for enzyme kinetics is (or was) that reaction rates double for every 10 degree celsius temperature rise -- but that enzymes denature irreversibly somewhere between 40 and 70 celsius. If we could find a way to push the critical temperature up to 90 celsius we'd potentially get 3-5 orders of magnitude speed improvement out of many of our critical biologically mediated chemosynthetic pathways, which would be ... well, not Drexler magic diamond-phase nanotech, but massively better than anything we've got today.

    One of the big growth fields of the 21st century, I think, will be high-temperature synthetic biology -- using non-naturally-occurring amino acids and substitutes thereof. We now have enough computing power to take a stab at the protein folding problem (it's one of the things big data/deep learning is good for) and optimizing the hell out of "what can this enzyme do in the way of improved thermostability and throughput if we expand its amino-acid repertoire by an order of magnitude" is a very valuable question to get answers for.

    823:

    This is almost exactly the opposite of how a tractor, bulldozer, or backhoe behaves.

    If you're using a battery tender for a tractor or combine harvester, then you've got an upper limit on how fast it has to go. Which means you can put a cheap low-power motor plus differential and steering on each axle and, by way of some control electronics, have it keep up with the prime mover even when it's backing up or turning. Means the tenders cost more, but they're flexible.

    Or you could go with an underslung battery pack on castors which can be rolled under the tractor and winched/screw-jacked up to it, then dropped when exhausted and swapped out for a new one.

    Note also that a battery tractor isn't hauling around a heavy diesel power pack and fuel tank. I suspect the shape of an all-electric agricultural vehicle may diverge sharply from a current hydrocarbon-burning one, much as diesel vehicles diverged over time from the steam traction engine (and the stationary engines used in agriculture prior to that).

    824:

    Charlie Stross @ 820 "One wonders when other major powers are going to try and get into the strategic rare element business."

    You don't have to be a major power to get into the strategic rare element business.

    Canada has some of the largest rare earth reserves in the world and the province of Saskatchewan is currently investing 32 million CDN in building a rare earth processing plant that will be ready next year.

    https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-mining/minerals-metals-facts/rare-earth-elements-facts/20522

    https://www.mining.com/canada-to-have-rare-earth-processing-plant-in-2022/

    825:

    Charlie Stross @ 823: "I suspect the shape of an all-electric agricultural vehicle may diverge sharply from a current hydrocarbon-burning one..."

    John Deere has a protoype robot electric tractor showing the possible shape of a future electric tractor:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMaQq_vRaa8

    826:

    One wonders when other major powers are going to try and get into the strategic rare element business

    One thing recent events should have taught all countries is the vulnerability of international supply chains to political actors, and the inability of treaties and contracts to regulate such interference.

    827:

    While I agree that the death penalty is obscene, and has no place in a civilised society, whether it is more cruel than locking people up for life in a small cell is moot; in an extreme case, what was done to Ian Brady was nothing short of torture. That is, however, irrelevant to what should be done.

    The point about 'deterrence' is that it does not work - as shown by the British Bloody Code. I used to have some (academic) friends who were experts in this area, who could describe why and what would work, but it was made clear that publishing would result in serious retribution from the government against their institutions. This has not changed, and I am pretty sure it is the same in the USA (though the retaliation would come from what isn't the government, we promise, but does control the USA).

    In reality, both the USA and UK penal codes are more retaliatory than anything else. They are also vindictively discriminatory against many subgroups of people, most especially some with psychological disturbances, including those caused by genetic and developmental abnormalities or by being abused as a child. Worse from society's point of view, they have the effects of preserving a high crime rate, especially violent crime, and there is some evidence this is not entirely accidental (yes, even in the UK).

    There is no evidence that the vast majority of the 'progressives' in either country want to change this - they merely want to change the subgroups that are targetted.

    828:

    Damn. HTML error. Sorry. I meant to close the bold after "does not work".

    [[ fixed - mod ]]

    829:

    If we could find a way to push the critical temperature up to 90 celsius we'd potentially get 3-5 orders of magnitude speed improvement out of many of our critical biologically mediated chemosynthetic pathways, which would be ... well, not Drexler magic diamond-phase nanotech, but massively better than anything we've got today.

    Look at black smoker ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean. Some black smoker microorganisms thrive at 115 C.

    830:

    One of the big growth fields of the 21st century, I think, will be high-temperature synthetic biology -- using non-naturally-occurring amino acids and substitutes thereof. We now have enough computing power to take a stab at the protein folding problem (it's one of the things big data/deep learning is good for) and optimizing the hell out of "what can this enzyme do in the way of improved thermostability and throughput if we expand its amino-acid repertoire by an order of magnitude" is a very valuable question to get answers for.

    I really hate to point this out, but back in the late 1960s, biologists started pulling bacteria out of hot springs, including one Thermus aquaticus. By 1976, they'd found an enzyme, a DNA polymerase, that's now known as Taq polymerase. It's the basis for the PCR systems used routinely today, and the guy who created PCR, Kerry Mullis, got a Nobel in 1993.

    Every molecular biologist who dreams of royalties from industrial patents goes out looking for thermostable, high temperature enzymes, for precisely the reason you state. They've been doing it for decades. It's a mature field, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't paid for at least one of Alvin's refits.

    Problem is, things are still slow at room temperature. So if you want to pour a magic nanite potion on a pile of garbage and have it sprout crystals of metal ore or what have you, and you do it at room temperature, it's going to take years. The problem isn't the enzymes, it's the temperature, and getting the energy to heat things up so they go fast. If civilization has to depend on less energy, we'll need to depend on slower processes.

    There are certainly other things you can do. Hot composting is a great way to break down a number of organic wastes and turn them into feedstocks for plants (e.g. compost). Or you can warm up horse manure, sprinkle it with magic fairy dust mushroom spawn, and get a crop of mushrooms in a few weeks. But not seconds. Or you can do what I do every week, and warm up a batch of milk to 108oF, inoculate it with bacteria, and get yogurt in six hours or so. But notice, these are all ancient technologies, and even with heat, they're slow. Hell, PCR takes hours.

    The problem with nanites as a concept is that they're treated like magic. They hit a pile of pure silica sand, digest it in milliseconds, make billions of copies of themselves, and fly on to ingest a hunk of pure iron, make trillions of copies of themselves from that in a flash, and so forth. In deep space, at maybe a temperature of 100 K. If you know any chemistry, you're already asking how anything that's made of only silicon and oxygen can replicate, especially at a temperature colder than liquid nitrogen. And it's worse if those little silica nanites can suddenly replicate themselves using nothing but iron atoms. Do you see how ridiculous this is?

    I already went into how life does it up above when talking about trees, and there are maybe 20-25 elements involved, processes are shut down by the absence of even one of those elements, and processes are optimized when the elements are present in the proper ratios. That's not sprinkle magic nanites and be done, that's endless fiddling and waiting until atoms become available. And that's slow. But it's pretty resilient when it works.

    831:

    Looks like Amazon is deliberately ignoring reporting requirements.

    More than 600 Amazon workers at one warehouse alone have contracted COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. But the online retail giant has registered fewer than five cases at the provincial workers’ compensation board, the Star has learned.

    But despite hundreds of workers testing positive, the company has registered almost no claims at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board as of this past week.

    Ontario employers are required to report COVID cases to the WSIB, which then decides if they are work-related. If the workplace contributed “significantly” to a worker contracting the virus, they would be eligible for financial support or health-care benefits.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/03/21/more-than-600-amazon-workers-in-brampton-got-covid-19-why-were-so-few-reported-to-the-province.html

    I wonder how profitable many of our large corporations would be if they actually followed laws and regulations, instead of ignoring them.

    832:

    One thing recent events should have taught all countries is the vulnerability of international supply chains to political actors, and the inability of treaties and contracts to regulate such interference.

    I will point out that this is a two-edged sword. Yes, I had a lot of fun pointing out the vulnerabilities of global supply chains in Hot Earth Dreams in 2015, and yes, we know something about messy the end of the Mediterranean bronze age was, when the supply chains for copper and tin collapsed. And yes, long supply chains in an increasingly unstable climate are dangerous too.

    That said, isolationist nationalism has its own problems. I've wondered for decades whether one reason the US and China tied their economies together so thoroughly was to prevent World War 3, and the EU was certainly an attempt to prevent WW3 by other means. One of the "nice" things about a global system is that most weapons of mass destruction end up destroying the aggressor as well as the victim, which is a strong disincentive for their deployment.

    Probably the answer is a resilient global system, one that can fall apart during disasters (such as storms, pandemics, wars) without killing too many people, and be rebuilt efficiently thereafter with little or no loss of function. To oversimplify, it's worth trading with China, but when the next coronavirus pops up, we want to be able to cut ties for a few months without people going hungry on either side.

    833:

    Just to be frivolous, starships needing magic isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. Figure out what magic is needed, and use it for worldbuilding.

    Not frivolous at all-- I don't believe poverty has much to do with terrorism. We should all be as poor as Osama bin Laden was for much of his life.

    I think political terrorists need time and energy to build up that level of rage over abstract issues. Admittedly, poverty can make it possible to recruit terrorists (blow yourself up and we'll take care of your family), but that's not most of what's going on.

    It's possible that ending child abuse would cut way back on terrorism, but that's even harder than ending poverty.

    834:

    "There is no evidence that the vast majority of the 'progressives' in either country want to change this - they merely want to change the subgroups that are targetted."

    Never fear. The insanity of the U.S. prison system is well-known to U.S. progressives. Unfortunately, it seems to be one of those intractable problems.* But I would love to see a much-greater emphasis on rehabilitation, fewer people put in prison, drug rehab rather than drug sentences, at least for end-users, and decriminalization of prostitution and (at least) marijuana.

    • I think the very biggest problems are racism and a legal system which doesn't give an attorney experience working as both a District Attorney (Crown Prosecutor) and a defense attorney before they are admitted as a criminal judge. Also all the other problems. Then the other-other problems.
    835:

    That's not what I said, not what I meant, and is precisely the problem. Those 'solutions' are merely putting lipstick on the pig.

    This is a social problem not a criminological one and, until that is accepted, the problem will remain.

    836:

    I think the very biggest problems

    At a practical level there are just too many things you can do that can be brought up as separate charges. Even though it is a single act.

    Which leads to the plea bargaining system. Which leads to all kinds of people tossed into jail/prison for small things which should be a slap on the wrist but cascade into a wreaked life.

    You can say racism is the root cause. And I will not disagree that it is a big or maybe the biggest factor. But just simplifying the list of things anyone person can be charged with will do a lot of stop the road to prison/jail. In the US.

    Eliminating racism is a multi-generational path. Re-writing the criminal code is not. But the re-election dynamics for those who try and not good at this time and for the last few decades.

    837:

    Just to be frivolous, starships needing magic isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. Figure out what magic is needed, and use it for worldbuilding.

    Nothing frivolous about this at all. It's the standard use.

    I'd point out one thing that often gets missed is another magical trope: "As above, so below." What this means is that the technology that enables starships really needs to appear on planetary surfaces. A classic example is Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, where the ships are magical but oddly enough, Earth 200 years from now largely looks like it does now.

    This is a basic point I keep hammering: technology spreads, is adopted, and is adapted. If you want to make generation ships possible, you need to make large-scale, long-duration closed ecosystems possible on Earth too. If you want ships to move at some fraction of C, you need to have starship engines (fusion torches, for example) that can burn for months or years. What does this tech do on Earth? Simultaneously, starship armor can basically shrug off the equivalent of a MOAB warhead or a small nuke. Imagine skyscrapers armored this way, or people building arcologies in the face of climate change.

    Similarly, if warpships are possible, then reactionless thrusters are possible, through smaller, analogous fields. What's powering them and what can you do with them in an atmosphere? Worse (or better), what does the reality of FTL do to culture and philosophy? So far as I can tell, it strongly implies that free will is an illusion and that on some level(s) we live in Einstein's brickverse. What does that do to arguments for democracy and equality? Every two-bit corner preacher and wannabe guru is going to pick that up and run with it. What then?

    Another part of this is how you build the technology on a planet. Or off a planet. Going from raw materials to starship is hard. Anyone colonizing a planet who wants to build more starships needs to make that a primary goal of the colony, and build the structures and infrastructures of the colony around that purpose. This means prospecting, building infrastructures to extract and refine materials, building infrastructure to move those materials to the shipyard, and constructing the shipyard. If that shipyard is in orbit, that means building a lot of launch facilities. And above all, it means providing food, shelter, clothing, medicine, supplies, education, entertainment and meaning for all the people involved in this effort. Most SFF colonies are replications of the American colonial experience, and what I'm describing above won't look like that very much at all.

    And is building starships on other worlds manifest destiny, serial ecocide, both, or neither?

    838:

    When the two economies are close in scale, like America/China, that approach might work.

    When wildly different, like Canada/America, it's a recipe for disaster waiting to happen. Agreements and treaties don't matter, because the larger party can just change the terms and say 'so what, watcha gonna do?' and the answer is 'not much'.

    Thinking of things like aluminum and PPE recently, going back to water and lumber when I was a wee lad.

    And vaccines — I'm still pissed at the Tories for selling off Connaught Labs a generation ago.

    839:

    I don't think I've seen any sf with starships that require magic to run, though there are a few (notably Melissa Scott's Five Twelfths of Heaven with a magical drive.

    Minor point: I loathed the bad world-building in Old Man's War and I've been told it gets better in later books. Does it?

    I don't know if I wouldn't have been as disgusted if I hadn't been told Scalzi was the new Heinlein, but it seemed to me that he was missing some important Heinleinian virtues, notably Heinlein's presentation of the universe as being full of interesting detail. You just can't have an advanced military with only four kinds of weapons.

    No doubt a matter of taste, but Heinlein has a lot of people addressing the question of who's in charge. Scalzi doesn't. Some might find that restful, it seemed more like a lack of flavor to me.

    840:

    Rbt Prior Yes. I'm very familiar with the Fen country, with my grandmother living in Holbeach ( Between Spalding & Lynn ) & going there twice or 3 times a year until I was 18....

    Later: I wonder how profitable many of our large corporations would be if they actually followed laws and regulations, instead of ignoring them. For a detailed look at one particular example, the shysters & crooks who run "Uber" try reading this article - & how, in spite of being completely creamed by the UK Supreme Court, they are STILL trying to cheat!

    EC Quite possibly, unfortunately easily believable But, no-one at all seems to emphasise that it isn't "Punishment" that deters - if anything it's Detection that deters. The failure rate of catching many actually-criminal acts is so high ( i.e. low detection rate ) that many people make a value-judgement based on "the odds" & go ahead. If "the odds" changed, noticeably, with a positive detection rate of more like 80%, rather than the current 5-10% - then I think you might see quite a sharp change. Even if it is, as you suggest, a "sociological" problem. Yes/No?

    841:

    Scalzi's God Engines uses magical drives. So, I guess, does the Dune universe.

    I like Scalzi's writing style, and I liked the first few books in the OMW series as brain candy. But the later stories annoyed me so much that I stopped reading. Yes, he makes a lot of gaffes, but I don't think he really corrects them. Then he failed my "squad of marines" test, and I gave up. The "Squad of Marines" test is whether, in SF battles, a squad of US marines would have done it differently and better. Star Wars pretty consistently fails this test, and so does Star Trek. Old Man's War kind of passed, until a certain incident where the setup was obviously stupid, the outcome was obviously stupid, and, just a few months before he published it, SecState Clinton had been in an analogous situation where they'd actually done the security right and nothing went wrong. I couldn't believe that a more advanced society, one that was at war, would have made such boneheaded decisions. But a science fiction author did make those mistakes, and I stopped caring about what happened next. So I stopped reading the series and I have no interest in finding out how it all ended.

    842:

    I'm going to define four categories of "nano-tech." I think merely defining the terms will answer your objections, but I'm also going to add a paragraph or two.

    Femto-tech: Really small nano-tech designed to work at the subatomic level. We're not discussing this one at all, and the current state of the art says this isn't possible. Femto-tech is definitely "magic."

    Nano-tech: Tech which is generally the same size as a cell, by which I mean ranging in size from the equivalent of a small cell to the size of a large cell - a couple magnitudes in range, at least. Nano-tech is good for manipulating loads/items ranging from single molecules/atoms to items the size of a small cell. You're probably right, or mostly right, about the performance limits. Assuming you can build something the size of a cell out of metal parts (big-assumption) you might get a 100x performance gain. It might or might not be able to do genetic surgery on a single cell, but I'm skeptical. (Nano-tech might or might not be possible in the sense of building really small machines. I'd call it "magic tech" except where it's used in the sense of growing something like carbon nanotube. As you noted, nano-tech is probably indistinguishable from a natural process, even if it's operating on metal or plastic.)

    Micro-tech: Tech built in the millimeter or sub-millimeter range, so from the size of an aphid to that of a really-small multi-celled animal, such as a hydra. (Definitely possible.)

    Milli-tech: Tech built in the size-range of an insect somewhere between the size of an aphid to a large beetle. (Definitely probable.)

    Once you define the terms, it's obvious that most of the work gets done by Milli and Micro-tech. And I don't think anyone will be stupid enough to expect "nano-tech" to grow crystals or something stupid like that. (My use of "ingots" above was a poor choice.) In fact, I'd expect that milli-or-micro-tech would function as trucks for hauling nano-tech around.

    But imagine you have a home garbage-collection device with some sensors and an attached grinder, based on micro or millitech. You pour your garbage in and at the end of the week you get a little box of "compost this stuff" and a little box of broken glass. You get a little box (or bale) of aluminum items, a little box (or bale) of each variety of plastic, a box or bale of copper items, etc. And these pay for your garbage truck, which is really a mining operation, to come by every month. (There's no need for it to come by once a month if you're turning your dinner into compost.)

    If you drop a bit of milli-or-microtech in the yard, it does something similar. But in no case is it growing crystals - gimme a break here. Instead it's boxing things up for further processing or making changes to your soil. "Smelt this small piece of gravel for tin and this piece of gravel for copper" or "let's replace this pound of clay in sector 42 with a pound of compost, because your soil could really use some nutrients."

    Could you order your milli-tech to dump the piece of gravel which contains tin into a vat of real nano-machines to grow a tin-crystal? Yes, you probably could, but a smelter would do just fine, and using nano-machines for this operation would be both silly and expensive.

    So in the real world you don't throw "nano-tech" at a problem and expect it to work. You have multiple classes of machines and assign them properly.

    843:

    @ David L and Elderly Cynic

    It would be possible for any American progressive/liberal to go on at enormous length about policing/"justice"/prison reform and the racism/sociological-fucked-upness that goes along with these question. I just hit (some of the) highlights in my very short post, but I wouldn't argue against either of your objections to my original post on the subject.

    The reason I propose the first* solution as making sure that judges have experience as both prosecutors and defense attorneys is because of some of the inequalities that you identify.

    The American judicial system is so very imbalanced and unfair that the first solution* I can see is making sure that every judge at least has the experience to be fair, because I don't think the evolution from University->prosecutor->judge has anything about it which would make a U.S. criminal court someplace where I'd like my case to be tried!

    • Definitely not the only solution.
    844:

    Troutwaxer @ 842

    What's the power supply for any of your classes of nano tech?

    You certainly can't just dump adenosine diphosphate on your nanites.

    845:

    That's what plants and fungi normally do. You don't get speed gains with this system, because you're still stuck with running on solar power, which if you're lucky is 1000 watts/m2 and is usually considerably less.

    The problem with nanotech is the fundamental assumption that engineers can do biology better than biology can. This is a mental illness that is decades old in the US (elsewhere too?), and the usual response to pointing it out is to try to justify the illness, rather than question whether it is healthy.

    Now what engineers can and are doing is making nanoscale stuff that's different than what nature does. Not better, different. And that's fine, even necessary. But trying to out-nature nature is typically a matter of arrogance and ignorance in action.

    846:

    I'm not remotely an engineer, but when I was trying to write science-fiction which included nano-tech I used beamed power. The huge advantage of this was that in a grey-goo or paperclip-maximizer scenario if you wanted your nano-tech to stop you could just turn off the power.

    An insect-sized "nano" could simply be fitted with a battery, of course. I think the real problem would be the "micro-sized" nanites. They're too small for a battery and too big for beamed power or some chemical solution. Any suggestions?

    847:

    I don't think I've seen any sf with starships that require magic to run

    I beg to differ. All FTL starships and a good many STL ones ones are totally dependent on magic. Cap'n Kirk's Enterprise is no less magical than Harry Potter's broomstick. It's just dressed up to look like post-WW II technology.

    And I agree about Heinlein. A very complicated author, with much to like and dislike. I come out on the like side. Mostly.

    848:

    but I wouldn't argue against either of your objections to my original post on the subject.

    Didn't think I was objecting. Just presenting a possible avenue to a fix. There are just way too many things wrong in my opinion for any one solution.

    849:

    "But trying to out-nature nature is typically a matter of arrogance and ignorance in action."

    The problem here is that you're not defining the problem correctly. The point of nanos is not to "out-nature nature." As you said, (and I implied above) that would be silly. The point of nano-tech is to do something different than nature does, something humans want done that nature doesn't care about. Nature doesn't pull all the copper-bearing bits of gravel out of my yard. That's something a human who needs copper might want to do. (And note that I suggest these bits of gravel should be taken to a smelter, not a container of crystal-making nano-slime!)

    850:

    Troutwaxer @ 846 : "I think the real problem would be the "micro-sized" nanites. They're too small for a battery and too big for beamed power or some chemical solution. Any suggestions?"

    Not from me! No matter from what side I've looked at the nanite power problem in the past I've always concluded that it was best to use genetically engineered biology than trying to build tiny mechanical stuff from the ground up.

    851:

    Time to avoid bananas in the UK.

    £1599 per bunch. Will some try and blame Brexit.

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/03/20/banana-price-issue-causes-expensive-apple-pay-mistake-in-uk

    It was a pricing error in the computer. And someone checked out with Apple Pay contactless. And didn't notice the total before paying. And the store couldn't process the refund so she had to find another store.

    You'd think there would be a sanity check in the price entry/change model. You'd think.

    852:

    My "problem" is that I read Drexler's Engines of Creation when it first came out. Then I went through plant anatomy and plant physiology, as well as mycology. Then I did my PhD work on the how millimeter-scale fungi affect the diversity of meter-scale plants around them. And I was a long-time regular on Orion's Arm.

    So I'm somewhat comfortable with dealing with issues of scale, since that was a major issue in ecology when I was getting my degree. And it was a big part of my degree. And I used to read Chemical and Engineering News regularly, not that I'm a chemist or engineer. So I've seen quite a lot of what people try to do with fictional nanotech, as well as actual nanoscale and molecular engineering.

    And that's where I'm coming from.

    The problem nanotech has in science fiction is that it's simplest use is as a retooled fantasy prop for some trope that might be as old as Ovid's Metamorphoses. And again, that's fine if you're trying to write a standard fantasy story in a science fiction setting. If you want to try something new or different based on where nanotech seems to actually be going (e.g. into super-computer cell phones that are bumbling into brute force AI right now, aka the original topic of this post), then none of this works all that well.

    And pushing these tropes is like me pushing the idea of running cars on iron-nickel batteries. It's amusing to some, annoying to others, and fortunately shows my abysmal ignorance to just about everybody. Which is also fine with me.

    853:

    Agreed in practical terms. The problem with that, as Heteromeles points out, is that you have to wait for stuff to happen at biological/botanical speeds and humans aren't good at waiting.

    854:

    judges have experience as both prosecutors and defense attorneys

    If you're going for balance, make that experience both winning and losing in each role.

    855:

    All sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Something that almost everyone seems to miss is that there are four levels from the hardest of SF down to pure fantasy (ignoring human error and ignorance). It is seriously unfortunate that this also applies to journals like Physical Review :-(

    Derivable from known science (no, black hole diving, dark matter finagling, (sub-)quark weebling, miracle medicine etc. do NOT come here)

    Compatible with known science but assuming new scientific laws or unsupported speculations based on existing ones (most ansibles, genuine AI and personality uploading come here, as do the previous examples)

    Incompatible with known science in a few, limited ways (any accelerated FTL and immortality come here)

    Flatly incompatible with known science, almost in its entirety

    856:

    What's the power supply for any of your classes of nano tech?

    Antimatter, until something more energy-dense comes along. I have this nebulous concept of Planck-length springs driving clockwork mechanisms but I'm not quite sure if the energy density figure-of-merit is an improvement.

    857:

    Nojay @ 56: " I have this nebulous concept of Planck-length springs driving clockwork mechanisms..."

    One thing for sure, with springs like that your mechanism would be able to hop at a fantastic speed!

    858:

    Somewhere earlier in this discussion there was a question of what would we use in place of plastics when all the oil & gas resources are exhausted? I still think glass & stainless steel are the answer (or some NON-reactive metal???) ... Anyway, not my field of expertise so whatever.

    But I was washing up earlier and I had a thought.

    Envision SOME TIME IN THE FUTURE where there's a reading of the will ... and all the heirs are waiting to find out NOT who gets the family manse & all the money ... no they're all waiting with bated breath to find out who is going to get spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler ... grandma's collection of Tupperware.

    859:

    You wrote: "take a stab at the protein folding"

    We've been working on protein folding for years... says the guy who supported, among many other people, the man who is the primary maintainer of NIH-XPLOR, used around the world to model protein folding.

    860:

    "The problem nanotech has in science fiction is that it's simplest use is as a retooled fantasy prop for some trope that might be as old as Ovid's Metamorphoses.

    The real problem here is that I'm ninety-percent in agreement with you and you don't know it. You're talking to some model of Troutwaxer that's in your head and you aren't talking to me.

    As for what I think... I don't think femto-tech will ever happen. Just not gonna.

    Nano-tech, if we ever achieve it, will, as you've stated, most likely be re-purposed biology/botany. A single unit of nanotech will, at it's very best and smartest, lack the intelligence of an ant, and will probably require some very careful guidance from something much smarter than itself in order to accomplish anything useful at all. And it's not going to do much that biology/botany doesn't/can't do. Furthermore, I'll be pretty surprised if we ever succeed in miniaturizing a metal/plastic machine to cellular size.

    The one thing nano really needs to do, if we're going to go someplace in a starship and bring our natural world with us, even in the sense of having a hydroponic farm, is to police/eliminate unwanted mutant cells/virii/etc. The reasons for this are obvious, I think, and we've discussed the mutation problem multiple times here. I think a thousand years of improvements will get us there, because we already have immune-systems to study and modify. (Always assuming, of course, that we don't break nature/weather in the meantime. (Global warming is such a complicating factor that I don't want to discuss it in terms of possible technical progress, because it makes time-estimates completely unreliable.))

    But I would wholeheartedly agree with you that ninety-percent of the nano-tech depicted in science-fiction is BS. It's just not going to do the things any number of authors I could mention think it will do. I'd expect nano-tech to do two things well:

    First: Provide interfaces between computers and biological/botanical components, but probably not as sophisticated as the kind of brain/machine interface we imagine in, for example, Neuromancer. Maybe do some limited fixing, but not anything miraculous. I'd expect it to work fairly well on cases of cataracts, for example, or cleaning out a coronary artery, but wouldn't expect it to repair brain tissue, fix an alcoholic's liver, or make me immortal.

    Second: Do things that biological/botanical processes could be doing now, but aren't, and possibly in a very sophisticated fashion.

    Also, nanotech might be able to make very small repairs - fix a radiation-damaged chip, for example. But I would never expect it to reprogram the chip or chop the chip up into tiny robots or anything like that, and it would repair the chip at biological speeds, so it might take several days for the chip to "heal."

    I think the big problem with this discussion is that you imagined that we had major differences on the subject, when actually we don't. Nano is not miraculous and it will never do anything any other machines or cells can't do, albeit on a much smaller scale. If anything does make nanotech miraculous it will be the ability to hook the tech up to a computer and write a program which allows the nanotech to undertake multiple simple actions which have a complex outcome.

    861:

    I've got 30-year-old tupperware-style containers that are beginning to spontaneously disintegrate — layers peeling off and odd odours coming from them. I'm not convinced that plastic containers are heirloom-quality assets…

    862:

    Well, I think the question is what the escapement mechanism is to hold a Planck-length spring in place. Then again, it may well turn out that if you substitute superstrings for Planck-length springs, you've simply come up with a really cool term for a plasma of some sort. Or, for that matter, warped space.

    Come to think of it, I'm not sure anyone's touched on a "nanowarp" before. I suppose that might be interesting, if only as a Rule Of Cool word salad for something in a story.

    You're quite right, though, in asking what the fuel is if ATP isn't what's being used.

    863:

    I don't give Scalzi money, but I've posted before about being collateral damage from when he was SFWA president, and he refused all responsibility.

    But I like the squad of Marines. One of the reasons I like Aliens (2nd movie) is that the Colonial Marines do come on correctly, in teams supporting each other.

    864:

    Somewhere earlier in this discussion there was a question of what would we use in place of plastics when all the oil & gas resources are exhausted? I still think glass & stainless steel are the answer (or some NON-reactive metal???) ... Anyway, not my field of expertise so whatever.

    I've got one word for you: hemp. And the cool part of using it in a story is that, even if you're wrong, there's already an audience out there who thinks this will be extremely right. Someday.

    Also, I've seen some interesting experiments with reconstituted chitin and keratin from shrimp shells and fish scales respectively. There are a number of natural polymers, but they do break down. The nice thing about plastics, at least at first, was that they don't break down so easily. And this has turned out to be a bit of a problem.

    865:

    "I've posted before about being collateral damage from when he was SFWA president, and he refused all responsibility."

    I don't remember that story, could you repost it briefly?

    I do note that you've posted multiple times in the last couple days. Are you starting to feel like yourself again?

    866:

    I think you might be a little out with your scales.

    Nanotech -- dealing with "things" on the nanometre scale -- must really be about manipulating atoms. For example the atom spacing in crystalline silicon is about 0.25nm. And for comparison, the typical human cell is circa 100 microns across (or 0.1mm).

    A human cell is really a general purpose 3D printer using amino acids as its building blocks. Would that put it into the milli-tech category?

    Just to throw a further spanner in the works, I've been looking at high quality carbon fibre. Some of the really good stuff -- requiring end-user declarations -- is 5 microns in diameter. Do you think of carbon fibre composite as a micro-tech technology?

    It'll be no consolation to you that I made the same scale mistake in front of our Graphene people when I asked whether we could use biological processes to make large areas of graphene. Geim put me straight immediately!

    867:

    Furthermore, I'll be pretty surprised if we ever succeed in miniaturizing a metal/plastic machine to cellular size.

    You might find this surprising, then: Micro/Nanorobots for Biomedicine: Delivery, Surgery, Sensing, and Detoxification. That's where part of the field has been going for years. But notice, these robots are not self-replicating. Rather, they're more like remotely controlled puppets scaled down for highly specific tasks.

    As for the using robot immune systems...not particularly. I suggest going back and reading Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline posts on Covid-19, focusing especially but not exclusively on his blogs about immmunology. It's a field that is as complex as cybersecurity, and for much the same reasons. He also goes into the design of drugs like remdesivir and the mRNA vaccines. They're basically nanotools, if not quite articulated machines. Although arguably the mRNA vaccines with their lipid coats are simple, completely artificial, nanomachines. But the problems with the complexities of human immune systems are very real. The artifice that's making them work better are things like vaccines, the occasional class of drugs, and better PPE.

    This gets at another point: I know very little about molecular biology, but what I'm seeing in places like In The Pipeline is that there are at least two approaches to nanotech. One is highlighted in the first article, where engineers are creating cell-scale tools that are generally remotely powered and controlled (using magnetic fields, acoustic systems, or whatever). The other end of the process is coming from molecular biology, where the molecules and molecular systems they're creating are getting increasing large, complex, and machine-like. I don't think they're going to fuse in the middle, because they have different uses, like axes and lockpicks. But they're approaching the nano scale from different directions using different approaches.

    I'm also not getting into all the metamaterial research, which is a whole other thing that's equally interesting.

    I could go on, but basically we do have quite a few differences, and mostly you're where I was about 25 years ago. We do agree on the uses in stories, but not about where the fields of nanotechnology have ended up going. Like any technology, they start by promising a whole new world and end up giving us a better clot-buster and some shimmery new ad materials that are hard to dispose of.

    868:

    H millimeter-scale fungi affect the diversity of meter-scale plants around them. Yes, well ... mychorriziae (sp?) - the supply of nutrients & vital trace elements to larger plant roots &/or the role of fungi in enriching soil generally, yes? On my allotment-plot-beds, I now often find a layer of fungal growth, where I have buried horse-manure compost & there is a clearly-visible whitish fungal layer there. Those beds are noticeably even more productive than those where this phenomenon has not yet developed. [ Oh & as a side-effect, I now have a healthy crop, every year of Agaricus campestris to cook & eat, dribble, oink! ]

    869:

    . I suspect there are some funky design constraints with a tractor pushing a tender and towing a harvester, but it might work.

    Biggest issue is that many problems "in the field" are currently solved with a 3 pound hammer and adjustable wrench. The more prickly connections you add that have to be done in the field the less reliable things become.

    870:

    Frequent stops, turns, and tight maneuvering will not be made easier with a trailer. (I still remember my father running out of patience trying to teach teenage me to back up with a boat trailer, and we had plenty of time and space.)

    Oh, yes. It is a skill I go to learn to in my youth back up a non power steering small tractor with huge over steering and uneven braking to hitch up to various things. In mud, dry ruts, maybe a concrete block or few lying around. You get the hitch point "close" and your mate (or you if you're having fun by yourself) go to the swing arm and drive it home with the hammer I mentioned. Then move an inch or two to line up the other side. And apply said hammer again.

    Makes backing up with my small utility trailer seem almost trivial.

    871:

    Frank,

    Your space ship problem got me thinking about how we could do it today. Obviously you'd send out baked-bean can sized star-wisp machines, but what would their mission be?

    Could I suggest you'd want to explore the solar systems before you selected one to exploit? Not only would you want your scout machine to alert you to conditions you might expect, but you might also want it to start some primitive terraforming, like say changing primitive life processes to left chirality from right, if that's what's there at the moment.

    As the conditions change in your solar system, you could then consider sending instructions for the machine to do more complex tasks. This would mean that the actual size of the scout ship need not be high and the instructions need not be more than minimal.

    Only at the end of a very, very long process would it make sense to send instructions for the reconstruction of a human.

    And whilst that might all seem less exciting than actually sending people, I'd have to question the utility of sending people to somewhere that they probably wouldn't cope with very well -- so I'm suggesting we set about making the destination more comfortable first.

    Think of it as the first two of a 4X game?

    872:

    "Like any technology, they start by promising a whole new world and end up giving us a better clot-buster and some shimmery new ad materials that are hard to dispose of."

    Amen.

    873:

    partly because of the neo-liberal/thatcherite suppression of civil society, which includes mass political parties (possibly as a side effect, but also often intentionally). What they have left is a very politically involved core

    There are exceptions, and they're interesting precisely because of how unusual they are. For example, the SNP in Scotland has more paid-up membersthan the entire Conservative Party, UK-wide: they've got 125,000 members, or about 3% of the electorate. Which is exactly the sort of mass-membership base you're lamenting the death of. (I'm a member of the Scottish Green Party, which is considerably down from its post-Indyref membership peak but still has nearly half as many as Labour, and nobody knows how many the Scottish Conservative Party has which isn't exactly a sign that it's boast-worthy.)

    NB: the Scottish electoral system is a mix of FPTP and party list regional proportional representation seats: nowhere in the UK has anything equivalent to US primaries, so party members are generally activists, not just folks signing up for a ballot.

    874:

    He also goes into the design of drugs like remdesivir and the mRNA vaccines. They're basically nanotools, if not quite articulated machines. Although arguably the mRNA vaccines with their lipid coats are simple, completely artificial, nanomachines. But the problems with the complexities of human immune systems are very real. The artifice that's making them work better are things like vaccines, the occasional class of drugs, and better PPE.

    The Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is a gene-edited "traditional" vaccine based on a virus which is theoretically non-transmissable in humans, a chimpanzee adenovirus. There is some evidence that if administered in quantity ten million and more that it can cause, in very rare cases, a particular type of blood clotting to occur in humans. The jury is still out, it might be they're finding the cases because they're looking for them and it may be that the modified chimpanzee virus isn't actually a causative agent in these cases but...

    The mRNA vaccines don't have this threat vector since the messenger RNA that creates proteins the immune system is trained on is carried in a simple lipid capsule, not a complex virus with its own proteins the human system isn't usually exposed to. It may be the lipids are problematic in their own ways but they're simpler and easier to model biologically speaking and so I'd expect them to be less worrying in that regard.

    875:

    the US reich isn't actually killing their politicians, but they are using democratic techniques to do the same thing - explicitly in the case of the Tea Party, but also in less coherent ways with the 'support Trump or get rolled' stuff.

    Happening on both ends. Right and left.

    876:

    I suspect the shape of an all-electric agricultural vehicle may diverge sharply from a current hydrocarbon-burning one, much as diesel vehicles diverged over time from the steam traction engine (and the stationary engines used in agriculture prior to that).

    Tractor design is more driven by the wheels and tires that work best for the job these day than propulsion methods. And the height of the crop/debris needed to be cleared. Once those decisions are made the engine and fuel tanks are bolted to the top.

    877:

    Yes. It started to be feasible c. 25 years ago, and has been sufficiently capable (in terms of protein size) and reliable to be used as a filter in drug design for some years now.

    878:

    I've got 30-year-old tupperware-style containers that are beginning to spontaneously disintegrate — layers peeling off and odd odours coming from them. I'm not convinced that plastic containers are heirloom-quality assets…

    More and more soft bits of various tools and whatnot seem to get "sticky/tacky" after a few years. Exposure to sunlight, even through windows, can make it worse.

    I suspect that the drive to lower costs "plastics" means less and less shelf life.

    879:

    I'm not convinced that plastic containers are heirloom-quality assets…

    Go for Corningware/Pyroceram.

    880:

    ONLY a "3-lb" hammer?

    Oh & wooden handles for screwdrivers & hammers, please. [ An agricultural hand-implement with wooden handle that has been inoculated with Linseed Oil will last a long time ... ]

    881:

    Your space ship problem got me thinking about how we could do it today. Obviously you'd send out baked-bean can sized star-wisp machines, but what would their mission be?

    The problem is slowing down once you get there, or not. I can imagine a post-Kardashev I civilization building vast machines that would accelerate a star-wisp probe to 0.01 or even 0.1 c, but it's hard to see how the the wisp would stay in the target system.

    So we're talking about fly-by probes for a long time, where "long" means millennia or the arrival of magic-tech.

    But that's OK -- at 0.1 c it would take 40 years to get to Alpha Centauri, 120 years to Tau Ceti. The orbit of Neptune is 4 light-hours in radius, so the probe would take 80 hours to cross a similar planetary system, plenty of time to take interesting observations.

    882:

    But I like the squad of Marines. One of the reasons I like Aliens (2nd movie) is that the Colonial Marines do come on correctly, in teams supporting each other.

    A Marine lieutenant who acted like Gorman would get fragged.

    883:

    a battery tractor isn't hauling around a heavy diesel power pack and fuel tank

    Farm machinery design is a tremendously subtle thing these days. The reason you can buy more or less the same engine-and-cab with five dramatically different ground connections is that stuff like ground pressure is important, and using soil as reaction mass is almost never allowed. So sometimes you want the metre-wide rubber tracks, other times you can get away with half that, sometimes four tyres is enough and other times you want a row of 4 or 6 attached to each stub axle. And the steering system has to be subtly different for each arrangement.

    Plus there's computers and stuff involved, as well as sometimes huge hydraulic and/or electrical and/or mechanical output to whatever machine the tractor is there to drive.

    I suspect that for at least some case bolting on an extra few tonnes of battery would make the whole machine not work. But equally, when you have a million dollar machine towing a multimillion dollar machine there's a lot of room for a cheap little robot that manages the extension cord. Just that with these machines they also go for quite large farms in many cases, so the cord length might be kilometres...

    884:

    While we're on the subject of Zoom meetings:

    "I brought doughnuts."

    https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/tuesday-march-9th-brought-doughnuts

    885:

    Those things may not be, but grandma's real Tupperware set probably is.

    Plastics these days are one of the many areas which are basically full of shit. There are all sorts of "improved" and "advanced" things which people in the plastics industry reckon are so amazing that they are vitally essential, but of which people not in the plastics industry find the advantage to be somewhere between nugatory and of large negative magnitude.

    Original Tupperware was a simple one-piece injection moulding of straightforward polyethylene. Or, rather, a fairly tricky one-piece injection moulding, seeing how the accuracy and definition of the mouldings is very good but polythene is kind of a sod to get that good a result with. The simple pure-hydrocarbon fully saturated polymer is very stable chemically, there are no seams or joints, and it tends to yield around stress concentrations so as to relieve the stress rather than cracking. So you basically just have a complicated-shaped lump of this stuff and it lasts for ever.

    What you describe sounds like an attempt to make the material properties of the various regions of the item (mating-surface vs. not-mating-surface, surface-of-material vs. interior-of-material, etc) a close match to the specific requirements for those regions by sticking a bunch of different materials together, even though the problem of meeting all those requirements with a single material has already been solved. So you have several different and more complex polymers, other chemicals mixed into them to alter their mechanical properties, more chemicals to help them stick together, etc. The inferiority of this method is clearly demonstrated when the various components decide they have had quite enough of each other's company and the thing starts to fall apart and make funny smells. Despite this, people in the plastics industry will still insist that it's a vastly better method than simple polythene plus good process control, claiming not only some cost saving for the factory which in all likelihood is merely one of the many toxic by-products of accounting systems that ignore or even deny reality, but also some improvement in performance for the people who eventually get to use the stuff, when all you actually do observe is that after a while it falls to bits.

    This sort of crap is also why apparently simple things like food wrappings have things like "non-recyclable" printed on them. What looks like a simple sheet of plastic, and always used to be, is now two or more different kinds of plastic laminated together, so you can't melt it down without ending up with a useless mixture of the two. Again this is supposed to be some kind of improvement, but in practice you can't tell any difference from the old single-material sheet, except perhaps a slightly increased tendency to resist opening and then split suddenly and dump the entire contents over your kitchen floor.

    886:

    I do wonder whether a solar parachute might work, at least to the point where a slingshot would be possible and if you knew of a couple of large planets in the target system it might be possible to accelerate gently using that, the reverse of how we get things out of this system.

    A lot depends on just how magic the probe is. From the orbit of Neptune you're going to want a pretty large aperture on your sensors just to get enough photos to make sense of anything, and likewise any signal return is going to need a narrow beam and a sizeable power output, both of which go against the "tiny lightweight widget" ethos. Unless of course you just fire a lump of grey goo at the target and it builds whatever it needs out of whatever it hits.

    On that note, stopping suddenly is always possible :)

    887:

    "Antimatter, until something more energy-dense comes along."

    Of course if you need such an extremely dense transport to get energy in, you also need some transport which is not all that much less dense to get the waste heat out. Otherwise your nanotechnology is limited by what you can achieve in an expanding cloud of thermal plasma.

    888:

    Stop right there. Don't give us "both sides do it".

    The Democrats went so far to the right during Raygun, Bush I, and Clinton (and the GOP House) that Rep. Eisenhower was significantly to the left of the Dems. They're finally moving back to left of center. They're aiming for, I dunno, LBJ values of "left".

    Meanwhile, the GOP is going full white supremecist. That is NOT THE SAME DAMN THING.

    889:

    Meanwhile in the UK, their foreign minister reports that democracy is in retreat, and a civil liberties type agrees and suggests that his government appears to be enusiastically persueing that gaol goal*.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/20/civil-rights-vigil-police-bill-liberties

    • a typo, but it seemed too relevant to simply fix it
    890:

    Bah, you should be grateful you still have an Overton window to look out of. When Our Lord Trump descends from heaven to rule the world you won't even get that. If elections are permitted you will be endorsing the candidates selected for you by the righteous government of the Lord.

    Also, it's such old news that it's easy to forget that your government is no longer discussing whether oligarchs should run your country, merely arguing over the extent of their direct control. The skin colour stuff is still largely a distraction (and a very effective one).

    891:

    Niala @ 778: Heteromeles @ 774

    Another problem with lithium batteries is that right now they don't give enough flat-out hours of output for a tractor used during 20 hour long harvest days. It would be the same for heavy earth moving equipment used for projects which run on several shifts during a 24 hour day.

    So, I hope that aluminium batteries eventually provide a better solution, for the sake of mules.

    By the way, I wasn't thinking of mining the Moon to build a huge starship but to build robot probes.

    So, how are those probes going to be powered? How are they going to work?

    Alpha Centauri C (Proxima Centauri) is the closest star to our Sun and according to astronomers it has a planet of approximately one earth mass orbiting within the "life zone".

    It's also something like 4.25 light years away, so if the probe manages the 1% of light speed Charlie proposed, it's going to take it 425 years - in fact, longer depending on how long it takes the probe to to accelerate to 1% of light speed plus whatever it has to do to decelerate enough to be captured into an orbit (because a high speed pass won't give the robot enough time to collect all the data we want from it).

    It might take (and this is just pure SWAG) 10 to 100 years after it arrives to get into position where it can survey Proxima Centauri B in sufficient detail to provide usable data about the planet.

    If we send the probe we might not get the data back for half a millennium [kiloyear (ky)] ... and that's just the first probe we might send out.

    What's the next closest star with possible life zone planets that we know about?

    Those probes are going to be expensive and difficult to build, so at the beginning I think we should concentrate on those stellar systems where we already have an indication of possible "earth-like" planets.

    And if we can figure out a way to get the data back, I think it's worth doing even if we never manage to build any kind of starship capable of carrying humans. Even if it turns out the human race is stuck here on earth for all the rest of time.

    All of the things we might learn justify the expense of sending the probes. But we have to accept that we won't live to see the results. They have to be a gift to the future of humankind.

    892:

    "what would we use in place of plastics when all the oil & gas resources are exhausted?"

    Not gonna happen. Well, technically it will eventually, but there is a lot of difference between oil that is easy enough to get that you can burn as much of it as you want and not really care, and oil that is kind of a pain in the arse to get but not so much of a pain in the arse as other things you might be able to use to build the same kind of objects.

    In any case, there are plenty of biological sources of feedstock. You can make polythene starting from booze and sulphuric acid. Or you can cook more or less any biological matter back down to a soup of small molecules and then assemble plastics out of the bits, which isn't a lot different from what starting from oil looks like anyway. Biomass doesn't work for fuel supply, but it's feasible for things we don't use in such tremendous quantities.

    And our consumption of plastics, along with a whole pile of other things (including human effort), would hit the deck if we shifted to doing things for their own worth instead of insisting that the only valid criterion for doing something is making money as rapidly as possible. Recycling is great, but it is still only a backup to make up for what can't be achieved by simply not throwing stuff away in the first place, which gets far less attention. And recycling itself could be used more if the plastics industry would stop inventing means of making unrecyclably intimately intermingled materials.

    As for things like molecular biology apparatus where you throw stuff away all the time because a single molecule of contaminant can ruin everything, I don't see any reason why they can't just carry on as normal. They may be extravagant users on the scale of a lab, but on the scale of a society they're too minor to be worth noticing.

    893:

    a typo, but it seemed too relevant to simply fix it

    Known in a dusty corner of Usenet as a Tobago. TypO, But A Good One.

    894:

    Scott Sanford @ 788:

    I'm unclear why battery tenders won't work. These are simply wheeled carts full of batteries that are towed behind or pushed in front of equipment, depending on where the work is being done.

    Tenders work really well on railroads. There are clues there about why they don't work as well elsewhere. Trains move along fixed routes along specially prepared surfaces.

    This is almost exactly the opposite of how a tractor, bulldozer, or backhoe behaves. Driving in a straight line happens but it's the exception - tractors and harvesters working large fields being the obvious example of long straight driving. Frequent stops, turns, and tight maneuvering will not be made easier with a trailer. (I still remember my father running out of patience trying to teach teenage me to back up with a boat trailer, and we had plenty of time and space.) All of these will be moving over uneven and unpredictable ground, which makes designing a trailer connection interesting for the engineer.

    I won't say it can't be done for some equipment, particularly large-field hardware that's already set up for heavy towing, but the battery tender seems like a niche application rather than a widely adopted solution. There's too much advantage in having a vehicle be a single unit.

    But then, I also don't think it's practical to have robot drones hovering in mid-air holding up a long extension cord - which would be silly but amusing to imagine.

    Well if you're replacing IC engines with electric motors, what about that big ol' space out there in front of the driver where there's usually a diesel engine nowadays.

    The "tender" would only need wheels to roll it into place between the front & rear axles, where it's then latched in (and lifted clear of the ground). Instead of something you drag around, it's something like the battery pack on an electric drill. My drill came with two battery packs so one can sit on the charger while the other is in use. I don't see why you couldn't use the same principle for an electric tractor?

    Show me a farm where they don't have an ATV that can tow a trailer being used for errands & such. The ATV could tow out a fresh battery pack & tow the depleted pack back to the charging station (and be plugged in to a trickle charger itself when not in use).

    895:

    Farm Machinery? I think I'll stick with one of these Ridiculously easy to drive & great fun ....

    896:

    Greg Tingey @ 792: Rbt Prior
    Should try the Fenlands in S Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire & parts of Norfolk, then!
    Typical view

    Gee Toto, I don't think we're IN Kansas any more.

    😎

    897:

    "much as diesel vehicles diverged over time from the steam traction engine (and the stationary engines used in agriculture prior to that)."

    Really? I'd say they had all stuck to the same basic format pretty consistently: big wheels at the front, even bigger wheels at the back, with the machine bit slung between them high enough off the ground not to get stuck, and a driving position at one end. You get minor variations like stationary engines not having a driving position, or some vehicles having an additional crew position for steering right at the front, but the basic layout is always the same. Even the tracked variants are still the same, just with a rubber band round the wheels and a few extra bits to support it.

    A good deal of the reason for this is that they all have a major component which is big and heavy and long, and strong, so you want it horizontal for stability and it is then sturdy enough to be used to connect the front and back ends together. A supporting framework holding a battery is big and heavy and strong, and while it doesn't have to be long it can be if it wants to, so the basic structural considerations are still pretty much the same.

    Also, of course, it's a layout which is highly suitable for generally being a vehicle-like thing, so a lot of vehicles use it and a lot of animals use something very closely related. I think it's most likely that it will continue to be used as widely as it is now.

    898:

    Um. I take the point, but that seems unwise, for reasons of justice; because you're making the lawyer's career progression depend on losing a case.

    899:

    Allen Thomson @ 803:

    Atlanta is currently 225 to 320 m above mean sea level. Do you think sea levels will actually rise far enough to submerge it?

    It's been a while since I looked at that but IIRC if all the ice melted and the water warmed up and expanded, sea level would raise by about 80 meters. Say 100 m to be cautious.

    Lessee...

    Yeah, something like that:

    https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-glaciers-melted

    So, not enough to submerge Atlanta at it's present elevation.

    Scott Sanford supplied that Futurama actually had the city picked up and moved to where it could be under water.

    Something I looked for and couldn't find was a GOOD map showing current day cities & roads that had an overlay (semi-transparent) showing where the coastlines would be for various levels of sea-rise. All of the USGS stuff just showed current day contours, but you lost the cities & roads & such (not even contour elevations).

    I'm looking for something like basic Google Maps with terrain AND contour lines plus an overlay that would follow those contour lines for various levels of sea rise. Even something with a crude 10 m contour interval would be better than anything I've found.

    900:

    It seems pretty common these days for farms to have a machine which has, or can have, some variant of the theme of a long arm with pallet forks on the end. So you could just have a kind of bathtub of girders as the main longitudinal element, and crane the battery in and out of the top with slings. That way you don't need demountable attachments that can carry the whole weight of the battery, and it's less awkward to get everything lined up when changing it.

    901:

    Far better to make them have experience in both adversarial and inquisitorial systems. If the jurisdictions doesn't have one of those then it's defective by design (viz, not everything requires two equal and opposed sides, but at the same time not everything has to follow from establishing the truth of the matter).

    902:

    For complete balance, you also need them to have experience of both winning and losing from the other side of the court. So a judge must necessarily at some point have been a convict, and then had to stop being one.

    903:

    Well yes, but your idea is too slow. Farmers are used to loading up on fuel in a few minutes and then rushing back to work. You have to suppose it's harvest time and they're working nearly around the clock with teams of farm hands!

    That's why John Deere (the tractor maker) is talking about a swappable battery system, capable of getting fresh batteries in there in seconds.

    904:

    I spend 6 year on similar. But mine was a flat head ford gas powered. Made in 54. Designed a lot earlier. Biggest downside to it was the PTO was tied to the drive axle. No split clutch. Ugh.

    905:

    If we send the probe we might not get the data back for half a millennium ... and that's just the first probe we might send out.

    That's where we get the 10% lightspeed rule of thumb. If your hypothetical interstellar drive system doesn't get up to around 0.1c, don't bother building it. Time is better spent inventing a better one.

    Working through the numbers, this makes sense. We can't guess what might be invented in the next 200 years and a 0.2c drive is plausible-ish in that time frame. (Maybe we work out bulk antimatter production?) Something that does 0.01c is impressive for getting around the solar system but would probably get passed while en route by the next generation.

    But 40 years to Alpha Centauri? Okay. It's likely something will revolutionize space travel in the next few years so it's safe to bet on what you have. Too, you'll want to recruit a bunch of hot young kids for the project; some of them will be helpful old farts when the data starts coming home.

    906:

    whitroth @ 806: Hooters still exists. Waitresess are young, well-endowed women. Shorts, and t-shirts are the uniform.

    Not somewhere I patronize.

    Forget the "well-endowed" part. That wasn't even true back in their heyday. It's just a sports-bar1 with an all female serving staff. Basic physical fitness along with a nice smile & a pleasant demeanor are the primary criteria for wait-staff.

    The concept is sexist, but not on the level of "topless/bottomless" establishments. Plus it's strictly "look but do not touch".

    And the tips are pretty good. There's usually a waiting list of young women wanting to get hired.

    1 Not to be confused with a sports-bra.

    907:

    Gee Toto, I don't think we're IN Kansas any more.

    It reminds me of driving to the Spokane Worldcon. There's a reason the 'drive in from Seattle' tourist guide didn't mention any scenic attractions past the Cascade Mountains...

    908:

    Allen Thomson @ 807:

    Actually, John Deere has an electric robot tractor powered by an extension cord. The robot manipulates the cord as needed, lifting it or lowering it or changing its position as needed.

    That is extremely cool and is, I confess, an application for robotics that would never have crossed my mind. All sorts of other applications, from robotic lawn mowers and sewer cleaners to lunar and martian lava-tube explorers seem obvious.

    The robot lawn mowers already exist, although most of the ones I've seen are battery powered and like those Roomba vacuums return to their charging station when they're not running around. I think you have to bury a wire like that invisible fence for dogs to tell it when to turn around.

    I don't know about robotic sewer cleaners, but there are robotic sewer inspection machines. They used one on the sewers on my street a few years back just before digging up all of the water & sewer lines and replacing them. I guess the robot inspections gave them the information they needed for deciding which streets to prioritize.

    They were pretty simple, just a little battery powered 4-wheel chassis with a light & camera pulling a fiber-optic cable to send the TV signal back to the operators. When it got to the end where they were going to take it out, they just disconnected the cable at the entry and reeled it in through the exit. It was sealed up so all they had to do was hose down the exterior once they brought it out.

    We don't have any lava tubes around here, so I don't know how they'd do that.

    909:

    When my grandmother visited us in Saskatchewan in the 1970s, she kept on repeating "look at this straight road!".

    https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@49.1961958,-102.5156775,3a,75y,93.82h,83.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sYRaomAh5gf6OhQwQz76aRw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en-GB

    Not the flattest part of the Prairies, but should give Greg an idea of the land I grew up in.

    As long as I'm being nostalgic, you might like Connie Kaldor's "Grandmother's Song":

    https://sonichits.com/album/Connie_Kaldor/Wood_River

    Direct link: https://youtu.be/RQH5JNP1veg

    (Other songs on the album are also good, but that one and "Spring on the Prairies" really sum up Prairie farming.)

    910:

    Hi Allen,

    Yes you caught me between thoughts. Initially, I'd thought about decelerating into the next system using something like Charlie's suggestion in Accelerando, but then I thought: "What's the odds of the next system being sufficiently interesting or amenable to be worth stopping for?"

    I guess I was really trying to reduce the physical and data load by making the scout probe as lightweight as possible. After all, if it does stop in a system, it is presumably because it has found resources that are sufficiently accessible that it can build the next stage of the exploration system, which is a machine that can then dial home for more instructions than the initial probe could carry.

    Then we are into the world of distributed agreement on which machine goes to which solar system. There seems little point in repeatedly re-infecting everywhere with the same grey-goo.

    The other consideration is that we have only marginally tipped our hand by sending out the scout probe. Any hostile aliens do not have instant access to a full copy of Human DNA with which to figure out how best to fumigate Earth. And depending on how we do the "phone home" routine they may or may not know where we come from.

    911:

    Heteromeles @ 808: Well, there's this cool thing about micrometeorites. They're much, much faster than a speeding bullet.

    Anyway, you're right. There's a controversial (read, less effective) military body armor called dragon skin, that's disks of silicon carbide interlaced with layers of kevlar. One of the vets will chime in, but without looking I'm pretty sure modern body armor has ceramic pieces in a matrix of kevlar. The point is to keep the bullet from penetrating and to spread out the force as much as possible.

    Don't really have an opinion about micrometeorites, but I know something about dragon skin body armor. Right out of the box, the dragon skin was better able to stop high power bullets than the Interceptor body armor issued by the U.S. military. The problem was it didn't hold up as well. Under the extremes of heat & cold common in Iraq, the silicon carbide disks would de-laminate due to glue failure and the fragments would fall to the bottom of the shell, leaving significant gaps. Plus they had manufacturing quality control problems.

    The Interceptor armor is multiple Kevlar layers inside an outer shell that has pockets to hold a large SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) plate front & back. The Kevlar layers will stop a 9x19mm bullet by itself). The SAPI plates would stop 5.56mm (M-16) & 7.62x39mm (AK-47) rounds.

    Later Enhanced SAPI plates were effective against 30-06 & 7.62x51mm AP rounds. The Russians have developed a 7N14 variant of their 7.62x54mmR cartridge that features a hardened steel penetrator and I don't know how well current versions of SAPI plates handle this round.

    The bottom line was that while the dragon skin armor was very good initially, it wouldn't hold up for the entire 6 year warranty period required by the U.S. specification.

    The Interceptor with SAPI plates installed was almost as good as the dragon skin (90-95%?) initially and it still provided as much protection the day you left Iraq (after a year-long tour) as it did the day you arrived there, while the dragon skin significantly degraded in only a matter of months. The Interceptor could be collected up when you de-mobbed and be reissued to another deploying soldier (as mine was - we turned in the SAPI plates before we left Kuwait).

    And if you do get hit, the SAPI plates are replaceable. The Interceptor vest is still good. With the dragon skin you had to replace the whole vest if it stopped a bullet.

    912:

    Looks positively hilly :-)

    The Gobi has bits that are pretty flat: https://roundme.com/viewgallery/322/202889

    (If you zoom in and look in the distance you can see that this part is actually inhabited — and not as flat as it appears at first glance.)

    913:

    Scott Sanford @ 810:

    Hooters still exists. Waitresess are young, well-endowed women. Shorts, and t-shirts are the uniform. Not somewhere I patronize.

    For many years the last highway exit northbound out of Portland, Oregon featured a landmark clock and sign reading Eat NOW at Waddle's. For better or worse, this was saved when Waddle's finally closed and now suggests the same for Hooters. (See for yourself here.) OryCon is held only a few hundred meters away and I got food at the Denny's on the other side of the highway just last week; I've spent a lot of time on that island. I've never been inside.

    The food's not that bad. It's pretty much standard sports bar fare. Or it was the last time I was in one ... I'm guessing 10 years or so ago. They're open kind of late at night if you want an alternative to Denny's or Waffle House.

    I was on a road trip (photo safari) & events conspired to keep me from being able to stop & eat until around 10 - 11 at night & there was a Hooters at the next exit ...

    914:

    with an all female serving staff

    How that square with equal-rights protections? Or is it a case of females being a protected class and males not? What about non-binary or gender-fluid people?

    915:

    Niala @ 825: Charlie Stross @ 823:

    "I suspect the shape of an all-electric agricultural vehicle may diverge sharply from a current hydrocarbon-burning one..."

    John Deere has a protoype robot electric tractor showing the possible shape of a future electric tractor:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMaQq_vRaa8

    Another side of the future of tractors:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPYy_g8NzmI

    916:

    How that square with equal-rights protections?

    Presumably the jobs are open to anyone with breasts, regardless of sex or gender :)

    917:

    “classic example is Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, where the ships are magical but oddly enough, Earth 200 years from now largely looks like it does now” I can’t be bothered to look it up but I’m reasonably sure that this actually a major plot point. As in, being a key reason it is an ‘old mans war’; the isolation and effective farming of Earth.

    Re: Tupperware - we have a fair bit of over 40 year old stuff in constant use and basically perfect condition. And, indeed, a few items that are starting to show a little wear.

    Re: hooters etc - “the office” back mid-90s was a few buildings away from a strip club (Arques Ave, Sunnyvale, CA) and one of my staff would frequently go there over lunch. Not, purportedly, for the nudity but because the very cheap lunch buffet was very good. Never tried it myself. Then again, he is Dutch.

    918:

    What's more useful: a tractor that's been bricked by the manufacturer, or a mule?

    You know it's only a matter of time.

    919:

    Elderly Cynic @ 827: The point about 'deterrence' is that it does not work - as shown by the British Bloody Code. I used to have some (academic) friends who were experts in this area, who could describe why and what would work, but it was made clear that publishing would result in serious retribution from the government against their institutions. This has not changed, and I am pretty sure it is the same in the USA (though the retaliation would come from what isn't the government, we promise, but does control the USA).

    We don't know if "deterrence" works or not. We only know that certain things have proved ineffective as a deterrent. And we may know a few things that will deter crime. I believe everything we do to aleviate poverty, inequality & discrimination has a deterrent effect on crime even if I can't prove it is so.

    In reality, both the USA and UK penal codes are more retaliatory than anything else. They are also vindictively discriminatory against many subgroups of people, most especially some with psychological disturbances, including those caused by genetic and developmental abnormalities or by being abused as a child. Worse from society's point of view, they have the effects of preserving a high crime rate, especially violent crime, and there is some evidence this is not entirely accidental (yes, even in the UK).

    I'm not particularly bothered about the penal codes being retaliatory. I am opposed to them being vindictive & discriminatory. I believe in equality before the law even though I recognize what we have now is a long way from that.

    But I am also opposed to the idea that anyone would be able to get away with murder because they were discriminated against or abused or have genetic and developmental abnormalities ...

    There is no excuse for committing murder. People who "get away" with murder invariably murder again.

    There is no evidence that the vast majority of the 'progressives' in either country want to change this - they merely want to change the subgroups that are targetted.

    I'm onboard with that if we can change the "subgroups" to none; make EVERYONE equally accountable. Although I admit that's an ideal that is probably impossible to achieve. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to achieve it.

    920:

    Allen Thomson @ 847:

    I don't think I've seen any sf with starships that require magic to run

    I beg to differ. All FTL starships and a good many STL ones ones are totally dependent on magic. Cap'n Kirk's Enterprise is no less magical than Harry Potter's broomstick. It's just dressed up to look like post-WW II technology.

    And I agree about Heinlein. A very complicated author, with much to like and dislike. I come out on the like side. Mostly.

    Didn't some famous author once opine that "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology"?

    921:

    David L @ 851: Time to avoid bananas in the UK.

    £1599 per bunch. Will some try and blame Brexit.

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/03/20/banana-price-issue-causes-expensive-apple-pay-mistake-in-uk

    It was a pricing error in the computer. And someone checked out with Apple Pay contactless. And didn't notice the total before paying. And the store couldn't process the refund so she had to find another store.

    You'd think there would be a sanity check in the price entry/change model. You'd think.

    Being the Luddite that I am, I don't use any of those Apple Pay, Google Pay ... whatever kind of pay where you point your phone at the terminal and tell it to pay ...

    I also, so far as possible, avoid the self checkout line, because they irritate me.

    But the one place I frequently shop where I can't seem to avoid the self checkout (Home Depot), I'm pretty careful to watch the screen when I'm scanning items and there's no way an error of that magnitude would slip by me even to the point of totaling the items purchased.

    Does using Apple Pay automatically authorize payment for each item as it's being scanned scanned? Or do you scan all your items & authorize payment for the total? She didn't notice when the bananas rang up at 1,599 GBP ($2,217)? Where was her head?

    922:

    There is no excuse for committing murder.

    That's tautological, though. You of all people should know that, after your experience of going to another country to kill people there... in violation of their laws and of international law, but (hopefully) not of the laws of your country.

    Something that's morally murder can be ethically fine, and legally some other crime, but any mix is possible (at least if you make the morals=personal/belief, ethics=philosophy/rationalisation distinction). Famously the Abrahamic religions are very keen on killing people but have an absolute ban on murder (which makes no sense unless you reword it as "you're only allowed to kill people when your religious leaders tell you to").

    https://ethics.org.au/ethics-morality-law-whats-the-difference/

    If we attempt to untangle that into "there are situations where killing someone is desirable, what situations are those?" it might be easier to think about what's going on. It makes arguments like "should the state murder people that offend it" at least clearer, if not easier.

    923:

    Robert Prior @ 861: I've got 30-year-old tupperware-style containers that are beginning to spontaneously disintegrate — layers peeling off and odd odours coming from them. I'm not convinced that plastic containers are heirloom-quality assets…

    It was just a passing fancy. I don't know if the sink full of dishes included any Tupperware or not.

    There were some plastic containers. A lot of my cooking is recipes that serve 4-6 and one meal gets consumed when I cook it and the rest get stored in the fridge & freezer for later consumption. And when later comes the containers have to be washed so they can be reused later still. The thought occurred and struck me as kind of funny.

    OTOH, I still use a 47 year old Spaghetti pasta keeper (probably Rubbermaid rather than Tupperware) that WE got as a wedding present & that SHE left behind (along with all the bills) when she ran off. It still works just fine.

    924:

    Thanks, I couldn't remember all the details about SAPI and dragon skin, and didn't want to sound stupider than I normally do. In this case, it is embarrassing, because I remember the husband of a friend doing multiple tours over there, and I seem to recall hearing a bit about dragon skin issues from them.

    925:

    “classic example is Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, where the ships are magical but oddly enough, Earth 200 years from now largely looks like it does now” I can’t be bothered to look it up but I’m reasonably sure that this actually a major plot point. As in, being a key reason it is an ‘old mans war’; the isolation and effective farming of Earth.

    You're right, but if that doesn't strike anyone as a bit maybe weird... So how did Earthlings get off the planet and acquire all that nifty neato tech in the first place, and why did the most populous human planet then systematically abandon not just starflight, but artificial gravity, brain transfer, and so forth. There's no rational basis for that, especially if humans are pretty much constantly at war with multiple alien species, some of whom find humans delicious with ketchup, and Earth is undefended. Mythology around Japanese gun bans aside, this is an unprecedented level of technology refusal in human history.

    So I'd put OMW as a Hollywood class SF so far as Deep Thoughts about Consistency goes. Fun to read, less fun to think about. And then he went and piped the Gamorans backwards in Ghost Brigades. Embarrassing, that.

    926:

    This is someone else's story, written in 2017 but encountered today by me while reading paleo-comments elsewhere:

    I have a good friend who works in Planetary Science and Aerospace Engineering. One of his more senior laboratory colleagues built a learning AI to solve certain specific problems related to combing through terrain data from space probes. This AI was tasked with returning certain values resulting from plugging existing data into functions that it would construct itself, based on certain known parameters. It was also instructed to be as efficient as possible, above all else (because minor mathematical uncertainties wouldn't harm these data sets, but could save months of processing time) where efficiency is defined as short runtimes. To make a long story short, it learned over the course of several weeks, to be lazy. It started creating null equations and sets of data so it could finish in shortest-possible runtime, having done no actual work. Essentially, what they managed to create was a perfect simulation of a bored grad student (albeit one with enough processing overhead to run a small city's infrastructure).
    927:

    Allen Thomson @ 881:

    Your space ship problem got me thinking about how we could do it today. Obviously you'd send out baked-bean can sized star-wisp machines, but what would their mission be?

    The problem is slowing down once you get there, or not. I can imagine a post-Kardashev I civilization building vast machines that would accelerate a star-wisp probe to 0.01 or even 0.1 c, but it's hard to see how the the wisp would stay in the target system.

    So we're talking about fly-by probes for a long time, where "long" means millennia or the arrival of magic-tech.

    But that's OK -- at 0.1 c it would take 40 years to get to Alpha Centauri, 120 years to Tau Ceti. The orbit of Neptune is 4 light-hours in radius, so the probe would take 80 hours to cross a similar planetary system, plenty of time to take interesting observations.

    I'm thinking some kind of on-board AI that can apply very small corrections to the course during the terminal phase making it possible for the target system to "capture" the probe. Plus some kind of magic parachute/solar-sail to slow the probe ... perhaps more than one so it can deploy them sequentially whenever it needs to warp itself through the gravity well of one of the system's planets. Sort of the reverse of the way we sent out the Pioneer, Voyager & New Horizons probes and used planetary encounters to change their orbits.

    With the ultimate goal that the probe ends up in a roughly elliptical orbit spanning the system's Circumstellar habitable zone.

    I am thinking more of 0.01C so that Proxima Centauri is ~ 500 years (including time for braking & capture), although if we could launch a probe every 10 years for a century, and the earlier probes could send back data that later probes could use, an initial fly-by might be more feasible in terms of shaping the course of the later probes that aim to be captured by the system.

    928:

    Re: hooters etc - “the office” back mid-90s was a few buildings away from a strip club (Arques Ave, Sunnyvale, CA) and one of my staff would frequently go there over lunch. Not, purportedly, for the nudity but because the very cheap lunch buffet was very good. Never tried it myself. Then again, he is Dutch.

    That reminds me that Portland also has a topless dance club and steakhouse which is known for having very good steaks. I've always been a little curious about that but have never had both the excuse and the round tuit to go find out. It does seem like an excursion that would be more fun with friends than alone.

    929:

    ilya187 @ 882:

    But I like the squad of Marines. One of the reasons I like Aliens (2nd movie) is that the Colonial Marines *do* come on correctly, in teams supporting each other.

    A Marine lieutenant who acted like Gorman would get fragged.

    A Marine Lieutenant who had as little experience as Gorman had would never be assigned to such a mission ... unless it was deliberate sabotage perpetrated by Corporate Overlords who had some kind of hidden agenda for the mission.

    930:

    Pigeon @ 892:

    "what would we use in place of plastics when all the oil & gas resources are exhausted?"

    Not gonna happen. Well, technically it will eventually, but there is a lot of difference between oil that is easy enough to get that you can burn as much of it as you want and not really care, and oil that is kind of a pain in the arse to get but not so much of a pain in the arse as other things you might be able to use to build the same kind of objects.

    Y'all do understand that the proposition that we'll run out of resources from which to manufacture plastics IS NOT MY PROPOSAL ... I was just riffing on it for the joke about Grandma's Tupperware that occurred to me while I was washing dishes this afternoon - because I had a sink full of reusable plastic containers to wash.

    Laugh or don't, but lighten up.

    I know I'm not going to live long enough to find out whether it becomes a problem or not, although I'm trying to make whatever small contribution I can to NOT making it happen.

    931:

    That's better than my thought, which is that certain types of plastiglomerate might become semi-valuable semi-precious gemstones in centuries and millennia to come. If you want to duplicate this process, there's no reason you can't make your own, with creative trash burning and such. Maybe you can even market it on Etsy or something as Anthropocenian Amulets (?)

    932:

    Robert Prior @ 914:

    with an all female serving staff

    How that square with equal-rights protections? Or is it a case of females being a protected class and males not? What about non-binary or gender-fluid people?

    They don't. They got sued by some guy. It eventually became a class action & Hooters, Inc. finally settled. But I think it was like a patent troll lawsuit. The men who sued never actually cared about working there. Some lawyer saw a chance to get rich ripping off a corporation & went out and recruited guys to apply, get turned down and sue.

    Most of the guys who got hired after the lawsuit was settled weren't that comfortable wearing the uniform & probably didn't do that well in tips.

    I don't think "non-binary" or "gender-fluid" has become an issue yet. And again, it's a sports bar where the women make very good tips. I don't know how well "non-binary"/"gender-fluid" wait-staff would do in the tips department. Hadn't really thought about the place in many, many years and the last time I did think about it "non-binary"/"gender-fluid" identity wasn't a thing.

    So I don't know.

    When I worked for the Burglar Alarm Company, I used to eat at Hooters occasionally when I spent a lot of time on the road for my job. I'd be gone from home overnight 3-4 days a week and I'd eat as many as 16+ meals a week in restaurants. (Probably more, because by the time the weekend rolled around, if I was off, I didn't care that much for cooking.)

    Much as I love McDonald's coffee, that much of their food would kill you sooner or later, so I ate at a variety of fast & slow food places - usually fast food for lunch & slow food for supper and a mix of fast/slow and whatever the motel had for breakfast. A couple of places where I had customers, Hooters was the most convenient place to stop for what I guess might be semi-slow food that wasn't another fricken' McDonald's hamburger ... especially when work kept me from having supper until late and this was long before McDonald's had the all-night drive through.

    But that was last century. This century I've eaten at Hooters a couple of times when I was on road trips since I got home from Iraq - maybe once or twice a year between 2005 and 2019 (road trips once or twice a year) - more between 2005-2010 and less after 2010 when I was diagnosed with Cancer.

    Thinking about it, I've only had one big road trip since then and a couple of shorter trips (weekends) every year for meetings of the photography association I belong to (professional development).

    933:

    Moz @ 918: What's more useful: a tractor that's been bricked by the manufacturer, or a mule?

    You know it's only a matter of time.

    I don't own a tractor. I have had a mule step on my foot. There's a hoary old joke about "bricking" a camel.

    http://www.eagle-wing.net/FunStuff/Mature/Camel.shtml

    934:

    Heteromeles @ 925: Thanks, I couldn't remember all the details about SAPI and dragon skin, and didn't want to sound stupider than I normally do. In this case, it is embarrassing, because I remember the husband of a friend doing multiple tours over there, and I seem to recall hearing a bit about dragon skin issues from them.

    I think a lot of the private contractors bought them. And I don't mean Blackwater & the like. I mean KBR truck drivers, civilian logistics people at LSA Anaconda & the people who ran the PX/BX system and DFACs on the FOBs. Plus maybe some of the civilian security guards down at the bases in Kuwait.

    935:

    Balthus s’excuser @ 926: JBS man, Korea / Vietnam / Gulf. You didn't lose the love of your life because of her, you lost her because you never talked through and understood things.

    If you mean my ex-wife, I didn't lose her at all. She lost me. She was a narcissistic sociopath who found a new victim and ran off with him.

    I'm lucky I got out of it alive.

    936:

    JBS No drainage ditches & dykes, not settled for nearly a thousand years, oh & is an elevated plateau, whereas the "Washlands" are all of those things & very close to Sea Level - so that when you get a tiny elevation, ancient settlements appear as this picture, in which The Ship of the Fens is visible, appear. ... later: commisserations & congratulations, but please do not feed the troll?

    Moz A v large number of people don't realise that English Law is adversarial, but Scottish is inquisitorial ....

    SS Doesn't count - I can see a road cutting right there ...

    937:

    Floodmap

    https://www.floodmap.net/

    Using this and selecting 60 metres of sea level rise my house is on the coast of a small island surrounded by he East Anglian sea. Fresh water would be a problem.

    939:

    Farm Machinery?

    Well my memory was a bit faulty. It was an 8N and they were not produced after 1952.

    It was a fun way for a kid to earn money mowing fields in summers. The impending cataracts and possible skin cancer, well, we'll see.

    The PTO overrun clutch mentioned in this article was a big improvement. But you could use 1/2 tube of grease per day if mowing all day with lots of speed changes. And to keep from tearing up the overrun clutch you used shear pins. A big bolt that would shear off if you hit something the mower couldn't take down. Never leave home without a handful or your day might end early.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_N-series_tractor#8N

    And at the other end of the scale you have this: https://www.deere.com/en/tractors/4wd-track-tractors/9420r-tractor/ And anyone who's driven such equipment knows the fun of dealing with tires filled with water. And if not in the tropics with salt (CaCl2) mixed in. Just to make life so much fun when dealing with a puncture.

    940:

    I just looked at wikipedia for Australian numbers, and I can't be bothered looking up the actual ones because it's too complicated, but roughly the Liberal party have 50k members to The Greens 15k (the Australian Labour Party have ~60k). Notably the Coalition is cagey about actual numbers (that's the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Liberal-National Party (Queensland) and the Country Party (Northern Territory)) . Useful summaries from the centrist fringe of our bought media::

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/13/party-hardly-why-australias-big-political-parties-are-struggling-to-compete-with-grassroots-campaigns

    https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-incredibly-shrunken-liberal-party-and-its-structural-challenge-20190221-p50z9r.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party

    941:

    I used to be a member of a casino when I lived and worked in Cardiff a long time back. In the UK casinos are private clubs, members only plus a limited number of guests allowed entry but the yearly membership fee was pitiful, about UKP 5 IIRC since they made their money at the gambling tables.

    What they did have was a decent restaurant with low prices which I frequented about once a month. It was also a good place to people-watch.

    942:

    60 metres? That would happen to mine at 15 metres, and I live just south of Cambridge (most of which would be under water).

    943:

    I can assure you that we DO know what I said that we do. The reason that you think that we don't is that there has been effective censorship of the area in the UK and apparently the USA for as long as I have been alive.

    The reasons that deterrence doesn't work are (a) many of the 'culprits' are not rational at the time (or at all) and (b) the psychology of risk-taking even in people who are mostly rational. And that is why no form of deterrence used in history has ever worked as a primary control.

    And you are quite simply wrong that murderers invariably murder again - look it up.

    944:

    Well, at least they have got over that truly imbecilic molten sodium idea!

    945:

    Elderly Cynic @ 943: "(b) the psychology of risk-taking even in people who are mostly rational."

    Ah yes, the "I-won't-get-caught-that's-for-the-stupids."

    I've met them before. Most were ex-convicts. One of them, I don't know if he was an ex-convict, but I caught him red-handed, so to speak. I had hired him to insulate and finish the interior of a shed.

    He had such a surprised look on his face when I told him I was going to call the police.

    946:

    Yes, that's the stupid end of the spectrum, but the mindset is embedded in the human psyche, even for the most rational people (mainly those of us on the Asperger's spectrum). I call it the "hope springs infernal" mentality, and it's why people gamble (including a lot of financial dealings), the cause of the majority of road accidents, a major reason that people are careless with their health and so on. Humans are very bad at evaluating risk.

    This has been well-researched. Insofar as deterrence works at all, the penalty is much less important than the probability of being caught.

    947:

    Thanks for that.

    60 metres turns our street into a beach, with our house on the wet side of it. Another 60 metres, and the coastline would move about a km south.

    948:

    I'm thinking some kind of on-board AI that can apply very small corrections to the course during the terminal phase making it possible for the target system to "capture" the probe. Plus some kind of magic parachute/solar-sail to slow the probe

    The numbers aren't encouraging. c/100 is 3000 km/s and solar escape velocity at the photosphere is a little less than 620 km/s. The probe would need to do a lot of slowing down. Maybe in a multiple star system, preferably incorporating a few neutron stars, some sort of multiple pass scheme would work -- IDK.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities

    949:

    My reading of the research is that punishment does deter, but that the deterrent effect caps out as soon as the punishment on offer is at least as costly as the gain from the crime.

    If my understanding is correct, this explains why punishments don't increase deterrence beyond a certain level - if you wouldn't risk a day in jail for a crime, then the exact penalty doesn't matter beyond that - anything that guarantees you at least a day in jail is enough punishment to stop you doing it. The Bloody Code and its use of the death penalty is certainly more punishment than a day in jail, but if a day locked up is enough to stop you completely, death won't stop you more than completely.

    On the other hand, perceived chance of being caught still changes the deterrent effect - I might be willing to risk a 0.0001% chance of being caught and killed for my crime, but not a 1% chance of going to jail for a day.

    950:

    Didn't some famous author once opine that "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology"?

    It sounds like Niven and is.

    951:

    Yes. I was over-simplifying. And your understanding is relevant only to 'rational' criminals, anyway - I believe that (in the UK) a majority of murderers, extremely violent criminals, and the worst sex offenders are seriously psychologically disturbed.

    952:

    And at the other end you have just plain old dumb. My ex-cop discussed frequent flyers for the low end stuff. And once you got a name he said you went first to mom's house then to the girlfriends. And that got them almost every time.

    Deterrents seemed to not register with these. They just didn't know, or maybe couldn't learn, how to function in a society where you just didn't take things belonging to others.

    One of his laments on being a cop was the amount of this level of BS you had to deal with day to day. It mentally just wore him down.

    953:

    Again, following the research, even the psychologically disturbed are rational in their decision to commit a crime or not. Where they differ from the general population is in their perception of costs, benefits and probabilities, which moves it even further away from extreme punishment as deterrent.

    At an extreme, if you genuinely believe that God will protect you from being punished for an act, no punishment for that act is severe enough to deter - you are confident that you will not be punished. Similarly, if you're sufficiently out of whack that you consider the pleasure of administering a beating outweighs any possible punishment (at least at the moment you decide to administer the beating), then you'll do it, even though after the fact you may feel that the cost/benefit ratio is out of line.

    The truly disturbed are thus very difficult to deter, simply because while their actions are rational in the context of their thinking, that thinking is not the same as the rest of us by a very significant margin.

    954:

    Or perhaps Lt. Gorman was considered the most expendable of the available lieutenants by at least those of TPTB who clearly understood the potential lethality of the threat.

    955:

    I doubt very much that applies to the impulse criminals (especially when drunk or hopped-up), who account for a lot of the violent assaults (and worse).

    However, we seem to have been at terminological cross-purposes - I wouldn't normally class such people as rational, but am not disagreeing with your points.

    956:

    So I've seen quite a lot of what people try to do with fictional nanotech, as well as actual nanoscale and molecular engineering.

    The one time I had a pint of beer with Eric Drexler he was quite bitter about the way his ideas had been misappropriated: by SF as a kind of magic wand wish-fulfillment tool, and by the chemicals industry ("these days nanotechnology is just a fancy marketing name for organic chemistry"). He's not wrong about that angle. And, weirdly, some of his ideas seem to be inching closer to reality -- but mostly through physical chemistry processes (small node size lithography) and also through messing around with enzymes. The full-on "Engines of Creation" stuff is still decades away -- and that doesn't including the bits that are "approximately never" (such as, thankfully, grey goo: we've got grey goo already in our water/lipid phase nanotech, we call it "bacteria" or maybe "fungi").

    957:

    Whitroth: I take it you missed this news about Google DeepMind and protein folding?

    958:

    I'm at 100m (Champigny sur Marne) and 78m (Abidjan).

    My mother in law is worse off -- she's at 2m above current sea level.

    959:

    David L & others .. Criminals: "Stupid, arrogant & shortsighted" - & probably "off their heads" as well. The idiots who did this - about a mile from me - obviously did not engage their brains for even a second - stabbed & died on Wednesday ( probably, again, because they were idiots ) arrested on Sunday ...

    Further to which .. "SF": At an extreme, if you genuinely believe that God will protect you from being punished for an act, no punishment for that act is severe enough to deter ... Da'esh. What does one do with Da'esh? Treat them like the WaffenSS & kill them all? Attempt to convert them to atheism? If something in between, then what?

    Charlie DeepMind / Protein-folding. At the very least, it's a promising start, which should get a lot better with time & practice.

    960:

    I had heard about it. That news item points out that it's systematically better, but not immensely so - 15%, according to one measure.

    And all such database-comparison methods have the problem that their accuracy will almost certainly be poor for proteins very different from currently known ones, especially if they have anomalous folding. But it's precisely that sort of out-of-the-box protein that people are most interested in being able to model, because they often can't be synthesised using existing toolkits and the researchers want to know if it's worth the effort of extending those.

    Yes, it's an advance, but not a major one.

    961:

    Slashdot has some current discussion on a recently published plan for Martian cities. The discussion seems to be tracking a lot of concerns raised here. The plans seem to be missing some details about cost, boost mass, energy budget, and what the planetary economy might be based upon. Anyway, the pictures are pretty.

    https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/03/20/199222/five-cites-on-mars-architecture-studio-releases-its-plans#comments

    962:

    We don't know if "deterrence" works or not. We only know that certain things have proved ineffective as a deterrent.

    From Home Office studies of the pre-1830s system we know for sure that hanging was not a deterrent to pickpockets -- as determined by pre-execution interviews with condemned pickpockets who had been arrested for plying their trade at public executions of other pickpockets.

    There's a lot of research on deterrence that tends to the conclusion that deterrence can work, but it has nothing to do with the severity of punishment and everything to do with the inevitability of punishment.

    Pickpockets aren't deterred by hanging if there's no police force and the risk of arrest is basically random happenstance. But they are deterred by community service (picking up litter, etc) if there's an efficient police force capable of enforcing the law, and a judicial system that handles criminal trials efficiently.

    Put it another way: a 1% probability of getting caught and a 10 year prison sentence isn't a deterrent. Whereas a 100% chance of getting caught and a 1 year community service order is a deterrent.

    (This is for crimes that are deterrable, however. Smoking dope, burglary, scamming pensioners out of their savings. The model breaks down completely if it comes up against unpremeditated/impulse crimes -- pub brawls, for example.)

    Also:

    There is no excuse for committing murder. People who "get away" with murder invariably murder again.

    Wrong. Again, the UK Home Office has good stats on this. Murder (first degree) carries a mandatory life sentence in the UK (since the death penalty ended in 1965). But most murderers are eventually released under license. The recidivism rate is tiny -- fractions of a percentage point -- vastly lower than the recidivism rate for other crimes. Indeed, it's orders of magnitude lower than the false positive rate for hangings of "murderers" who were later proven to have been innocent in the decades leading up to abolition.

    963:

    Charlie Stross @ 957

    Looks nice, but what is it?

    A protein secondary structure?

    A protein tertiary structure?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_secondary_structure

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_tertiary_structure

    964:

    A friend and I, coming from the DC metro area, rented a roomette on Amtrak. Going west, gorgeous scenery.

    966:

    Let me read that... "deep pockets".... Right. NIH-XPLOR is free. And runs in parallel, too, so if you've got a beowolf cluster, it's fine.

    967:

    Drexler, Engines of Creation

    The thing that I think should be remembered about that is, details about nanothings and implementation aside, he pointed out that the present biological world is an existence proof by demonstration that matter can be alive, conscious and intelligent (for modest values of intelligent). That seems to be true and significant.

    968:

    AC Clarke

    Vice versa.

    969:

    GT@959: "What does one do with Da'esh? Treat them like the WaffenSS & kill them all? Attempt to convert them to atheism? If something in between, then what?"

    The defeat and occupation of Japan at the end of WWII might be a worthwhile example. While I suspect there were many in Japan who 'had their doubts', the prewar and wartime culture was basically 'fight to the death'. They were thoroughly defeated, long before Hiroshima, but the bombs gave the Emperor a way to end the fight.

    There were military and political leaders at the time who wondered what it would take to end the war against a fanatical, suicidal opposition.

    A decade, half a decade later and Japan's culture had morphed entirely.

    The parallel with something like Daesh is in the individuals. As a group it must be defeated, individuals can probably be brought out of the cult through deprogramming.

    970:

    The model breaks down completely if it comes up against unpremeditated/impulse crimes -- pub brawls, for example.

    There's a fair bit of evidence that people's response to alcohol and other inebriants is culturally determined. So a different model tied to culture might be needed for crimes where 'loss of control' is a factor.

    (One study gave a group of hard-drinking university students* either alcoholic drinks or fake** drinks for a night of drinking. The researchers were supposedly testing something else, so all students thought they were getting free drinks as well as a few quid. At the end of the evening all of the students were hammered — including those who hadn't had any booze all night.)

    *The usual psych-research subject :-)

    **Supposedly tasting/feeling like alcoholic drinks but not actually containing alcohol (or much — it's been a few years since I read it).

    971:

    Totally unrelated to anything in this thread (AFAIK) but touching on other discussions about energy sources, I belatedly discovered

    https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php

    It has the Gridwatch database of UK total electricity demand and aggregate individual sources such as CCGT, nuclear, wind, biomass, solar and others in 5-minute intervals, day after day, year in and year out.

    I've been interested in wind especially so downloaded some 125,000 rows of CSV and see, to no great surprise, that wind, while making a very important overall contribution, is very variable and can die down a lot for periods of ten days or more.

    972:

    Rocketpjs @ 969: "They were thoroughly defeated, long before Hiroshima, but the bombs gave the Emperor a way to end the fight" and also: "A decade, half a decade later and Japan's culture had morphed entirely."

    In traditional left-wing historiography the emperor surrendered only after the Russians started their last offensive and the Japanese army told him that the situation was, in consequence, hopeless. To the army brass the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were no more than examples of useless bombings, like the B-29 bombings of Japanese cities. The bulk of the Japanese army was outside the home islands, far from the B-29s. They felt they had nothing to fear right up to the day the Russians "betrayed" them and invaded.

    If you look at the Japanese mindset a decade later, they still thought that the Chinese were an inferior species and that the Yankees were foreign devils. Right now a lot of Japanese seem happy at the idea that they'll probably be having their Olympics without any forrign spectators. They certainly haven't been "deprogrammed".

    973:

    Mike Collins @ 937: Floodmap

    https://www.floodmap.net/

    Using this and selecting 60 metres of sea level rise my house is on the coast of a small island surrounded by he East Anglian sea. Fresh water would be a problem.

    Mike Collins @ 938: Also
    http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=52.6470,1.7200&zoom=17&m=1&type=hybrid

    The second one is much better for my purposes.

    What's the consensus among reliable, reputable scientists? Would 60m be the worst case? Best case? Somewhere in the middle?

    Sixty meters floods the Neuse River and Crabtree Creek and puts a half-mile wide "stretch of ocean" (I don't know the word for it?) a mile from my house.

    https://www.floodmap.net/?ll=35.799576,-78.609243&z=15&e=60

    I don't think it will really affect me, because I will probably be gone before it happens. But I am concerned with what those who come after me will have to deal with.

    974:

    Ah yes, the "I-won't-get-caught-that's-for-the-stupids."

    Criminology -- the study of criminal behaviour -- has some interesting lessons ...

    Firstly, criminals in prison overwhelmingly rate themselves as competent; they just had this one piece of bad luck, could happen to anyone, that's why they're in here, won't happen again. (Especially to frequent flyers.)

    Secondly, criminology can only study criminals who are sufficiently in-competent that they got caught! So we don't know a whole lot about how the efficient, competent criminals operate. No, wait, we do: they get themselves elected Prime Minister or President and change the law to give themselves retroactive immunity, or they figure out some grift and become televangelists with three business jets, thank you Jeeezus, or they found a start-up that takes in billions in investment and somehow manages to lose money creatively for a few years before it goes bust and oddly the CEO walks away with several millions tucked away in their back pocket.

    975:

    The defeat and occupation of Japan at the end of WWII might be a worthwhile example.

    The Tokyo War Crimes tribunal tried and executed a number of leaders: roughly 900-950 death sentences were handed out at various post-war trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    In addition: 7 years of military occupation and direct rule, then a staged transition to managed democracy with a large occupying force remaining on Japanese soil to this day (Okinawa in particular), and the threat of Stalin on the other side of the sea to concentrate the minds of anyone who was still skeptical about the idea that surrendering to the US and UK was a good idea.

    976:

    The Press reports of new wind turbine farms always state the dataplate figure, the absolute maximum amount of electricity the installation in question can provide -- for example the Hornsea stage 1 offshore wind farm, one of the largest in the world has a widely reported dataplate figure of 1.2GW. It has of course never produced that amount of electricity and on several days since it was commissioned the entire British production of electricity from wind has been less than 1GW in total, from a wind turbine fleet of over 24GW dataplate nationally.

    I finally found a figure I'd been looking for for a while -- the amount of energy needed to heat British homes, shops, factories etc. in winter. It's a bit dated, from 2010 but the peak demand just for heating is 300GW. Nearly all of that heat energy is provided by gas of course but if we're going to wean ourselves off the fossil carbon teat we're going to need an awful lot more wind turbines to meet that level of energy demand predictably from renewables. Right now, on a good day with a storm passing over the country we can get 12GW of wind-generated electricity out of what we've built over the past ten years. If there's a lull then freezing to death in the dark is a real possibility if we don't build a lot more wind turbines.

    In reality we'll build more gas turbine generators to provide peak power when the weather Gods don't oblige and pretend it's Green because look, wind turbines! and similarly pretend we're going to do something about the extra CO2 added to the atmosphere later.

    977:

    n traditional left-wing historiography the emperor surrendered only after the Russians started their last offensive and the Japanese army told him that the situation was, in consequence, hopeless. To the army brass the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were no more than examples of useless bombings, like the B-29 bombings of Japanese cities. The bulk of the Japanese army was outside the home islands, far from the B-29s. They felt they had nothing to fear right up to the day the Russians "betrayed" them and invaded. If you look at the Japanese mindset a decade later, they still thought that the Chinese were an inferior species and that the Yankees were foreign devils. Right now a lot of Japanese seem happy at the idea that they'll probably be having their Olympics without any forrign spectators. They certainly haven't been "deprogrammed".

    This is getting to be a strange attractor for this blog. It shows up every few years.

    First off, there's a really good history of the end of the war: Richard Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. What makes it so good is that 50 years had passed by the time Frank wrote it, so he had access to both the US and Japanese secret archives to find out what had actually happened.

    It wasn't particularly the Russians, and it was very much the atomic bombs. Sorry, the theory you posted above is one Frank deals with at some length, and the records simply don't support your contention. The simple version is that Japan and the US were both readying themselves for what the US called Operation Downfall, which was an invasion of Japan. Reading the records afterwards, it was obvious that both sides had planned for the same invasion, so it was going to be a bloody mess, with millions dead on both sides. Japanese soldiers were falling back as fast as they could to reinforce the motherland, given that the rail and sea links had largely been destroyed by that point.

    What the US did was to drop two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by a metric shit ton of leaflets with a list of the next cities they would bomb in order, ending with Tokyo and the Imperial Palace. This was a bluff (there weren't enough atomic bombs in the pipeline) but it worked. Hirohito and council realized they were faced with a weapon that they couldn't defend against, that could destroy cities at the allies' will, and that this weapon rendered their defense of Japan moot. So they surrendered. Hirohito then faced an attempted coup that failed, and Japan formally surrendered soon thereafter.

    The narrative you gave above popped up as part of the anti-nuclear war efforts, part of a claim that nukes were not only dangerous but useless. The Japanese bombings, unfortunately, do not support this claim. First off, the two nukes only accounted for about 25% of the deaths from US air raids on Japan, with the rest being accounted for by the firebombing raids that had gone on for awhile by that point. Secondly, the two bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people, but inarguably saved millions of Japanese lives by rendering Operation Downfall moot. I'm not a fan of nuclear war at all, and I hope the damned things completely disappear from arsenals sooner, rather than later. That said, they shortened WW2 and caused fewer casualties than the conventional war could and did, and there is, in fact, good evidence on which to base those claims.

    As for the rest, realize that I and a number of people on this list have Asian spouses and friends, so please be thoughtful about race-based comments. I'm quite aware of both inter-Asian and anti-Asian racism, but given how many anti-Asian hate crimes are happening in the US at the moment, such stereotypes may not be a good thing to play up.

    978:

    Allen Thomson @ 948:

    I'm thinking some kind of on-board AI that can apply very small corrections to the course during the terminal phase making it possible for the target system to "capture" the probe. Plus some kind of magic parachute/solar-sail to slow the probe

    The numbers aren't encouraging. c/100 is 3000 km/s and solar escape velocity at the photosphere is a little less than 620 km/s. The probe would need to do a lot of slowing down. Maybe in a multiple star system, preferably incorporating a few neutron stars, some sort of multiple pass scheme would work -- IDK.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities

    It still seems feasible that using some sort of Solar Sail as a parachute to decelerate at the far end might work.

    Most of the Wikipedia article on solar sails is concerned with accelerating away from the solar system (or getting to the outer solar system), but there is a table for Interstellar travel catalog to use photogravitational assists for a full stop.

    It suggests a period of 100 - 150 years for Alpha Centauri A & B. Proxima Centauri would obviously take longer because the "light pressure" of a Red Dwarf is going to be a lot less; so you'd want to be going slower & deploy your "parachute" for a lot longer period (i.e. starting further out).

    979:

    Charlie Stross @ 974

    The best movie portrayal I've ever seen that gave life to the "incompetent" criminal mind at work was Primal Fear (1996) with Richard Gere as the defense attorney and with Edward Norton, who gave an outstanding performance as the "bad guy".

    980:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 949: My reading of the research is that punishment does deter, but that the deterrent effect caps out as soon as the punishment on offer is at least as costly as the gain from the crime.

    If my understanding is correct, this explains why punishments don't increase deterrence beyond a certain level - if you wouldn't risk a day in jail for a crime, then the exact penalty doesn't matter beyond that - anything that guarantees you at least a day in jail is enough punishment to stop you doing it. The Bloody Code and its use of the death penalty is certainly more punishment than a day in jail, but if a day locked up is enough to stop you completely, death won't stop you more than completely.

    On the other hand, perceived chance of being caught still changes the deterrent effect - I might be willing to risk a 0.0001% chance of being caught and killed for my crime, but not a 1% chance of going to jail for a day.

    How do you know when someone has been deterred from committing a crime?

    How do you measure the crimes that didn't happen? We can somewhat measure what DOES NOT work, but when it DID work and a crime didn't happen how do we measure that?

    My contention is we don't know what works in deterring crime, because we can only measure what has not worked. How would you measure successful deterrence?

    981:

    There's a lot of research on deterrence that tends to the conclusion that deterrence can work, but it has nothing to do with the severity of punishment and everything to do with the inevitability of punishment.

    Unfortunately anecdotal (AFAIK, Soviet criminologists never bothered to do a formal study), but here is something to support your point:

    Soviet Union did quite a few flip-flops regarding capital punishment during its 74 years, but under Brezhnev things stood thus: Nobody was ever executed for one murder (typical sentence was 12 years, could range from 8 to 15 depending on circumstances), but killing two or more people automatically earned firing squad. And quickly -- no lengthy appeals in USSR.

    Consequently, inmates already in prison for murder were extremely reluctant to kill another prisoner because they knew that would be the end of them.

    982:

    Even here in Merry Murderland, the vaaaaast majority of murders are impulsive acts, and even the ones that are premeditated are themselves almost all in circumstances that wouldn't actually repeat.

    983:

    How do you measure the crimes that didn't happen?

    Experimentally. You change something and see what that does to the crime rate.

    That can be as simple as rounding up a bunch of criminals and moving them somewhere else, so now you can compare site a: lots of criminals with site b: missing a lot of criminals. The British did this extensively, as well as a variant involving removing rather than moving. The results seem to have been mixed, because those experiments were hard to evaluate using the technology of the time (Australia is not England, genocide is not the same as intra-racial murder, and "five shiploads" is not a good statistical analysis).

    These days what's normally done is using census data as well as reporting + arrest + charge + conviction data to monitor the effect of changes in treatment of residents in an area. Using modern statistic methods and detailed geographic and demographic breakdown we can use "natural experiments" (like lead in petrol or drinking water, or a difference in policing strategy between police commands) to see how people react, and what that does to the output variables. We also have longitudinal studies, like the (in)famous Dunedin Study.

    It's not rocket science, but at the some time it's not "someone on the internet reckons". There really are highly trained professionals in multiple fields who spend their entire careers doing this stuff. In some countries those people often work for the government, generally in the legal system, and often have direct input to legislation and other government activities.

    We have been through this repeatedly on this blog, and it's tiresome. Criminology is a well-established field, it's not as though my uncle was some pioneer who chanced his way into the RCMP because they liked the shape of his beard.

    984:

    waldo @ 954: Or perhaps Lt. Gorman was considered the most expendable of the available lieutenants by at least those of TPTB who clearly understood the potential lethality of the threat.

    A LT may be expendable, but the rest of the platoon is NOT. At least, that's my experience from the military.

    It's Hollywood and Gorman is intentionally selected for failure specifically for the profit of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

    But that's not something that would be acceptable to ANY modern military and something I hope never will, especially not in any U.S. military force. There's no way to have an effective, cohesive military force if the rank and file have even a hint of a suspicion they're sacrificial pawns being set up for betrayal. So Hollywood is in imperfect mirror for real life.

    985:

    Or if you believe Avi Loeb's argument in Extraterrestrial, something like 'Oumuamua could have been a starwisp probe, because it was light enough and reflective enough to accelerate as it left our system. There's also the idea that it's a shard of really reflective and really light nitrogen ice, for what that's worth.

    But the bigger point is that a probe, if it came into our system, probably wouldn't announce its presence. If it was functional after however many thousands of years, and if it heard a bunch of radio noise on the way in, it might well try to carefully imitate a comet, come in on a hyperbolic path, and bug out before reporting home, just so that the system indigenes wouldn't find it and get ideas of some sort. "Don't mind me while I play dead" is a classic defense, after all.

    986:

    That actually is a good question for writing stories about space marines and other first-in types based on modern military doctrine.

    If you've got a standard SF monster or station mysteriously fallen silent scenario, and you headed a squad of marines who were going to be sent in to investigate after all the remote intelligence had been gathered, how would you go about doing it? Is there doctrine analogous to this situation?

    I suppose the analogous situation might be when a fire base has fallen radio silent, and an overflight shows no damage but no sign of life either. What does a trained officer do next in terms of planning and acting?

    987:

    That actually is a good question for writing stories about space marines and other first-in types based on modern military doctrine.

    If you want to game things out, you could do worse than pick up At Close Quarters by Doug Berry.

    https://bitsuk.net/Products/ACQ/ACQ.html

    Doug was an infantryman, and once said that he knew the rules were good when playtest groups reinvented proper infantry tactics because they discovered Hollywood tactics got them killed. :-)

    988:

    Charlie Stross @ 962:

    We don't know if "deterrence" works or not. We only know that certain things have proved ineffective as a deterrent.

    From Home Office studies of the pre-1830s system we know for sure that hanging was not a deterrent to pickpockets -- as determined by pre-execution interviews with condemned pickpockets who had been arrested for plying their trade at public executions of other pickpockets.

    There's a lot of research on deterrence that tends to the conclusion that deterrence can work, but it has nothing to do with the severity of punishment and everything to do with the inevitability of punishment.

    Pickpockets aren't deterred by hanging if there's no police force and the risk of arrest is basically random happenstance. But they are deterred by community service (picking up litter, etc) if there's an efficient police force capable of enforcing the law, and a judicial system that handles criminal trials efficiently.

    Put it another way: a 1% probability of getting caught and a 10 year prison sentence isn't a deterrent. Whereas a 100% chance of getting caught and a 1 year community service order is a deterrent.

    (This is for crimes that are deterrable, however. Smoking dope, burglary, scamming pensioners out of their savings. The model breaks down completely if it comes up against unpremeditated/impulse crimes -- pub brawls, for example.)

    That's kind of my point. From the records we know that the threat of being hanged was NOT a deterrent for pickpockets.

    But what about all those others who decided not to be pickpockets? What deterred them from pursuing a life of crime?

    Also:

    There is no excuse for committing murder. People who "get away" with murder invariably murder again.

    Wrong. Again, the UK Home Office has good stats on this. Murder (first degree) carries a mandatory life sentence in the UK (since the death penalty ended in 1965). But most murderers are eventually released under license. The recidivism rate is tiny -- fractions of a percentage point -- vastly lower than the recidivism rate for other crimes. Indeed, it's orders of magnitude lower than the false positive rate for hangings of "murderers" who were later proven to have been innocent in the decades leading up to abolition.

    Do you consider that to be getting away with murder? I don't.

    They were caught, tried & convicted and served time in prison. I don't really have the tools to evaluate how long a prison sentence is effective in keeping someone from murdering again, and I don't know how the U.K. decides who to keep in prison and who to release, but as far as I can tell they don't release everyone who's serving a life sentence before that sentence is complete.

    And I also know there murderers in the U.K. who are released early who DO go on to kill again.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-16638227

    We know a considerable bit about those who do commit murder, including many of the the deterrents that failed to stop them. But what do we know about the vast majority who DO NOT commit murder, and WHY they don't? What deters them?

    989:

    Allen Thomson @ 968:

    AC Clarke

    Vice versa.

    You'd think the commenters on a SciFi author's blog would have recognized it right away and recognized it as the converse of Clarke's original observation.

    990:

    Charlie @ 975 Precisely - see also the Occupation of (W) Germany & the Allied Zones of Control & Denazification ... etc. RIGHT - now then, how do you do that to Da'esh? You need a fully-free-hand to do anything at all (short of nukes) militarily to Da'esh & then you need to be able to commit to the resources to "control" those areas you have, err, "taken over" ... um, err, slight problems there, I think! Back to the original question. What to do about Da'esh - kill them all, or soemthing else & if so, what?

    Nojay @ 976 As I keep on saying & nobody fucking LISTENS ... tidal.

    991:

    I don't comment on absolutely everything I know.

    992:

    Heteromeles @ 977: I'm not a fan of nuclear war at all, and I hope the damned things completely disappear from arsenals sooner, rather than later. That said, they shortened WW2 and caused fewer casualties than the conventional war could and did, and there is, in fact, good evidence on which to base those claims.

    Amen to that.

    993:

    Heteromeles @ 985: Or if you believe Avi Loeb's argument in Extraterrestrial, something like 'Oumuamua could have been a starwisp probe, because it was light enough and reflective enough to accelerate as it left our system. There's also the idea that it's a shard of really reflective and really light nitrogen ice, for what that's worth.

    But the bigger point is that a probe, if it came into our system, probably wouldn't announce its presence. If it was functional after however many thousands of years, and if it heard a bunch of radio noise on the way in, it might well try to carefully imitate a comet, come in on a hyperbolic path, and bug out before reporting home, just so that the system indigenes wouldn't find it and get ideas of some sort. "Don't mind me while I play dead" is a classic defense, after all.

    That's a good argument for the AI running the probe having discretion on whether or not to deploy the parachute. But doesn't tell me anything about whether the parachute will work or not.

    994:

    Niala @ 991: I don't comment on absolutely everything I know.

    Why not? It's more fun when you do. I only try to restrain myself from commenting when it's something I'm pretty sure I don't know.

    995:

    Well there is the question of letting others have a turn on certain topics, instead of being a smart ass absolutely all the time.

    996:

    Why I've been going about this deterrence stuff ... how do we prevent this shit from happening?

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/us/boulder-colorado-shooting/index.html

    997:

    Thanks for the recommendation! Now, for lazy slobs like myself who'd rather read someone else's combat doctrine than (re)invent our own...Or who are stuck in the US and can't buy this one easily...

    998:

    for lazy slobs like myself who'd rather read someone else's combat doctrine than (re)invent our own...

    Better get that from someone who's actually had the training. I've read some manuals, but consistently lose tactical games.

    999:

    "I finally found a figure I'd been looking for for a while -- the amount of energy needed to heat British homes, shops, factories etc. in winter"

    Have we not discussed this figure like six times or more on this very blog? Usually in the context of "nuclear is what / is all, we need" and I point out that if it's all nuclear then you need to build enough to cover the winter peak and so you need to build like twice the figure you're using so it's even more expensive unless you cover the peaks with Interconnectors and sell the excess with Interconnectors. And if you're going to have the Interconnectors anyway, then that removes the objection to the much cheaper renewables. Then that gets thrashed back and forth a few times with you quoting figures from the brochures of imaginary reactors and me quoting figures from the real world, and you saying those figures don't apply in this situation.... And so on until neither can be bothered anymore.

    1000:

    I apologise, but must point out that that was not heavy.

    1001:

    Catching up after many days away, so here goes.

    SFReader @ 681: Tree size - several years ago I visited Mt Washington

    In the summer of 1991 I was coring trees in the Canadian Rockies (basically the BC - Alberta border) to construct tree ring chronologies. We were operating close to glaciers (Peyto Glacier in this case), and thus close to where trees could physically grow (any colder and they literally would not be there).

    I cored a tree (probably Engelmann spruce) that, upon inspection in the lab, was 760 years old. The tree was about 30-40 cm in diameter (not radius!). Some years this tree would lay down a ring only half a dozen cells wide.

    Other species (Larix lyallii, I believe, but it's somehow been 30 years, so I'm not 100% sure) don't bother putting down any rings at all when conditions are sufficiently unfavourable. Which makes producing a chronology a challenge - eventually you'd learn that "oh yes, 17xx, 18xx and 19xx almost never produce a ring, so if you're off by one, mark those as zero width".

    Robert Prior @ 838: I'm still pissed at the Tories for selling off Connaught Labs a generation ago.

    Not to worry, the Reformatories have rejected the notion that climate change is real at their recent convention. So we've got that and other stupidities to look forward to if they get in next time.

    It bothers me (to say the least) that our electoral system is set up so that only the CPC and Liberals have any chance of national government. If only we had a system better than FPTP.

    EC @ 943: And you are quite simply wrong that murderers invariably murder again - look it up.

    Going to give another quote from Rumpole - he mentioned facetiously that the majority of murderers only kill one person, so once they'd gotten it out of their system, why should they be punished further?

    David L @ 952: And at the other end you have just plain old dumb.

    I remember reading that a cop said "Policing would be a lot more difficult if the crooks weren't so stupid" or words to that effect.

    1002:

    Do we have enough tidal capacity to maintain 300GW even at minimum neaps? I don't think we do. There's enough tidal phase variation around the coast of Britain that we can be sure of always getting something, but half the time most of that something will be only what we can get from the crappier sites. And I'm not sure that even maximum springs output from the good sites adds up to 300GW.

    1003:

    Well, limit magazine capacity, for one thing. And keep working a lot harder on all that stuff about hatred and bigotry that's so frustrating and tedious for all of us to varying degrees.

    1004:

    This is another subject thrashed out several times in the past, by the same people. The UK tidal potential is about 10-30 GW. (depending on who you listen to)

    https://www.gov.uk/guidance/wave-and-tidal-energy-part-of-the-uks-energy-mix

    https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2016/10/tidal-and-wind-energy-in-the-uk

    1005:

    Magazine capacity really isn't possible any more because 3D printing and composites can make magazines that work well enough. These men are not going on extended missions in rough conditions, they're doing one, normally brief, action then giving up.

    The question is not "what have other countries done to stop mass killings", or even "what approaches work", it's "of the many things that have been shown to work, are any politically possible to implement in the USA?"

    And to that I think the answer is "no". We're have to just hope that political change eventually makes some or all of the know solutions possible eventually.

    1006:

    Deterrents seemed to not register with these. They just didn't know, or maybe couldn't learn, how to function in a society where you just didn't take things belonging to others.

    I still remember the easiest shoplifting case I had when working at a convenience store. A fellow we'd seen before shambled in, got a beer, and headed for the door. The conversation went roughly like this:

    Him: I need a beer! Me: Come on up and pay at the register. Him: I need a beer! Me: That's okay, just let me ring it up. Him: I don't have any money! I need a beer! Me: If you don't have any money you can't have a beer. Him: I NEED A BEER!

    He left and I called the police, directing them to the detox group house across the street, apartment so-and-so...

    1007:

    How about plasma cleaning?

    In physics experiments we sometimes put things that needs to be really clean, like laser mirrors, into a vacuum chamber, pump it down.

    Then one puts a little bit Argon, Neon, or maybe Hydrogen, into the chamber, applies a high voltage DC supply (or microwaves) to get a good, steady, glow discharge going.

    The discharge "burns" everything off the surface, especially organic stuff. It does not get warm in the normal sense, but, the ions are moving at a good clip correponding to very high temperatures.

    There has to be windows in the chamber, the glow is very pretty and very photogenic!

    PS:

    With plastic, the plasma will excite the surface so that stuff like Polyethylene and Teflon can be glued or have dyes printed on them. So, plama cleaning probably won't sterilise plastics more than Once.

    1008:

    JBS It really does seem to be a "USA problem". Other countries have considerable numbers of guns in their societies - think rural France or Germany, for instance, & mass shootings may happen, but they are incredibly rare, compared to the USA. Incidentally & AGAIN, the argument about being armed ("carrying") stopping random shooters seems to have failed - again And yet this obviously-false narrative is trotted out. There is plainly something badly worng with the USA society as a whole. ( See also Moz on "Politically possible in the USA?" )

    Pigeon Probably not enough to cover everything, no. But it would make a very reliable cover for huge amounts of it, wouldn't it?

    1009:

    Don't allow morons and cray-cray people to have guns? Establish a fund that pays compensation to all victims, funded by an annual tax on each gun owned (people with illegal guns can conveniently be taken down for tax fraud, which worked on Al Capone)?

    Realistically, I think it is a "Culture Problem" and that cannot be fixed with the population as it is.

    1010:

    Meanwhile... An interesting problem ( To do with the "Standard Model" )

    1011:

    I remember I got randomly beaten up on the way home from work once. It happens that I was carrying a very sharp knife at the time, but to me it was just the tool I used to cut nylon cord and cheese. It never even occurred to me that I was armed.

    I don't know a lot about guns but I suspect that the answer depends on what the owner thinks they are for.

    1012:

    50p says the anomaly goes away as they collect more data.

    1013:

    "Probably not enough to cover everything, no. But it would make a very reliable cover for huge amounts of it, wouldn't it?"

    Average demand over the whole year is about 240 GW, winter peak 300 more than average.

    So if fully exploited, the most optimistic estimate is about 7% of that. That's not a usage of the phrase "huge amounts of it" that I was previously aware of.

    1014:

    He was probably suffering withdrawal, which can kill you. So faced with "die" or "steal beer" I can actually understand the steal beer.

    What I don't understand are the kids that wander the streets at night going through unlocked cars. If they got a night job stacking shelves or running a petrol station they'd earn 30 dollars an hour. Collecting coins out of cars would never match that. Then of course, if they get caught... A couple of years ago the dogs barked and I got up. There were two guys getting out of my car. I called the cops. They caught them 4 hours later, few streets away with 20 dollars in coins and a couple of credit cards in someone else's name. One of them was already out on bail for sexual assault, with his case to be heard on about 6 months time. So he went to jail for 6 months. The other guy was a minor who got a formal warning.

    That's a terrible return on their time.

    1015:

    What I don't understand are the kids that wander the streets at night going through unlocked cars. If they got a night job stacking shelves or running a petrol station they'd earn 30 dollars an hour.

    Well, I'm speaking from a position of little personal knowledge, but I've understood that not all people know how to get a job, even stacking shelves or running a petrol station. Parents are not all good in all circumstances, and in many places you can slip through institutions without nobody really teaching you the stuff. "Do better" is not very good advice, nor is "get a job" if you don't know how to even start doing that. (I could well imagine going to a petrol station asking for a job looking a bit scruffy not going very well.)

    In many cases, punishing especially young people, seems punishing them for something somebody else did or didn't do (their parents, possible governmental security nets, volunteers, what not). At least here in Finland I think it's been researched that putting young people in prison mostly puts them more into contact with older criminals who then teach them the trade, so doing that is not very smart, from the society's perspective.

    Add to this possible other factors, like being some easily discernible minority, and "getting a job" becomes even more difficult. People still need to eat and drink and have some shelter, so if you don't have a job (and perhaps don't know how to apply for benefits), what are you to do?

    1016:

    dpb Unfortunately, you are probably correct

    Mikko P Yes "Not knowing how" can be a huge disadvantge - & sometimes a slight advantage. Many years ago, it was suggested to me that "could I place a bet on $_Horse" for someone .. to which the answer was: "Sorry, where do I start? How do I place a bet - I've never, ever been inside a Betting Shop ( Bookmakers ) - what would I do next?"

    1017:

    In the UK in the year ending 2015, 81% of homicides resulted in a charge or the suicide of the suspect. There simply AREN'T that many people who murder and get away with it, let alone do it again, in any country that has even an approximation to the rule of law. Yes, I know that the USA is a dysfunctional society, but it's not as bad as it is made out to be.

    1018:

    I do. Yes, they could get more money in such a job, being bored out of their skulls and treated like dirt, but this is NOT a financial cost-benefit analysis. Let's skip the debate about whether it can be classified as rational.

    One reason is that it (AND the risk of being caught) is a bit of fun and excitement in lives that are seriously lacking in them. In the UK and I believe much of the USA, those have largely been privatised, and the process has not stopped, so even shelf-stackers have limited access.

    Another is getting back at people who are 'better off' (not always financially) or 'other'. The latter mindset has been documented ad tedium by zoologists and anthropologists.

    And something that elderly people and those who have never been through a turmoiled adolescence(*) seem to have obliterated from their minds (yes, it IS like that) is that such factors weigh MUCH more strongly in young people, especially young males.

    (*) Dysfunctional upbringings, ill-treatment or abuse (ESPECIALLY by mothers and other female carers) are a major factor in causing this.

    1019:

    I remember reading that a cop said "Policing would be a lot more difficult if the crooks weren't so stupid" or words to that effect.

    Might have been me.

    My wife's sister's husband is a retired cop. It as a mantra of his. I've mentioned it around here before.

    As a tangential point. He also carried a hand gun with something like a 6 shot clip. One of the somewhat second amendment relatives said that seems small. His reply was that most police shootings last less than 5 seconds and involve less than 3 shots total. A larger gun or more ammo just was going to be dead weight for 99.999% of the cops on the street. He retired never firing his gun except in practice.

    1020:

    Yes, I know that the USA is a dysfunctional society, but it's not as bad as it is made out to be.

    Even in the US the vast majority of killings are "heat of the moment" things. And most involve people who are in relationships. Dysfunctional but relationships none the less.

    1021:

    On the US Vaccine front. For those who want a treat and can ignore the related health issues.

    Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (which got it's start in North Carolina) will give anyone presenting a CDC Vaccine card a free doughnuts every day through the end of the year. And I can't see how they prevent you from showing up at multiple stores through out the day.

    Their doughnuts are fantastically tasty for most people. And about as healthy as eating dirt. But tasty they are. (More than one a day makes my stomach feel like I swallowed a brick but to each their own.)

    Most stores, maybe all, are really bakeries with a small store front and/or walk up window.

    If you're in the US, enjoy.

    1022:

    Gamma radiation is a common method of sterilisation for plastic products. It degrades DNA and a combination of DNA with specialised washing should do the trick.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17318649/

    1023:

    What I don't understand are the kids that wander the streets at night going through unlocked cars. If they got a night job stacking shelves or running a petrol station they'd earn 30 dollars an hour. Collecting coins out of cars would never match that.

    Only kids? In my area they seem to be mostly adults. They get on a lot of security cams at night.

    As to the why? I have an older cousin who is now in his 70s. He would much rather spend 10 to 12 hours a day working scams and make $50K a year then work a job 40-50 hours a week and make $150K.

    Maybe he was thinking if he just got the scam right he'd net $500K. I don't know.

    It's pretty bad when your dad tells you he considers your cousin a con man and thief. (That side of my family had a lot of issues.)

    1024:

    Greg Tingey @ 1016: ""Sorry, where do I start? How do I place a bet - I've never, ever been inside a Betting Shop ( Bookmakers ) - what would I do next?"

    This would be very simple over here (outside of pandemic times) since all betting is run by the province. Except of course for bingo parlors run by the indigenous peoples, on their reservations.

    All you'd have to do is go to one of our casinos and smiling employees would do their best to explain everything to you (including sports betting) to make you part with your money.

    I call this "voluntary tax", since all the money they make from the suckers go into the province's coffers.

    They also sell lottery tickets, in gas stations, pharmacies, dépanneurs, etc. etc.

    As for me I only bet on sure things: The delicious food they serve in the casino restaurants.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loto-Qu%C3%A9bec

    1025:

    When I was a teenager (over fifty years ago) I knew two people who were joy riders. They did it just for the excitement and danger. They were never caught. One went on to get a degree and became a town planner. The other was already working in a clerical job but last time I saw him he was working for Securicor.

    1026:

    His reply was that most police shootings last less than 5 seconds and involve less than 3 shots total.

    A few years ago I read a history of the Glock handgun (and company). Apparently the reason for refitting police departments with Glocks was a claim that the police were outgunned based on one shootout that was misrepresented (police claimed they were outgunned, when in fact the officers forgot that they had heavier weapons but admitting a mistake was a no-no). And when those retired police guns were sold to dealers they ended up in crooks' hands, which meant that small-time criminals had easy access to good firearms rather than zip guns and the like.

    1027:

    @977 There's plenty of creditable historians who would come down on the other side when describing the reasons for Japan's surrender. The whole issue is a minefield. There's an excellent summary of current historiography on the nuclear secrecy blog- https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/

    1028:

    All you'd have to do is go to one of our casinos and smiling employees would do their best to explain everything to you

    Years ago when I would be in Vegas for conventions the default TV channel when you turned it on was a continuous series of "how to" videos. How to play craps. How to play blackjack. How to play ....

    1029:

    Nothing deters me from murder. I don't want to murder people, so I don't need to be deterred,

    In general, deterrence is stopping someone from doing a thing they would otherwise do. And I don't point this out as JUST a semantic thing. JBS' statements here generally seem to feel like they mean it in that sense - that there's people who just want to crime, and we need to figure out ways to stop them.

    And generally, that's not how crime works. I say generally because people like domestic abusers exist.

    But reducing crime is not about deterring it and more about eliminating the causes, to the extent they can be eliminated. Poverty is the big dog, but there are others, including the 'justice' system itself.

    In the US, anyway, the fact that there are illegal drugs itself creates crime. I don't mean that in a 'it's not a crime if you legalize it' sense, although there's that. But because drugs are illegal it creates markets that incentivize other criminal behavior, for a variety of reasons.

    If, for instance, you sell drugs and you get busted, ESPECIALLY if you're a minority, the legal system both milks you for money AND makes it much harder to get well paying jobs, which feeds into the system.

    And so on.

    But if you take the classically popular idea that criminals are Other (which is, for instance, one of the major points of Les Mis)and they need to deterred because they are Bad, well....

    1030:

    I have to disagree. Crime has many causes, and some are definitely what you describe.

    Others are not, and I'll give a hypothetical example. It's hypothetical, not because it didn't happen, but because the suspect (aka IQ 45, Agent Orange, El Cheeto Grande, and the 45th President of the United States) has not been charged with this particular crime.

    The example is handling of the Covid19 pandemic. IQ45 was told early on that it was more dangerous than the flu, and that he needed to take action. While he and his administration had dismantled some of the bureaucracy designed to deal with it, he had a playbook developed by the two previous administrations. I've got a copy of it, and it's not hard, it's literally a fill in the blanks exercise, that directs a president with no knowledge of what to do in a pandemic what questions to ask which people, and what to do with the results.

    IQ 45 ignored it, and decided, apparently for the sake of propping up the stock market (and his own fortunes???) to ad lib and bullshit the response. He also encouraged people to ignore the recommendations his administration were trying to promulgate to limit the pandemic's spread.

    As a result, he is arguably indirectly responsible for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pointless deaths. Pointless is key, because he wasn't fighting a war (where soldiers die to achieve a goal), he was trying to profiteer off a plague. While he didn't directly murder any one person, that much reckless endangerment really should put him in prison for the rest of his natural life.

    The other point was that he could have simply followed the damn playbook started by the Bush administration, come out a hero, and coasted to a second term. That's the part I completely agree with JBS on. There are some people (and I know a few) who, even when the honest way is easier and more profitable, will chose the crooked path. Many of us have this tendency, but in some it's pathological. El Cheeto Grande is merely the most flagrant exemplar we've had recently.

    1031:

    Well, dude's got tenure, but I've got a PhD and I strongly disagree with people in my field who have tenure.

    That said, here's the key point, which is why I disagree with him. The reference I cited above was based, very explicitly, on the records of the war that were declassified, starting in 1995. Many records had a 50 year moratorium on them, and once it passed, Frank (the historian) went to work on the newly declassified archives from the US and Japan. He very methodically lays out the timeline of events based on the documents, and in a couple of key spots (Truman's decision, the coup coming after Hirohito's surrender, the casualty estimates), he disagrees with this blog post.

    The critical point is that this Wellerstein never mentions the book Downfall or Frank in his text, even though it's been around since 2001. If I'm reading it correctly, he mostly refers to postwar references and stuff that depends on them, not to primary documentation from the events themselves. I'd say he's cherry-picking his evidence to support his narrative.

    The one part I cringed on was his cavalier dismissal of casualty estimates. Both sides had a pretty good estimate of Japanese casualties (good in that IIRC they agreed with each other). The Japanese high command was counting on the notion that the US would look at the butcher's bill from conquering Japan, and rather than commit to seeing it through, would negotiate a cease-fire that preserved the emperor. Although I don't think they had the data, there was a germ of truth to the notion, as summer 1945 polling of the US showed that something like 25% of respondents were not in favor of invading Japan. The point of the nukes was that it demonstrated to Japan that their strategy would not work, and that triggered their surrender without the US invasion. Ironically, because of surging communism in the streets after the surrender, MacArthur decided to allow the Emperor to continue on the throne as a US vassal, so that Japan would not become communist, as was happening at that point in Korea.

    And I'll note, again, that I do not support having modern nuclear weapons in arsenals, let alone their use. I'm just pointing out the horrible irony that a adversary choosing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of enemy lives to save millions of enemy lives is actually what just war theory would ask.

    The fact that the Japanese empire was willing to put millions of their citizens' lives on the line to save a government is the part that we need to remember from this horror. We want governments to put the planet first, their citizens second, and their own continuity third. Not the reverse.

    1032:

    Re: Misc stuff

    1- Spaceships & trees -- I'm going to complain/whine here ... this is an SF blog which I interpret meaning: just because we don't have/understand it yet doesn't mean it's ridiculous/stupid. Yes - we absolutely need to understand what we have growing on our planet but this does not automatically mean we cannot or should not consider alternatives.

    BTW - I recall reading that spaceship heat problems are likelier to be finding enough safe ways of getting rid of excess heat vs. not having enough heat. Guess this means that there will not be a shortage of energy to boost some of the various chem reactions mentioned by Charlie and others. Could also mean that our spaceship crew might need to be selected for heat tolerance.

    Breaking away from the same-old-same-old - I'm glad that China's in the space race because we need more POVs. And if they're serious about a Moon settlement/colony, it'll be interesting to see how they approach it both in goals and processes. (My impression is that China's culture is still a scrimp & save & re-cycle vs. excess consumption & throw out whenever a new toy comes available. Maybe someone here is familiar with Chinese manufacturing and research therefore can provide an informed guess.)

    2- Crime & deterrents

    On a planet with over 7 billion people, a one-size-fits-all approach isn't likely to work to stop all crime. Although there's a fair amount of data showing overall crime does drop with certain social measures (plural): minimum/livable wage, access to education, healthcare - esp. mental health, social acceptance of 'alternate' lifestyles/sexuality, religious (including atheism) tolerance, etc. However because much of these data are from non-USian countries/cultures -- therefore just like universal health -- a good chunk of USians prefer to ignore it. Weird ain't it how USians keep trying to sell consumerism, guns, evangelical religion, etc. because since it works so gosh darn good in the US, it's just gotta work everywhere else ... but if something works elsewhere, it ain't gonna work in the US, no way! Lastly, 'crime' is defined by statute: what's a crime in one country/culture, may be just one of those things in another country/culture.

    3- Marion berries I think I've seen these or something that looks just like them growing wild in Washington.

    4- Trees - colder climate equals smaller growth Amazing that a tree several hundred years old can be so small with annual/annular rings only molecules thick.

    1033:

    Uncle Stinky @ 1027: (link to Alex Wellerstein's blog entry on the end of the war in Japan)

    I think that Alex Wellerstein has a very good question-filled summary of the Nuclear bombing of Japan, but he misses out completely the Soviet contribution.

    There's a well-footnoted little gem of an article on the short Soviet-Japanese war in Wikipedia and it just has to be read to see part of the story of the Soviet contribution to the Japanese surrender:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War

    There's another part though that doesn't have a good Wikipedia article and that's the Lend-lease USA contribution to the Soviets.

    It was an immense contribution. In the vehicle segment alone the US contributed. 400,000 jeeps and trucks to the Red Army. This is a huge figure.

    Now, this meant that the Soviet divisions destroying the Japanese army in China had for all purposes a "US army" manned by Soviet soldiers and also using top of the line Soviet tanks.

    And that's what beat up and scared the japanese generals so much and it was a collaborative US-USSR effort independent of the dropping of the two nuclear bombs.

    1034:

    Heteromeles @ 997: Thanks for the recommendation! Now, for lazy slobs like myself who'd rather read someone else's combat doctrine than (re)invent our own...Or who are stuck in the US and can't buy this one easily...

    If you like computer games, Arma 3 has an extensive modding community that offers some realistic sims with on-line play. Some of them are pretty hard-core.

    Stipulating that no mil-sim type game kills people the way "real life" combat does. Ain't no respawns in "real life" and there's no simulating the kind of fatigue that comes from just walking around day after day carrying 70+ pounds of armor & equipment. But, they definitely get the difference between cover & concealment right.

    There are also "mods" for those who want something unrealistic - Zombie Apocalypse, Star Wars, Warhammer40K ...

    Some of the current big names in on-line gaming started out as "mods" for Arma 2, the predecessor game - PlayerUnknown's Battlegrouds (aka PUBG) and DayZ.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia_Interactive

    1035:

    H governments to put the planet first, their citizens second, and their own continuity third. Not the reverse. You realise You've just described BoZo's crew of crawlers, shysters & occasional fascists...... ( ? )

    Niala & others Nah Nuking them did it. The Soviet-backed-by-US-aid attack certainly helped, but the IJA-controlled "leadership" at that time was almost completely bonkers - it required two nukes to shake them out of that mindset. Every single account I've seen that argues to the contrary smells very strongly of Special Pleading, for fairly obvious reasons.

    1037:

    It was also said by people who were actually involved - I can't remember whose account I read. The atomic bombs stunned the warlords enough for Hirohito to simply bypass them and surrender unconditionally - previously, the warlords were demanding to be left in position, even if they personally were executed, which would have been a disaster.

    We shall never know if a ground invasion would have been Okinawa writ a hundred times larger, but there was a lot of evidence that it might be, and that had to be planned for.

    1038:

    Heteromeles @ 1003: Well, limit magazine capacity, for one thing. And keep working a lot harder on all that stuff about hatred and bigotry that's so frustrating and tedious for all of us to varying degrees.

    I don't see why we need magazine capacity at all. Much as I like guns, we don't need assault weapons other than those assigned to the military.

    I love the Second Amendment, but I love ALL of the Second Amendment, not just one single clause. Hell, I was an active member of the "well regulated Militia" for almost half of my life.

    But mostly that was a cry of despair, because I know we're never going to do what needs to be done to prevent this kind of shit.

    The perpetrator has now been identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, obviously some kind of Islamic Terrorist, so you know any conversation about about what the proliferation of guns in doing to our society is effectively shut down until there's another incident, and just hope the next shooter isn't Hispanic or Black or Asian or ... Because it'll just be the same old thing all over again.

    1039:

    Moz @ 1005: The question is not "what have other countries done to stop mass killings", or even "what approaches work", it's "of the many things that have been shown to work, are any politically possible to implement in the USA?"

    And to that I think the answer is "no". We're have to just hope that political change eventually makes some or all of the know solutions possible eventually.

    I fear you are correct. I know with near absolute certainty that "eventually" will not come within my lifetime.

    1040:

    If you've got a standard SF monster or station mysteriously fallen silent scenario, and you headed a squad of marines who were going to be sent in to investigate after all the remote intelligence had been gathered, how would you go about doing it?

    Oh boy, all I can say (for now) is, you're going to have fun when INVISIBLE SUN drops.

    1041:

    David L @ 1021: On the US Vaccine front. For those who want a treat and can ignore the related health issues.

    Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (which got it's start in North Carolina) will give anyone presenting a CDC Vaccine card a free doughnuts every day through the end of the year. And I can't see how they prevent you from showing up at multiple stores through out the day.

    Their doughnuts are fantastically tasty for most people. And about as healthy as eating dirt. But tasty they are. (More than one a day makes my stomach feel like I swallowed a brick but to each their own.)

    Most stores, maybe all, are really bakeries with a small store front and/or walk up window.

    If you're in the US, enjoy.

    Their doughnuts are basically a puff of starch deep fat fried and coated with sugar. But they are mind meltingly delicious. I'm not allowed to have them any more because I'm borderline diabetic (i.e. I would actually be diabetic except for the prescription medication I take every day) and I do have to reduce my sugar intake.

    But, if it's going to be every day for the rest of the year, I'm probably gonna' cheat on my diet. I can resist everything except temptation.

    Measuring now with Google Maps it's 4,864.83 ft from my front door to theirs. If I skip breakfast I can probably harness up the pup for an extended walkies to get a cup of coffee and "Whatta ya know? I just happen to have my Covid vaccination card in my wallet!".

    1042:

    I've read Downfall. What sticks with me was that for the first 8 months of 1945, the parts of Asia that had the misfortune to be still occupied by the Japanese (or recently occupied by them) was that 250,000 people were dying every month from war and things brought on by war (disease, famine, etc).

    250,000. Per month.

    If the war had gone into extra innings (USA invades Japan), we can assume that this death rate would continue, PLUS extra dying goodness on the Home Islands.

    That being said, I don't imagine that the quarter-million dying per month instantly stopped upon Japanese surrender. But things would improve, I'd imagine.

    1043:

    it, he had a playbook developed by the two previous administrations

    Stupid question:

    Think yourself into the brain of the Grifter-in-Chief. You have a major crisis on your hands, and you have a playbook.

    Should you (a) throw the book out of the window and ad lib (see above), or (b) execute the playbook while maximizing opportunities along the way for self-enrichment (as the British government did, by handing out PPE and contact tracing contracts on a no-bid emergency basis to their next-door neighbours, old schoolmate's wife, former colleagues, etc)?

    I'm going to go with (b). Do you want to stick a number on how much money the Trumps could have made if they'd done it all by the numbers? If so, what would it be?

    My suspicion is that Trump actually made less money by doing COVID19 his way -- and lost the election into the bargain -- than he could have made if he had presidented up and done things right (while handing out $60Bn in contact tracing contracts to companies owned by Jared Kushner). The real reason he didn't was because he couldn't stomach running a plan laid out by a black man. Pure and simple racism just killed up to half a million Americans in under a year.

    1044:

    Robert Prior @ 1026:

    His reply was that most police shootings last less than 5 seconds and involve less than 3 shots total.

    A few years ago I read a history of the Glock handgun (and company). Apparently the reason for refitting police departments with Glocks was a claim that the police were outgunned based on one shootout that was misrepresented (police claimed they were outgunned, when in fact the officers forgot that they had heavier weapons but admitting a mistake was a no-no). And when those retired police guns were sold to dealers they ended up in crooks' hands, which meant that small-time criminals had easy access to good firearms rather than zip guns and the like.

    If it was about the North Hollywood Bank of America shootout, the police were out gunned. But having the Glock instead of the then standard .38 revolver wouldn't have put the police in any better position. The cops had to go into a nearby gun store to get AR-15 rifles because the only long guns they had at the time were 12ga shotguns.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout

    1045:

    About nukes, since there's discussion of whether and how they shortened WW II:

    Whadabout the "Long Peace"(*) that followed WW II and still continues. Meaning, mostly, that WW III hasn't happened. Not what you would have expected given the generally bloody history that preceded it or the militaristic character of the East and West.

    Either the better angels of our nature have been gaining influence, rational governance has been taking hold in the major powers or, to the present point, nukes provide an all too terrifying answer to the question "How bad a mistake could we make?"

    I tend to the third of those, but don't like it.

    (*) The formulation often heard is "It has been 2,000 years since so long a time has passed without an army crossing the Rhine." Whether it's true or not, it sounds good and conveys the thought.

    1046:

    Justin Jordan @ 1029: In general, deterrence is stopping someone from doing a thing they would otherwise do. And I don't point this out as JUST a semantic thing. JBS' statements here generally seem to feel like they mean it in that sense - that there's people who just want to crime, and we need to figure out ways to stop them.

    And generally, that's not how crime works. I say generally because people like domestic abusers exist.

    Yeah, no.

    I don't know if you could deter someone who actively WANTS to do crime.

    But I think it might be possible to convince the people on the edge, who just don't give a shit one way or the other. Make crime unattractive for them because it's gonna be more hassle than not doing crime and/or make going straight (in the criminal sense) more attractive than not.

    1047:

    The weirdest thing about Trump and the pandemic was that in an interview with Woodward in February 2020, he showed a good amateur understanding of the pandemic and then didn't act on it.

    1048:

    Greg Tingey @ 1035: Nuking them did it. The Soviet-backed-by-US-aid attack certainly helped, but the IJA-controlled "leadership" at that time was almost completely bonkers - it required two nukes to shake them out of that mindset.
    Every single account I've seen that argues to the contrary smells very strongly of Special Pleading, for fairly obvious reasons.

    I agree in principle, but I don't think the IJA "leadership" faction was ever shaken out of that mindset. They were still completely bonkers after the surrender.

    1049:

    My suspicion is that Trump actually made less money by doing COVID19 his way -- and lost the election into the bargain -- than he could have made if he had presidented up and done things right (while handing out $60Bn in contact tracing contracts to companies owned by Jared Kushner). The real reason he didn't was because he couldn't stomach running a plan laid out by a black man. Pure and simple racism just killed up to half a million Americans in under a year.

    Racism is my first suspicion too, but apparently the pandemic playbook was started by the Bush II administration. Despite their manifest failings, they faced down an H1N1 potential pandemic and started the project. Obama kept it, and added to it with the Ebola non-pandemic that he acted to stop. Thus, if Trump fluffed it, he was actually ignoring the Bushies too, although whether he could remember back that far is highly questionable.

    As for half a million dead due to Trump...No. Even though I loathe the man, I'm guessing there would have been a least a hundred thousand Americans dead if Clinton had been president. It's not as easy to calculate as I'd like, but a better measure is the (US total death count/population-global mean death count/population)*US population. That's still going to be a lot (and yes, I realize that's within the parameters of your statement). BoJo isn't doing very well under that measure either, I'm afraid. Maybe if someone shaved him bald, he'd be able to think....?

    1050:

    Charlie Stross @ 1043:

    it, he had a playbook developed by the two previous administrations

    Should you (a) throw the book out of the window and ad lib (see above), or (b) execute the playbook while maximizing opportunities along the way for self-enrichment (as the British government did, by handing out PPE and contact tracing contracts on a no-bid emergency basis to their next-door neighbours, old schoolmate's wife, former colleagues, etc)?

    I'm going to go with (b). Do you want to stick a number on how much money the Trumps could have made if they'd done it all by the numbers? If so, what would it be?

    I'm going to go with (b). Do you want to stick a number on how much money the Trumps could have made if they'd done it all by the numbers? If so, what would it be?

    My suspicion is that Trump actually made less money by doing COVID19 his way -- and lost the election into the bargain -- than he could have made if he had presidented up and done things right (while handing out $60Bn in contact tracing contracts to companies owned by Jared Kushner). The real reason he didn't was because he couldn't stomach running a plan laid out by a black man. Pure and simple racism just killed up to half a million Americans in under a year.

    They threw away the playbook at least two years before there was even a hint they were going to need it. By the time they did need it there was no hope of a plan (b) solution even if they'd wanted one. The only option they had available was to wing it.

    None of them could read the instructions for pouring piss out of a boot, and they damn sure weren't gonna' listen to anyone who could read them.

    1051:

    Uncle Stinky @ 1027: what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings Thanks, that was surprisingly non-annoying, with some slight exploring of alt-histories. Casualty estimates were dismissive, as Heteromeles (i think) said (and I'm pretty sure the range(expected mean) was lowballed, as Elderly Cynic says). My father at that point was with Patton's army in Czechoslovakia near Prague, they having fought their way across Europe. They collectively were anxious not to be part of an invasion of the Japanese islands. (And Patton wanted to invade Russia - and he wasn't alone - Operation Unthinkable.) Nancy Lebovitz @ 1036: Good news-- Peter Beagle has won (most of?) his court case. Ah, good. SotMN mentioned "The Last Unicorn" a few years back - enjoyed it, a lot. (Personal reasons.)

    Noted: With help from Netanyahu, Kahanist candidate optimistic 4th election’s a charm - Itamar Ben Gvir is relatively relaxed on campaign trail as his far-right movement is all but assured entry to Knesset after decades of pariah status (Jacob Magid, 23 March 2021) Quoting from the WaPo (no link per rules): Backed by Netanyahu, Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party is poised to gain its first spot in Israel’s Knesset and possibly even a cabinet position in the next government, providing the ultranationalist group with a foothold in its bid for legitimacy. This is old but helpful political survey(pages 51+) work on FSU to Israel immigration: Auditing Israeli Democracy – 2009 Twenty Years of Immigration from the Soviet Union (Asher Arian, Michael Philippov, Anna Knafelman)

    -- Balthus s’excuser Gonna break 3 billion Minds and you're worried about the fucking china? Captured most of that (2021/03/22 early), missed something. (Mod is taking something that is very important to me. Wide sigh.)

    "Their Minds - are like Candy. And they like slaves." You might know I'm not a fan of slavery. Taste testing required, yes?

    Candy sheep subsist on a diet of rose petals, and produce pale pink wool. To survive in the thorny meadows where they feast, their skin is thick and scaly—when sheared, they resemble weird ungulate dragons

    — infineot (@ctrlcreep) February 21, 2021

    You should read 'Binti'. p44 "No Meduse has ever spoken to a human.... except long ago". Read when you mentioned it; it (first book/novella) was a quick read. It was pleasantly odd to read (albeit uneven in some details), and (among other things) it prompted noodling about analogues of Binti's described trained thinking style, not compatible with verbal expression. "I slowly stopped treeing, my mind clean and clear, but much stupider. I needed to speak, not act. So I had no choice."

    1052:

    I agree in principle, but I don't think the IJA "leadership" faction was ever shaken out of that mindset. They were still completely bonkers after the surrender.

    The Japanese War Cabinet met in the early afternoon of 9th August 1945 having read the reports from Nagasaki and the second nuclear bombing. They knew the Hiroshima bomb and the new Nagasaki bomb were nuclear and incredibly destructive. They also had the first reports about the anticipated[1] Russian attack on the Army of Manchuria which had kicked off the day before and they did not make good reading, basically the defenders were being overwhelmed and even that early into the campaign it was clear they were going to lose half a million troops in a short space of time.

    After all of this, considering the knowledge that the Americans had nukes and were willing to use them as well as the Russians declaring war on Japan the War Cabinet voted to continue fighting and refuse the surrender terms on offer from the Allies.

    The last combat losses on the Allied side actually happened after the surrender had been announced when rogue elements of the IJA's air force attacked and shot down American reconnaissance planes flying over Japan on, I think, the 18th of August. There were also documented reports of other Japanese pilots setting off on suicide missions against Allied forces, ships etc. after the surrender was announced but no-one seems to have recorded any attacks from those sorties, successful or otherwise.

    [1] The Japanese occupation forces in Manchuria knew the Russians were preparing to attack them, what they didn't comprehend was the enormous scale of the planned attack. The Russians moved men and materiel at night to avoid reconnaissance aircraft spotting the traffic and this led the Japanese to seriously under-estimate their defence plans although given the ridiculous numbers they faced they were going to get thrashed anyway.

    1053:

    "What I don't understand are the kids that wander the streets at night going through unlocked cars. If they got a night job stacking shelves or running a petrol station they'd earn 30 dollars an hour..."

    If they poke around in unlocked cars they can be pretty sure of getting some money now. Maybe not very much, but it'll get them something to eat for a day or two, and then they can go and get some more.

    Whereas if they follow your suggestion - if they even can - it'll be some weeks before they actually get to see any of it.

    This of course means that during those weeks they will still have to poke around in unlocked cars as well.

    So what's the point even thinking about trying it, when it won't actually solve the problem anyway.

    "The system" is built around the unthinking assumption that nobody ever really has nothing, even when they don't have anything. It's perfectly fine to limit people to methods of getting money that involve weeks of delay before anything actually comes through, because they can't possibly really have any difficulty managing over so short a period. This is because it is controlled and administered by people who perhaps occasionally make a joke about grubbing for coins down the back of the sofa when they want to buy a new car. They can't actually imagine a situation where grubbing for coins down the back of other people's car seats when you want to buy food is a normal occurrence, and when someone is in such a position they don't understand or even believe it.

    They are equally unable to comprehend the very real way your horizon shrinks when you are in that situation. It's not so much that you don't give a fuck about what might happen in a few weeks time, more that you can't even think enough about such an unimaginably distant future to be able to give a fuck or not. The future is a few days at the very outside, not even one week. You only think about things that offer a very clear and direct path to getting some money today, or maybe in a couple of days at the most if it's a lot of money (like 50 quid) and your confidence in it is good.

    Therefore the only things that meet the basic criterion to be considered at all are criminal enterprises, and those only of the most inefficient and minimally productive variety.

    This is also an area where the police and court system fails massively. If you get caught with someone else's car stereo in a shopping bag you can expect to spend some hours in the cells, then they give you a ticket and tell you to come back for court in a month's time. And that is basically it, as far as anything you can envisage well enough for it to count is concerned.

    When it does get to court, the case is likely to be adjourned for a month before anything serious happens, and this may repeat several times. When you do eventually get sentenced whatever you got caught for is ancient history and there is no noticeable connection between the two (especially considering all the other things you didn't get caught for); the sentence is just one of those shit things that happens because life is shit and it's naturally full of shit things.

    1054:

    Most criminals literally have no clue. I've mentioned before how my late ex, in jail as a terrorist, was helping women arrested for prostitution, because they had no idea how to get an apt, or open a bank account, never mind try to get a job. Their "schooling" set them to "you'll never amount to anything".

    And a lot really are not bright. Around '80, I read an article in the City Paper in Philly about crime. Lead in the article was one guy beating up another guy because the other guy wouldn't give him a cigarette.

    WHILE BOTH OF THEM WERE IN THE HOLDING CELL AT THE #1 COP SHOP, DOWNTOWN IN PHILLY WITH A CAMERA ON THEM.

    A LOT of jobs were taken away from population centers (see "rust belt"), and shipped where there were no unions, then out of country. Most jobs suck, and underpay.

    There is also a known causation, not just correlation, between income threat and family violence.

    But ROI....

    1055:

    "Moving them around". In the US, it's been shown, over and over again, that the less the contact with friends and family while incarcerated very much increases the probability of recidivism.

    1056:

    That is assuming that I'm wide awake, nothing elese is going on, and my right shoulder is not giving me a lot of pain, which it has since my open-heart surgery, 5.5 weeks ago.

    1057:

    And maybe not being able to buy an assault rifle the day you're planning on murdering people, like the guy did in... sorry, lost track, Boulder or Atlanta.

    1058:

    Stocking shelves or running a petrol station, $30/hr? You live in utopia, man. In the US, they're lucky to get more than $7.50/hr, and get treated like shit, and have no benefits, and have no medical coverage.

    1059:

    I disagree with "most people". A lot of folks from elsewhere don't care for them; certainly, I don't. I'll take Dunkin' Donuts, a cakey (I think) donut, and just pass by Krispy Kreme.

    1060:

    Let me point out that some big money manager? or billionaire? said that all the money IQ 45 was proud of making... he could have made that or more by just putting his money in an indexed fund.

    But that doesn't feed his ego, and he desperately wants to have his late daddy change his mind, and approve of him.

    1061:

    Re: slow interstellar probes: Is Project Starshot aka "Big Honkin' Space Gun" likely to be impractical?

    Re: "itty-bitty" tech: I believe somebody touched on it, but is it fairly reasonable to say that we'll be able to genegineer living things to do what we might otherwise use "i-b tech" to do? Example: instead of bird-, bug-, and germ-sized tech, we have modified/trained (and non-self-reproducible) birds, bugs, and germs.

    Re: 300 GW to keep GB warm: May be very hard to answer, but has anyone done a study of how much this could be reduced through effective insulation, ground-based heat pumps, etc.?

    Re: "A sufficiently advanced..." Clark's Law: "A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

    Schroeder's Law: "A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."

    Nivens's Law: "A sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."

    Halperin's First Law: "A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable."

    1062:

    whitroth @ 1059: "I'll take Dunkin' Donuts, a cakey (I think) donut, and just pass by Krispy Kreme."

    Well, yes I've eaten certain Dunkin' Donuts products which were as intresting as a Krispy Kreme donut.

    But there is nothing I know that can beat an Opera cake done by a real "patissier".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_cake

    John Ralston Saul said that there was nothing in the world as good as an opera cake.

    1063:

    Meanwhile, in an incident that of the sort that appeals to readers of this blog, the Suez canal has been blocked by a large container ship getting stuck.

    1064:

    all the money IQ 45 was proud of making... he could have made that or more by just putting his money in an indexed fund.

    Yeah, but then people could look at the money in the index fund and say "he has X much money", and he wouldn't be a billionaire any more.

    This way he has a tangled web of stuff that he doesn't really understand, and nice people give him money for reasons he doesn't have to think about, and he can tell people he's a billionaire and a really smart guy (just look at how little tax he pays!)

    1065:

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a dog-and-pony show - old IT aphorism.

    1066:

    Who knows, maybe we'll both be at a Worldcon some day, and I'll be working on a bid, and bring my real torte: walnut flour, and eggs, and 1 tsp of backing powder, a bit of salt, did I mention eggs?, oh, and eggs. Baked, filling between the two layers (I'm not quite crazy enough to cut them so I have seven layers) with apricot preserves, and a sorta-ganache: butter and cocoa, melted together, and taken off, and a shot of triple sec, then over the whole thing.

    No one can eat a large slice. No gluten! Calories? ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!

    1067:

    (Gregory) Benford's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

    Note there is another Benford's Law about random numbers.

    JHones.

    1068:

    any sufficiently stupid user is indistinguishable from a terrorist?

    1069:

    I used to make a self-saucing chocolate pudding that was delicious with chocolate icecream, but had to be eaten in small quantities. From memory it was roughly 1/3 each sugar, flour and cocoa powder, with just enough baking powder to make it rise. It wasn't gluten free but it would make you hyperglycemic just from being in the same room.

    1070:

    Yes, this is the part of criminality that I don't understand. I get the "reasons" for pretty crime like looking through cars for change and credit cards, supposedly excitement (through having watched them trudge up the street they looked far more bored than the postie who's clearly having a whale of a time riding his little motorbike around in the sun and chatting to people).

    In reality it's not exciting, it's not rewarding and it is more work.

    The Orange one could have just pointed at a lackey and said "you, what do we do when this happens? Wait, don't tell me I don't care, make it happen." He would have been a hero, it would have been no effort, he would have won the next election. Instead he had to do a lot of extra work. Not work he enjoyed.

    Most crime is like that. Lots of extra work, no reward. I can see it once, maybe, but after having done it once?

    1071:

    A few more, not sure about attribution: Any sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise.[1] Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from bad luck.[2]

    [1] The physical limits of communication or Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise (Michael Lachmann, 2004, Semantic Scholar had a copy but links aren't sharable.) Others have expressed similar thoughts. [2] An early Vernor Vinge story, "Original Sin" (1972) touches on this, where a human in violation of a technology embargo explains to the natives that he can't use their 'mam'ri for fear of detection; if detected they will suffer from a run of bad luck imposed by the technology embargo cops.(The story is weirder than the wikipedia description.)

    1072:

    Let me point out that some big money manager? or billionaire? said that all the money IQ 45 was proud of making... he could have made that or more by just putting his money in an indexed fund. But that doesn't feed his ego, and he desperately wants to have his late daddy change his mind, and approve of him.

    I believe the dude who said Trump could have made more money with indexed mutual funds was Robert Reich. At least he's the one who popularized it. Now of course, parking a billion in an indexed mutual fund leads to all sorts of interesting taxes, so you've got to skirt limits...

    That said, I'll put on my broken record hat and point out there's a global wealth management industry that purportedly has on order of $20 trillion under management, and which is used by a majority (all?) billionaires. Avoiding the payment of taxes and debts is one of its principle reasons for existence. If Trump gets nailed on tax evasion, it says some very negative things about his financial acumen. Not only could he have avoided five bankruptcies by simply investing his inheritance in the stock market, but he could have avoided conviction by hiring a trustworthy wealth management firm to make his fortune untaxable. All by hiring the best people, as he claimed.

    Some of us here talk about valuing neurodiversity, but this is an extreme example that I really don't get. I mean...why? Addiction to power? Hubris? Psychopathy? Malignant narcissism? It's enough to make anyone believe that Trump's election in 2016 was the result of vote hacking and foreign interference in the election process, coupled with some really hubristic national elections managers in both parties...

    1073:

    Any sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise.

    That's true, but "sufficiently" is a pretty low bar. Efficient compression and/or readily available encryption produces something that looks and sounds like noise.

    There's a hex editor, HxD, that has an option that lets you look at the number of occurrences of characters in a file. It's instructive to take a newspaper article, compress it and then compress and encrypt it (7z works for this) and see how the histogram flattens out as you do that.

    1074:

    An early Vernor Vinge story, "Original Sin" (1972)

    Yes. There are many things in that story that need to be assimilated even today. The almost-god-tech, the plausible and horrifying biology of the aliens(*). And well told.

    (*) Likely aliens think the same about our biology.

    1075:

    Yes. Yes I do.

    Minimum wage for a casual employee is 24.80 per hour.

    The award for a shelf stacker or petrol station cashier (retail employee level 1) is 27.23. For shift work (ie stacking shelves at night, or manning a register in a 24 hour petrol station) there's a 55% shift loading on top. So 42.20 per hour.

    Centerlink has emergency payments, so no one needs to break into cars to eat "today". Once you're on benefits it's currently 720 every 2 weeks, plus a rental supplement. That never runs out. You can be on that for the rest of your life if you want, you just have to apply for jobs. Beyond that there's drop in centres where they'll feed you (and try to convert you to Christianity), and the curry place in town, run by Sikhs, will feed anyone who needs it for free without trying to convert you.

    If you're looking for excitement, there's a million more exciting things to do in town than walk from car to car. There's mountain bike trails, surfing, spearfishing, line fishing, a skate park, dirt bike riding. There's a rail line, so if you want to hop a train (which has that frisson of illegality, but only has a fine attached) you can go anywhere.

    Everyone has free unlimited health care, working or not.

    There's really no rational reason. It's not exciting, it's not rewarding, there's no need. The only reason to do it is because you're a dick.

    1076:

    Centerlink has emergency payments, so no one needs to break into cars to eat "today".

    Sadly this problem was fixed by our government and there are now stand-down periods before benefits are paid and strict limits on emergency payments, especially of cash. It is also very easy to get suspended for non-compliance... just having a PhD does not mean you're good enough at paperwork to satisfy the requirements Centrelink imposes.

    There are also issues with the mistakes they make, specifically that those almost always disfavour the recipient (they can't be said to favour Centrelink, since that organisation's legal purpose is to pay people's entitlements on time and in full (let's just pretend that's true, ok, and there are no incentives to do evil at any level of the organisation))

    1077:

    Everyone has free unlimited health care, working or not.

    That's not true, and I don't think it ever has been. When it was introduced it was only for Australians, and while the exact boundaries have been tinkered with that has more often than not been in the direction of restricting it. Just being a legal resident isn't enough, and what refugees get even after they've been legally accepted is nasty.

    There's a whole raft of "insurance" payments for different categories of subhumans (viz, those not part of your "everyone") that buy various levels of limited access to the "free unlimited healthcare" you would like to think exists.

    https://www.studyinaustralia.gov.au/english/live-in-australia/insurance

    One of the few remaining benefits kiwis get in this hostile environment is "essential" healthcare* if they know to enrol in their first six months here, and can prove they'll be here for at least six months:

    https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/individuals/subjects/how-enrol-and-get-started-medicare/enrolling-medicare/if-youre-new-zealand-citizen

    • it's not free, it's paid for by the Aotearoa government.
    1078:

    That said, I do agree with your general point that the USA is not the world.

    Although maybe they are the children... the special children:

    South Dakota’s Governor Noem proposes: our common mission and key objective needs to be explaining why the United States of America is the most special nation in the history of the world.

    https://news.sd.gov/newsitem.aspx?id=27616

    1079:

    OK, that's sort of true (emergency payments), it's (the social safety net) being dismantled by the current government who believes that women are property (overseas readers, that's not an exaggeration) and that only the sinful are poor, so they deserve it and making them suffer is doing God's work (again, not an exaggeration) but really, you don't have to be hungry in this country town, and it's not an excuse for on going petty criminality. There's plenty of places that will feed you, if you're really desperate there's fruit picking, which pays almost nothing (because the National Party arranged an exemption from the minimum wage) but you get fed and housed while you wait for centrelink to kick in.

    Some people are just awful. Some are rich and awful (the entire Coalition government) and some are poor and awful.

    PS, yes, sorry, all citizens. Not everyone. I'm very aware of the disgraceful treatment of New Zealanders in Australia.

    1080:

    any sufficiently stupid user is indistinguishable from a terrorist?

    Any sufficiently advanced technology catastrophizes mistakes?

    1081:

    I hope no-one in your country two has to go hungry. Genuinely.

    But in Sydney a lot of people are grateful they can choose to skip meals in order to pay the rent. Being homeless is no fun.

    The good news is that only "about four in ten of hot-bedding {international} students were going without meals". The bad news is that that figure is from before covid.

    It's kind of hard to talk about the deliberate decisions to do this to people without turning into a frothing, wild-eyed revolutionary. It's not torture, any more than Trump's decision to favour business over American lives during Covid was murder. In many ways it's worse, because it's so disinterested and sociopathic.

    1082:

    Centerlink has emergency payments, so no one needs to break into cars to eat "today".

    I tried to explain to you that not everybody knows how to get those. See also Pigeon's comment at @1053 - that's more insight than what I had.

    Also, there have been a lot of studies that stress from having to think where to gets the next meal really affects people's mental capabilities. It's very hard to think of any long-term plans if you don't know where your next meal is coming from, or if you don't know you can pay the next rent. This affects people with low-paying, non-reliable jobs.

    Saying that "there are systems which help everybody if they just went and get that help" is not very helpful, because many people don't know they exist, wouldn't know how to use them even if they existed, and might even have some trust issues with institutions. (For example, if mostly every interaction with the authorities has been the police or related people making you do stuff you don't like, in many cases because they felt like it, you probably don't feel that these people are the ones you got to ask for help.)

    1083:

    Sydney is it's own kettle of fish.

    Despite the hordes of Sydneysiders leaving like rats during covid and hoovering up every last rental in town, 135 a week gets you a room across the road from the beach. 93 a fortnight in rent assistance for someone in shared accommodation, so 177 a fortnight out of the current 720/fortnight. That's vastly more disposable income than I have.

    https://flatmates.com.au/share-house-port-macquarie-2444-P1062665

    I can't say that no one in my town is hungry, but I can say that no one needs to be. There's certainly mentally ill people who can't navigate the system, but that's a completely different set of people to kids (who are almost certainly living at home with their parents) stealing from cars.

    1084:

    Hmm.

    What I'm clearly not getting across here is that I don't live in the kind of shit hole where people are left to die in the gutter.

    No one here starves.

    No one.

    I'm sure that there are places where you have to steal to survive.

    This isn't one.

    I've had someone ask me for money on the street a total of once.

    Them, "mate, can you spare 10 bucks I'm hungry"

    Me, "I don't have a cent in cash, only cards, but I'll buy you a meal" (gestures at boutique hamburger joint)

    Them, "nah mate, I want Subway" (which is about 8 km away)

    Me, "sorry, I have no cash, but I'll buy you anything you like from this place" (gestures at high end hamburger place again)

    Them, "can't you just give me 10 dollars?"

    His mate, "leave in alone, he's told you he's got no money".

    But the kids stealing from cars aren't homeless waifs anyway.

    1085:

    Uh, are you presenting one personal anecdote to prove that no one starves where you live?

    That's kind of... not very comprehensive study.

    Have you also been studying those kids stealing from cars, or do you perhaps know them personally? How do you know where they live, in what conditions?

    I can think of many reasons how kids could be functionally homeless and didn't know how not to get hungry without stealing.

    (Also, that "homeless waif" doesn't sound like appropriate language here, though I'm really not a native and can't tell that with much confidence.)

    1086:

    I think he's stuck in the mindset that he doesn't see the poverty where he lives, so "the system is working".

    That's why I keep posting links to people with actual experience of the Australian system, and specifically to academics studying what the system actually does, as distinct from what some more socially-minded people might like to think it does.

    I've lived on a kiwifruit farm right next to a state "care facility" for boys, and many of those boys had no idea how to work, let alone how to find paid work (or how to manage money etc). We had occasional problems with them vandalising stuff, mostly "cut 10cm out of an irrigation pipe to use as a bong" sort of stuff. But we also had them in picking fruit, usually cleaning the last of the reject fruit off the vines where they were unlikely to do much damage. It wasn't about profit, it was about teaching them what a job is and showing them that they can do it.

    My step-cousin is an alcohol baby, she's a bit thick and has poor impulse control. She was pregnant at 16, ran away to the big city while pregnant because people kept telling her what to do (less drinking, less smoking, talk to the midwife... all reasonable stuff). She could work, but she was brought up by a caring family, with other kids, and had a consistent home environment. But she still needed help to get the dole, find a flat, anything involving paperwork. I don't think she had a plan when she left, she just couldn't handle being where she was. I am pretty sure the baby was taken into care when it was still young, but also that it too was a drug-affected baby. For kids like her I really don't have a good answer. Mostly what I know is that I am a really bad person to ask because I am "not good with people" (in the sense that Trump is not good at medicine).

    1087:

    "Uh, are you presenting one personal anecdote to prove that no one starves where you live?"

    No, not as such, I'm presenting 5450 days in this town where no one who was hungry asked me for food or help. Not one person begging on the street. There's one person in town who sleeps rough, and they've been doing so for years.

    "That's kind of... not very comprehensive study"

    I'd have done a more comprehensive study for a comment on a blog post, but I don't know how to navigate the research grant system so it was steal from cars to fund a research program or just rely on my 15 years of living in this town.

    "Have you also been studying those kids stealing from cars, or do you perhaps know them personally? How do you know where they live, in what conditions?"

    I studied them enough to give the police a description. Neat casual clothes, one wearing merch from a football club. Spotlessly clean. Clean shaven. Nicely cut hair that looks professionally done. Clean white Nike shoes. If they're "functionally homeless" they're living under a bridge with a washer and dryer. As for where they live, I know what all the houses in walking distance are like. There are some places that I'd describe as shacks, but they're 50 km or more. Everything in walking distance is a nice middle class house. Most built in the last 30 years. So we're talking about someone who lives in a nice house on a big block by the beach, or owns and drives a car that they use to get to their stealing job.

    This is approximately where they were caught, a few streets from where I live. Feel free to find the shanty town.

    33 Boonamin Rd https://maps.app.goo.gl/8t5Evak6AitwJPAR7

    "homeless waif" means child of about 12 years in a very undernourished state, wearing filthy rags with wild unkempt hair.

    https://www.amazon.com/Homeless-Children-Original-Vintage-Postcard/dp/B00P5EQ9M4#

    To say they're not homeless waif is saying they're not little kids in a desperate situation. The two that the police caught, one was an adult. The other was 17. They were both big solid blokes as far as I could see. Think more "football hooligan" less Oliver Twist.

    Is it really such a stretch to conceive of a town where there's basically no really poor people? (excluding some with mental health issues). Is it such a stretch to think that there are people who are just bad people? Not forced to steal out of desperate circumstances, but just because they like doing bad things.

    1088:

    "doesn't see the poverty"

    I can see the difference between poverty and middle class youth doing bad things.

    Maybe you're blinded by the "Ned Kelly' ethos? Not every bushranger is a champion of the oppressed poor fighting the unfeeling system. Some of them are simply rapists and thieves.

    1089:

    I can see the difference between poverty and middle class youth doing bad things.

    But you respond to that with blanket claims about things you think are available to everyone in Australia, when they're not. Pointing that out doesn't mean I deny that privileged kids commit crimes, or even that I think they stop if they grow up. It's just me pointing out that not everyone is a privileged white kid (with Australian citizenship).

    1090:

    Is it really such a stretch to conceive of a town where there's basically no really poor people? (excluding some with mental health issues). Is it such a stretch to think that there are people who are just bad people? Not forced to steal out of desperate circumstances, but just because they like doing bad things.

    I can easily conceive multiple ways of having a town with no poor people. You might have a thing where everybody would have "enough" and have enough services to help them if they have problems (like mental health issues).

    You might also have all the poor people carted out of your town so the "proper people" don't see them.

    I know there are just bad people but mostly to me they seem to be worst when they get to positions of power and money, not when they are breaking into cars. (Much bad stuff can be done within the law if you just use some effort to do that, and even if it is unlawful, it might be hard to figure out and prosecute successfully.)

    1091:

    I think poor impulse control and inability to think through consequences of action would account for 80% of every interaction with police (the rest being thugs doing thug life). As you said its a freaking quandary when a person who is doing the 'bad thing' is incapable of fixing that. The whole civil society thing is built around people being in control of themselves.

    The FAS foster kid being raised be raised by the loving and patient middle class family and being sent to the best school will still sometimes toss the iPad across the room when Minecraft glitches, or hit the bad kid etc.

    The well managed schizophrenic will still spend all their money on (insert random thing here) when the voices get a little too loud.

    The alcoholic/drug addict walking to their dealer will see the coins, and take the coins without ever even realising that they were in a locked car.

    I'm sure everyone here has amusing tales of dumb criminals doing dumb, no amount of jail is going to teach the FAS kid self control, or stop the voices. But having them kicking around occasionally going off the rails isn't great either.

    Thugs, bikies and grifters on the other hand can rot.

    1092:

    But on the main topic :

    Nvidia live deep fake as video encoding:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVa1xRaHTA0

    Combined with this :

    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/satin-microsoft-s-latest-ai-powered-audio-codec-for-real-time/ba-p/2141382

    I see a weird future where the AI says what it thinks you would have said to save the hassle of making the call (to another AI which relays the gist of it).

    1093:

    On petty crime: there is a guy who makes terribly over-engineered glitter bombs that look like expensive Amazon deliveries. He and his collaborators leave them on their porches and let them be stolen. Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4T_LlK1VE4

    One incident starting about 13 minutes in caught my attention: a kid steals the parcel and takes it home. He tells his Mom that stealing "feels good". She doesn't seem concerned about raising a thief, just about the risk of getting caught.

    1094:

    OK. I think I see where we're at loggerheads.

    I live in a town full of privileged people (of all sorts of colours, including me who isn't white). I expressed that I don't understand the privileged people spending hours stealing practically worthless shit from other equally privileged people. It's a gigantic waste of time and no fun. The example being two privileged white kids, (one minor and one adult on bail from a rape charge)

    The world wide response was that I'm a heartless privileged white person who doesn't see poverty from his privileged white privilege and a hand full of coins and some useless credits cards were clearly all that stood between these poor starving kids and death from starvation.

    Me saying that these kids could have made more money with less effort in any job was not meant to be a blanket statement that applied to all people in all countries at all times. I'm just saying that here's an example of people who are not in need, stealing stuff they don't need, simply for the sake of stealing and that it makes absolutely no sense to me at any level. I have the same feeling about people who vandalise buildings. I worked in demolition and it's hard dirty work that I wouldn't do for free.

    That doesn't mean the world is free of poverty, inequities and injustice. Or even that Australia is.

    1095:

    "You might also have all the poor people carted out of your town so the "proper people" don't see them."

    Or you could just not let them in right from the start. Which is what we did here.

    People turned farmland into houses, (and the farmers got very rich). Then, (and this is the clever bit) they only let people with lots of money live in the houses. Anyone who wanted to live in the new houses had to have hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some people didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars spare just sitting in their pocket, but they wanted to live in the new houses too. They could borrow money and give it to the people who made the houses, but the banks wouldn't lend them the money unless they had good stable, well paid jobs.

    So we ended up with a town composed entirely of people who had good jobs or who had so much money they could buy a big house by the beach for cash. Surprisingly few starving homeless people bought houses by the beach, or indeed bothered to move from wherever they were starving to a slice of suburbia in the bush just so they could take advantage of the fact that no one bothers to lock their cars here.

    1096:

    I think the reason Trump didn't do pandemic prep and good policy is that he's (at best) thoughtless and impulsive and (at worst) cruel, and that's what his base wanted. Considering that his white supporters were put at risk, I don't believe racism is a great explanation.

    I've been thinking about American rambunctiousness-- refusal to submit to authority. It has mixed effects. It made the pandemic worse, but I think it also has a lot of do with gay rights succeeding and with revealing the pedophile priest scandal. Sometimes cooperating with the people in charge is the right thing to do and sometimes it's the wrong thing.

    Ship stuck crossways in the Suez canal

    This seems exactly like the sort of fun people here like. Ship geeking, world commerce geeking.

    Fetal alcohol syndrome is surprising because it's a self-replicating sort of intergenerational damage which isn't genetic.

    Another example of slow payment causing problems is that it can take a year or two for people to get the money they've inherited. I don't know whether America is typical on this one.

    Jewish law requires that day laborers get paid at the end of the day they've worked. Anyone know whether this is also the law in Israel?

    1097:

    I think it was a combination of "Not invented here," "I'm in charge" and "Not doing what the Black man said." Plus sheer stupidity, of course. The Trump White House probably had the lowest collective IQ since Buchanan was president.

    And what is it with "I'll vote for the man/woman I could have a beer with." Fuck that shit! I'll vote for the man/woman who's so smart that having a beer with me would be a total waste of their time!

    1098:

    gasdive I live in a town full of privileged people - presumably, form your previous post, that being Port Maquarie ( & not to be confused with Maquarie Harbour ... (?)

    Nancy L It appears that the ship wedged in the SewageSuez Canal had a total power failure... But what a future opportunity for someone to eff-up world trade, yes? Though of course, it's happened before: 1955-7 & 1965-75 .... I wonder if, from now on, some sort of guarantee of ship-internal-power reliability will be required?

    1099:

    On a different topic, here is something interesting about brains: scientists studying brain "organoids" grown in a petri-dish (basically, culture brain cells, get something that looks like a tiny brain in a dish) have discovered a single genetic switch that makes human brains so much larger than those of the great apes. From the Guardian:

    Tinker with the switch and the human brain loses its growth advantage, while the great ape brain can be made to grow more like a human’s.

    Research paper: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00239-7

    So, how long till someone does something to an ape with CRISPR-CAS9 to see what happens when they get bigger brains.

    Or possibly just rats.

    1100:

    I've been told container ships have spare generators. They certainly should. Possibly several different things went wrong at the same same time.

    As for the brain research, I'm reminded of one of my favorite sf stories.

    A scientist thinks that lizards are sluggish because of their inefficient three-chambered hearts. As a matter of generosity, he adds a wall to make the hearts more efficient in a few juvenile alligators (crocodiles?).

    Not only do they get a lot zippier, they grow wings.

    So the scientist is riding one flying lizard-back while they destroy civilization for everyone else. (End of story.)

    Is there a term for stories which are sort of science-flavored while being total nonsense?

    1101:

    They don't cover the skull size at all. Slight problem there.

    1102:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1100: "Is there a term for stories which are sort of science-flavored while being total nonsense?"

    I call them "stories-published-in-Galaxy-Magazine-in-the-1950s".

    1103:
    And what is it with "I'll vote for the man/woman I could have a beer with."

    Famously said about Bush, who doesn't drink because he's a "recovering" alcoholic and Trump who doesn't drink because his brother was an alcoholic.

    1104:

    You define the category much too narrowly.

    OMG, not only was the story easy to find (fortunately, I remembered it was in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology), it's online!

    It was published in The Blue Book Magazine in 1934.

    I read it in Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, which had a lot of remarkably fine stories, though I think "Day of the Dragon" and Benet's "The King of the Cats" are what I remember as being from there.

    1105:

    Given there's a genetic predisposition for a non trivial number of people to being an alcoholic / addictive personality, I'll not hold not drinking against anyone.

    1106:

    I thought that crocodilians including alligators were one of the few types of reptiles that do have four-chambered hearts? Still, full marks for an interesting route to a dragon apocalypse...

    1107:

    I disagree. Galaxy was a good mag, and, as they used to advertise, they didn't publish Bat Durstan's, which some magazines did.

    For those unfamiliar with that, we're talking "The loner rode into the spaceport on his one-man ship, and settled his blaster on his hip...." (That is, westerns rewritten to be "sf".)

    1108:

    Galaxy published more SF that had humor and satire, while the other SF mags of the period took themselves seriously most of the time.

    1109:

    the other SF mags of the period

    Those shaped a lot of us, I'm sure.

    Let us list them:

    Astounding Amazing Galaxy F&SF If

    What others were significant in one way or another?

    1110:

    Yep, crocodilians have four-chambered hearts. There's some thinking that their more terrestrial ancestors were endothermic too, and crocodiles can gallop, a gait that was once thought to be a hallmark of endotherms.

    I should point out that the tropes about social complexity being a hallmark of endotherms are more or less wrong. For example, eusociality is, with one or two exceptions, a trait only found among ectotherms (ants, bees, termites, wasps, naked mole rats). The only definite endothermic (or rather, heterothermic) mammal is the Damaraland mole rat. And if you consider humans eusocial, we would be the only fully endothermic eusocial animal known on the planet. Of course, you can start a general brawl at the sociobiologist's dungeons by debating whether humans are eusocial or not (my guess is...not).

    1111:

    I was fine with the "rich kids stealing small change" stuff, I didn't bite until you said "no-one needs to go hungry and everyone get free health care".

    I live in a town full of privileged people (of all sorts of colours, including me who isn't white).

    I suspect we also use different definitions of "white". There's a really big gap between "does someone who counts the generations since their ancestors came here from Britain and built this farm from nothing consider you a proper Australian" and "do the police consider you livestock to be controlled or people to be asked for assistance".

    1112:

    How common are 1 in 100 year events?

    It's right there in the name!

    across all of Australia you would expect the one in 100 year event to be exceeded somewhere far more often than once in a century! ... In much the same way, you might have a one in a million chance of winning the lottery, but the chance someone wins the lottery is obviously much higher.

    Also, there are lots of 1/100 events, and we tend not to notice the ones that don't happen. If you have 100 "one in a hundred years" events, odds on one will happen most years. Of course Murphy ensures that some years the volcano starts bushfires that are extinguished by the floods which trigger the locust plague...

    1113:

    Allen Thomson @ 1109: "What others were significant in one way or another?"

    Let's see, there was Weird Tales, who printed early SF before most of the SF pulps were born:

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeirdTales#/media/File:WeirdTalesMarch1942.jpg

    And there was Planet Stories ("Strange Adventures on Other Worlds!")

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Stories#/media/File:Planet_Stories_March_1951_cover.jpg

    1114:

    Weird Tales, Planet Stories

    Thank you -- now that you name them, I do remember reading stories from them.

    I wonder if there's any project to locate issues and scan them for posterity. And for history -- as said, I think the genre did have a significant cultural effect in the middle 20th century.

    1115:

    whitroth @ 1056: That is assuming that I'm wide awake, nothing elese is going on, and my right shoulder is not giving me a lot of pain, which it has since my open-heart surgery, 5.5 weeks ago.

    There are tactical level board games & simulations.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_wargame

    I suggested the computer game because it's a game I'm familiar with; I think it meets the criteria set for At Close Quarters (i.e. reinvent\learn proper infantry tactics) and you won't need to recruit a group of players (don't have to break quarantine to play).

    I hadn't really thought about it, but there might be ways to play board game simulations over Zoom or the like. I don't know how I'd go about setting that up though.

    But I already have my computer game so I don't have to figure it out.

    whitroth @ 1057: And maybe not being able to buy an assault rifle the day you're planning on murdering people, like the guy did in... sorry, lost track, Boulder or Atlanta.

    I've seen news about the Boulder shooter indicating he bought the gun at least a week in advance. A CNN report I watched on YouTube says it's the seventh mass shooting in the U.S. in just the last week.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-StPojXPGo

    1116:

    I think it was personal, Trump simply doesn't like Obama. Its possible a lot of Trump's actions were down to personal animosity.

    1117:

    I first heard it in the Reagan administration, or maybe even the Carter administration.

    1118:

    Omni was a big deal back in the day. They published a lot of Gibson's short stories, and probably Sterling's as well. I was quite bummed when they went under.

    1119:

    Allen Thomson @ 1114: "I wonder if there's any project to locate issues and scan them for posterity."

    The SF pulp magazines are considered "serials" by libraries and kept apart.

    In other words rich university libraries (at least the ones teaching SF in their English departments) would get subscriptions of SF pulps, bind them in good bindings at the end of each year, and place them on serials shelving for contemporary studies and for posterity.

    I made a search for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in worldcat.org (the biggest common library catalog) and found 252 libraries that had it.

    1120:

    whitroth @ 1059: I disagree with "most people". A lot of folks from elsewhere don't care for them; certainly, I don't. I'll take Dunkin' Donuts, a cakey (I think) donut, and just pass by Krispy Kreme.

    FWIW, Dunkin Donuts offers a glazed yeast donut similar to the Krispy Kreme and Krispy Kreme has cake doughnuts. The advantage for Krispy Kreme, the reason I prefer them, is you can get them hot out of the cooker. Dunkin Donuts manufactures all their donuts at a central factory & ships them in bulk to their local stores where they're just warmed over before being placed in the display racks.

    Plus, Dunkin Donuts has retreated from this area, closing a lot of locations. AND Dunkin Donuts has not announced they're going to be giving away free donuts to people who can produce a Covid19 vaccination card.

    But, to each his (or her) own.

    1121:

    That was certainly a motivator, but Trump is capable of multiple forms of stupidity at the same time.

    1122:

    Yes, I remember Omni. I bought a few issues. But the SF stories were few and far apart.

    When Omni went under there were no tears among periodical and serials librarians. Influential reference librarians considered Omni to be worthless pap.

    To each his own.

    1123:

    Depends on when you're talking about. Before '54? '55? there were a number more, including the just-mentioned Planet Stories. Then someone bought one of the two national US distributors, and decided the parts were worth more than the whole, broke it up and sold it off, and suddenly dozens of genre mags (not just SF) went under without a distributor. By the early sixties, I think that's the list.

    1124:

    korydg @ 1080:

    any sufficiently stupid user is indistinguishable from a terrorist?

    Any sufficiently advanced technology catastrophizes mistakes?

    To err is human ... but to really fuck things up you need a computer.

    1125:

    I don't know what the definition is. Sometimes it seems anyone who holds a different point of view is white, no matter what colour they are. (I'm not saying you do that, but I've experienced it). "White" people tell me that if there's black in your line, you're black. Megan Markle counts as "black" though I had to be told she's black. I'm about as black as she is. My father had difficulty navigating the white Australia policy to get into the country despite being married to an Australian passport holder. Being fluent in a bunch of European languages probably helped on the dictation test which could be done in any random European language. Memory is hazy but I've got some recollection that they gave the test in like five or six languages and he aced it in all of them. (sadly he forgot languages as fast as he acquired them so I only speak English, but I swear in urdu.)

    Of the people in my street who I know their background, there's 3 families of former fauna. (for our overseas listeners, aboriginal Australians were considered fauna until a referendum that took place in my memory) One Māori (who disappointingly speaks like 8 languages but not te reo Māori, so I can't practice) and his Pākehā wife, the Lebanese couple next door and the apparently all Aussie neighbours on the other side, though I've never actually asked them.

    1126:

    Omni was later. Wikipedia says '78-95.

    1127:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1100: I've been told container ships have spare generators. They certainly should. Possibly several different things went wrong at the same same time.

    The spare generators aren't connected to the ship's propulsion. What I read about it is the ship briefly lost power to its steering system and was pushed sideways by the wind. When the bow stuck into the bottom near the bank the continued push of the wind caused the ship to twist sideways. The canal is 250m wide & the vessel is 400m long.

    Is there a term for stories which are sort of science-flavored while being total nonsense?

    Fantasy?

    1128:

    I never said it was earlier!

    1129:

    Yes.

    Port Macquarie (he says having totally doxed himself)

    I didn't pick it. My partner was transferred for work. Having said that it's pretty nice, albeit humid (and currently flooded, but that's the old town, not where I am).

    In 1970 it had under 10 000 in the whole area and about 6000 in town. Now it's 10 times that. Almost all new houses. In 1970 my house was a cow paddock.

    I realise that it's hard for someone living in a town that predates Roman invasion to get it, but these very new towns are not like a forest, they're like a pine plantation. There's been no time for diversities to build up and create a spread of socioeconomic differences. The people transplanted here all crossed the bar of being independently wealthy enough so they didn't need to be in a big city for work, and having enough money to buy a new house on its own block by the beach (because that's all that's here) while running a car (because there's basically no public transport).

    1130:

    (he says having totally doxed himself)

    We just run round town bumping into people until someone swears at us in urdu then apologises in english?

    1131:

    arrbee @ 1116: I think it was personal, Trump simply doesn't like Obama. Its possible a lot of Trump's actions were down to personal animosity.

    Personal animosity combined with spite, but Trump hated Obama because he was black. Not everything Trump does is motivated by pure racism, but racism is a huge part of his makeup.

    1132:

    No, at least to my mind, fantasy generally has magic. Magic is made by humans or other sentients with their minds to change the world, and it includes outcomes which can't be gotten by ordinary means.

    This is a matter of feel, and I'm probably not covering some edge cases.

    Magic is individual. Using magic for mass production is contrary to the usual presentation of magic, so it has a humorous effect.

    Psi is not magic in terms of the effect on stories, but damned if I can formalize the difference.

    "The Day of the Dragon" isn't fantasy because alligators are transformed by an operation combined with a totally unlikely hidden capacity of alligators.

    If Coyote had inspired the scientist to do the operation (and probably modified alligators so they'd turn into super-predators, not that Coyote thinks that far ahead), it would be a very different sort of story. So would a story about a human using magic to turn alligators into dragons.

    It's all very nice to carve reality at the joints, but human creations don't have handy joints that you can carve.

    1133:

    (Gregory) Benford's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

    And to bring it full circle, Freefall had Florence Ambrose riff on this that Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it.

    1134:

    By that definition, The Incomplete Enchanter is wacky science fiction, because the mechanism for magic is symbolic logic applied by psychologists.

    I do actually get what you're getting at, but I don't think there's a field of absurdist science fiction per se. One problem with defining it is that fans of Star Wars and Star Trek various popular works might take offense at being told they're fans of absurdist SF. I'm afraid, that defining it as "we know it when we mostly agree we've seen it" is about as good a definition as we can get at the moment.

    A good example of this is EE Smith's Lensman series. My parents, both of whom were engineers, read the series in college and thought it was meant humorously. They were vastly amused by the idea of prototypes working the first time they were turned on, spaceships going from design to completion in the time it took a character to cross a room, and so forth. And given that Smith actually was an engineer, he might have deliberately spoofed engineering in his books, simply for fun. Problem is, feed the Lensman series to a bunch of artistic types, they take it seriously, give it a big ol' force-feeding regimen of pure Jungian Myff to fatten it up and add gravitarse, and pretty soon fighters are howling through the vacuum while the heroes play with extra-shiny swords, which are definitely not phallic objects. Really.

    1135:

    AT "Analog" - which was the largest, maybe. "F&SF" was the one I found first.

    gasdive Ms Markle is a v pale brown - well-suntanned, if you like. "Black"? Not in a million years, unless you are a racist-&-bonkers-arsehole.

    1136:

    This is a list of what authors Omni published with links to the stories. Note particularly several of Gibson's earlier works.

    http://www.williamflew.com/authors.html

    I should also note that Ellen Datlow was the fiction editor for most of the run. All I can think is that your reference librarian friends have very weird standards for who/what is important in the history of science fiction, or are thinking of another magazine.

    1137:

    "White" people tell me that if there's black in your line, you're black. Megan Markle counts as "black" though I had to be told she's black. I'm about as black as she is. My father had difficulty navigating the white Australia policy to get into the country despite being married to an Australian passport holder. Being fluent in a bunch of European languages probably helped on the dictation test which could be done in any random European language. Memory is hazy but I've got some recollection that they gave the test in like five or six languages and he aced it in all of them.

    Yes, I'm quoting Gasdive, but I've got to point out there are three standards here. One is the "one drop of blood" racism principle, by which standard a bunch of white folk are actually black. This includes, apparently, a certain family with the last name Windsor, because Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. She had ancestors who were "Moorish" (black muslims). But we won't talk about hypocrisy at all, because...

    There's this notion of "passing for white," people of African-American ancestry who pass the "brown paper bag and ruler" test (skin lighter than a brown paper bag, and straight as a ruler) were either given additional privilege, membership into certain groups, or even could pass for white. This is about discrimination based on color, or colorism, a word you may have seen a lot recently.

    Then there's Ms. Windsor nee Markle. She was a child TV star on Nickelodeon, and her skin was definitely darker then than it is now. She definitely passes for white by most standards now, due to however much work she puts into it, but at the same time she speaks up for her heritage, which is her right, privilege, and even glory.

    At the same time, crypto blacks like HRH Prince Charles really should speak up for that side of their ancestry, if only to stick a finger in the eye of the "one drop" racist chunderbrains.

    1138:

    They weren't looking at the science fiction at all. They were looking at the non-fiction.

    1139:

    Not everything Trump does is motivated by pure racism

    Cheating at golf would come under that heading…

    https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/apr/02/donald-trump-golf-28-club-championships

    Commander in Cheat is an amusing book. And infuriating. The anecdote about Trump bullying a child so he could claim a better-placed ball says a lot, if true*, about his character.

    1140:

    Every time you think the STUPID can't possibly get any worse, THEY make an extraordinary effort to prove you're wrong:

    https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-ship-suez-canal-hillary-clinton-1578428

    1141:

    There's this notion of "passing for white,"

    Out of my 14 dearly-loved nieces, most would be described as "mixed" by people who care about such things.

    Personally, I think terms like "cute", "smart", "beautiful", "brilliant", and "drop-dead gorgeous" convey far more useful information.

    1142:

    Cheating at golf would come under that heading…

    There's also driving a golf cart on the green, which is simply Not Done. Coverage by golf.com, CBS Sports, and Golf Digest can be assumed to care more about golf than politics; golfers are not amused.

    He is widely known to cheat at golf.

    1143:

    "mixed"

    I struggle not to laugh at that, because I always think "part raccoon?" or something equally irrelevant.

    Because underneath that is the whole idea that "mixed" distinguishes from people who are "pure" (Airedale, I presume) and we all know that the only "racially pure" people are a few isolated Africans. Especially lately, when we have nice solid genetic evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed to our "pure" gene pools.

    1144:

    I fully agree with both you and Greg. Racism makes no sense. The attempts to draw lines in a spectrum even less so. I did see a lot of reporting along the lines that Megan would be a huge asset in commonwealth relations, as people could see someone who looked like them in the Royal family. Which is completely bonkers, but that's how it was reported.

    https://www.elitedaily.com/p/meghan-markles-quotes-about-racism-in-the-palace-will-make-you-rage-65178713#:~:text=%22I%20know%20how%20much%20you,like%20them%22%20in%20her%20position.

    I do pull the "black" card when I get accused of white privilege. Not something I'm proud of but occasionally I get the shits and do. It's a bit cheeky as I'm at best "suntan", and I'm just as privileged as the next white fella. (though my brother used to delight in getting the "local price" when there was an official "visitors price" at Chinese tourist attractions. He could pass for Tibetan and spoke a bit of Mandarin.)

    1145:

    Unfortunately, racism makes a lot of sense if we're talking about profit motives, politics, and assuaging the consciences of "good Christian folk." It also has a huge biological connection.

    In reverse order, there is no biology behind concepts of race. However, race, via racism, has enormous biological consequences for people on the receiving end. These play out in things like more physical and psychological problems, worse food and therefore worse health, and getting shot by American cops more often. These are quite real biological problems that correlate quite strongly with race in America. Too many researchers infer the wrong causality from these correlates, sadly.

    Anyway, if you're Christian or Muslim, you're not supposed to enslave another human being, or at least a coreligionist, or at very least someone (Islam) who practices a "religion of the book" which means they worship notionally one God and have a religious text that they believe in. So where do all those slaves come from? Well, obviously (if you're a bigot) they deserve it (criminals), they're of a lesser gender (women, LGBTQ), they worship too many gods or no god at all, or the biggest lie, they're not (completely) human, so the rules don't apply. I'm being sarcastic, but an imperial buttload of fortunes were made by the rich exploiting the poor, and you can't get more exploitative than "owned outright with no rights." But how do you tell that someone is less than fully human and therefore deserving of enslavement? They've got one drop of black blood, and even though that turns out to be bullshit biology (and I apologize to the bulls for dragging them in), the intellectual taint still lingers very strongly.

    I'll point out that I'm still a clueless white guy who's learning to be antiracist, but as my extended family keeps getting more diverse, I'm getting more of a clue about what they go through, and I'm learning. A lot.

    1146:

    H How do the US racist meatheads classify people from "India" ( i.e. India-before-partition ) I wonder? Because a huge number, particularly for the N of that area are "Indo-European" - or as I say to my neighbour, whose grandparents fled Kashmir - - "What about Aryans like you & me?" Inevitably, as you must realise, we have our own set of meatheads, but their racist standards are different to the US ones, though still based on ignorance & stupidity, of course.

    1147:

    I don't hold being an alcoholic against anyone (I am one myself), but I think anyone who thinks it would be "fun" to have a drink of beer with an recovering alcoholic or a teetotaler has an odd idea of fun.

    1148:

    On the frequency of 1/100 year events:

    In addition to Moz's comments about the need to count events that didn't happen, there is a very real problem with the statistical assumptions behind these estimates.

    To measure the actual frequency of 1/100 year events you need several centuries of data. We don't have that, so the only solution is to extrapolate from the data we do have. Draw a frequency distribution, measure the mean and standard deviation. Test for normal distribution, and yes, it fits. So now you can extrapolate the 1/100 year frequency because that is however many sigmas off to the right.

    Trouble is, as with any extrapolation, you have no guarantee that your model is accurate that far out.

    1149:

    On Clarke's and Niven's laws:

    Terry Pratchett had a riff on this in Good Omens; the demon Crowley waves vaguely at his car to turn the lights off, and Mr Young assumes it was done by infrared.

    1150:

    Digitised issues of Omni can be found at the Internet Archive.

    https://archive.org/details/pub_omni

    1151:

    The Incompleat Enchanter is at least as much science fiction as the Xeelee sequence.

    1152:

    As I understand it, the Roman model of slavery was that being enslaved was, to some large extent, a result of getting conquered-- more a matter of bad luck than personal or group inferiority. It was quite possible for slaves to become free, or even free and wealthy. There were still a lot of slaves being worked to death.

    Enlightenment values did lead to people who still wanted slaves to justify it to themselves by saying slaves deserved it, or even that slavery was good for slaves.

    I think racism is a convergence of a few factors. One of them is people's increasing capacity for abstraction so that ingroup-outgroup hostility gets expanded way beyond individual connections.

    1153:

    A propos of nothing: Real Science Fiction plot come to life:

    Viable Nematodes from Late Pleistocene Permafrost of the Kolyma River Lowland

    (2017, so this is old news, but I just learned of it.) I'm told by colleagues that the cores came from an old Stalin-era gulag site, so there were also human remains found in them. None of the humans came back to life on thawing, AFAIK.

    1154:

    Omni was like a science fiction "pulp" turned upside down.

    The typical science fiction "pulp" had fiction stories and a few non-fiction articles.

    Omni had mainly non-fiction and a few science fiction articles.

    Omni had a bad reputation among inluential librarians (who wrote textbooks and articles in librarian publications) because they compared Omni to Scientific American and to other publications that made Science accessible to the general population. With its articles on alien beings, psi powers and other mumbo-jumbo Omni didn't have a chance among that group of librarians.

    1155:

    Ob Freefall: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3300/fc03225.htm

    "There are times when I'm not sure if the planet you came from is real or something from a horror story".

    1156:

    Ob Freefall: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff3300/fc03225.htm

    Yeah, Bacillus endospores have remarkable survival properties.

    1157:

    The other big difference between Roman slavery and later versions is that the condition of slavery was not hereditary.

    1158:

    underneath that is the whole idea that "mixed" distinguishes from people who are "pure"

    It's also a useful mental shortcut for a racist when someone doesn't look like their pre-conceived notions.

    Given the health problems faced by purebreds, caring parents should be ensuring that their families are as genetically diverse as possible. Anything less is setting their descendants up for hardship. Don't they care about the children?! :-/

    1159:

    Re: '... racism is a convergence of a few factors'

    Agree - and these factors vary in strength by society/culture which makes me think that they can be addressed. I've never seen any research that associates any statistical weightings of these particular factors v-a-v criminality just feel that these are probably among the most common/most heavily weighted: mental/emotional convenience (intellectual/moral laziness - don't have to think things through on a case by case basis), privilege (early social-emotional training), socioeconomic environment - access to fundamental needs, innate egotism/sociopathy (brain wiring/hormones). The 'Colorism' form of racism is comparable to earlier appearance related prejudices: facial hair distribution (clean shaven vs. beard), head covering, facial features (nose, eyes, epicanthic fold, etc.).

    As for social inequality, privilege, racial/ethnic stereotypes, cultural/religious norms, inborn/genetic differences and 'criminality' (vs. ethics/morality) - Victor Hugo's works still resonate. Fortunately a couple of his novels have been translated to the musical stage - most people have heard of 'Les Miz' by now, but there's also 'Notre Dame de Paris' (based on The Hunchback of Notre Dame):

    Les Miz - 10th Anniversary Concert (aka 'The Dream Cast'):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c2sx47p31M&t=7676s

    NOTRE DAME de PARIS - Premiere in Paris 1999 France, Full Live.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_OsuQCu0M

    1160:

    The weirdest thing about Trump and the pandemic was that in an interview with Woodward in February 2020, he showed a good amateur understanding of the pandemic and then didn't act on it.

    Might have hurt his popularity rating. Such as it was. What do you expect from anyone who keeps harping that the news media is not acting as a PR service for him. And had been doing such for 40 years.

    1161:

    I'm not protesting the alcohol. I'm protesting the idea that being "someone I could hang-out with" is a meaningful qualification for electoral office. The "beer" is only incidental to this kind of thinking.

    1162:

    I think the reason Trump didn't do pandemic prep and good policy is that he's (at best) thoughtless and impulsive and (at worst) cruel, and that's what his base wanted.

    I've sort of watched DT on the business news for a few decades. Not too closely but watch him float by on his latest nonsense. Here's my take.

    Trump does not do anything unless he thinks it makes him look important and in charge. Pandemic response was not going to do that. Especially if he did something and people started dying. If he did nothing then it must be the fault of others. In his PR oriented world.

    1163:

    Agreed about how Omni inverted the pulp's formula. But this is also clearly a picture of the reference librarians not getting it. Omni's "science" articles weren't looking at present-day science. They were looking towards the future and looking at both the possible science itself and what the softer consequences of that science might be, in an era when most people didn't own a computer and MS-DOS was king of the desktop. Omni was not, remotely, trying to be anything like Scientific American.* IIRC, when Omni first came out my upper-middle-class family didn't even own a VCR!

    But Allen's original question was about what magazines were influential to the world of science-fiction, and that's where Omni really shined. They published both major science-fiction stories, and - this is really important - they were a glossy, so they could publish major science-fiction artists, in detailed color, with much more background than you could get from a pulp. I still remember some of the art, in graphic detail, today, and remember reading Gibson's cyberpunk, Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shriner for the very first time.

    But if you want to know whether Omni has "reference" value, pick out one magazine from every six months of the run, read it, and see whether the futurism applies to either today's world or today's POV. I have no idea what you'll find, but it's obvious to me that if someone is comparing it to Scientific American that a major mis-classification has occured.

    • I'd have to grant the librarian's concerns about the psi, however. I find that as I grow older and older I have much less patience with "the woo."
    1164:

    Personal animosity combined with spite, but Trump hated Obama because he was black. Not everything Trump does is motivated by pure racism, but racism is a huge part of his makeup.

    Am I the only one who remembers/saw the clip of the time at a big dinner where O made fun of DT? And DT sat their steaming?

    Forgetting a perceived insult was never in the Trump playbook.

    1165:

    Given the health problems faced by purebreds, caring parents should be ensuring that their families are as genetically diverse as possible. Anything less is setting their descendants up for hardship. Don't they care about the children?! :-/

    Well, this is a yes and no thing. The two issues I'll point to are skin color and teeth. The thing about melanin, IGNORING THE HUGE SOCIAL SIGNALS OF DERMAL MELANIN CONCENTRATION, is that it provides a pretty decent UV shield, and it's used as such by a large number of organisms. For humans this is both good and bad: we need UV light penetrating our skins to help with vitamin D synthesis, but too much sunlight leads to permanent skin damage and increases in skin cancer. In very high light and very low light conditions, a diversity of melanin pigmentation is not necessarily a good thing. This DOES NOT MEAN that people in the tropics always have darker skins than do people at the poles: check out Inuit skin color in summer (sunlight reflecting off snow is brutal), and the skin of tropical forest dwellers who live mostly in the shade. But equally, check out fog-bound Scots and sun-stroked Aussies of Scots descent.

    The other thing is that human jaws and teeth are a mess, and pairing genes for big teeth with genes for small jaws can be problematic, especially if dentistry is not available to fix it. Worse, human jaw length is adaptive: if you give a kid baby food, apparently their jaws end up growing shorter, leading to a general need for surgery to remove wisdom teeth. Giving toddlers more adult food (that requires more chewing) sounds like child abuse, but if wisdom tooth surgery isn't available, it will save them from a life of tooth pain later on.

    So is mixing better than not mixing? You tell me. We know that modern humans are a mix of ancient Homo sapiens sapiens from Africa, one or two Homo spp. populations in Africa for which we have no fossils, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, in varying proportions.* These varying proportions did not lead to modern races, they're just the melange that racists have chopped into races. Anyway, with all this mixing, there are saints and sinners, geniuses and idiots, athletes and klutzes in every population. How much of it can be traced back to pure breeding versus mixing? Yeah, kinda hard to tell, no? But it's not neutral, positive, or negative. It's all of the above, plus environment and culture.

    *And yes, the answer to "I can't believe they'd kiss someone who'd look like that, it must have been rape," is almost certainly "bullshit, don't project your personal preferences back on prehistory."

    1166:

    Agreed. Magic is personal - you have to have something special to do it (like midichlorians [g]). Tech is something anyone can use (look at all the people who should not be allowed to clean their toasters).

    It's all dependent upon a few people, not the masses (although Turtledove, in his Darkness series, did an interesting take on it).

    1167:

    Like many Americans, and almost all the "evangelical Christians" and members/voter base of the GOP in the US, and those who actually voted for the Tories in the UK.

    1168:

    How do the US racist meatheads classify people from "India"

    Not white. Basically white means from Europe. Or similar. Go back over 50 years and being from southern Europe was a major step down. Not so much now but among the "gentry" and some others it can still be so. We have our Mayflower society that pre-dates by a century or more the DAR which pre-dates the DAC.

    Then there are those articles/editorials I've read in the New York papers from the mid 1800s about the Irish. They were considered less than the darker folk.

    1169:

    Racists are assholes. 'Nuf said, I think.

    1170:

    You've seen my nasty post about needing Aryan reservations. In those, I'm deliberately being nasty... but I'm using their own definitions against them. By their definition, since all four of my grandparents were Jewish, I'm not "white" - hell, neither are the Irish (signs reading "no Irish or Jews need apply have been regularly documented). They there's Italians, and Greeks, and Spanish.

    That leaves what? Anglo-Saxon, maybe Scots, maybe French, maybe Germans, and that's it. Poles? Nope. Russians... who knows.

    And by their definition, one great grandparent makes you black, rather than the inverse. shakes head They're struggling with desperately immense feelings of inferiority, maybe because they're so outnumbered.

    Or because the ones who do that aren't the ones who are capable and competent.

    1171:

    And it's Newsweek, not the Onion....

    1172:

    Actually, there's a recent article in the Voice of San Diego arguing exactly the opposite: https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/government/middle-eastern-communities-say-census-whitewashes-their-numbers-needs/

    The issue is that San Diego has a big immigrant/refugee population. Part of what's going on is that we're a big military town, and the US has been at war in the Middle East, so a number of people who helped the US in the Middle East ended up here, with their family and friends, and the communities (very much plural) have grown. There are a lot of formerly middle and upper middle class Iraqis and Afghanis here, struggling back up the economic ladder.

    Anyway, the census is counting them mostly as "white." That doesn't help them deal with the issues that refugee status brings. The biggest one of these is that White has a subtext of "speaks English fluently," and that is most definitely not the case for the newly arrived. It's also played out with assistance during the pandemic, because separate aid systems were set up for minority communities that missed these communities, because they were flagged majority white.

    There are other issues (can someone commit a hate crime on a Muslim who is censused as "white?") and it's a good article.

    1173:

    Psi, not being magic. I see the difference as a) it fits within the science we know, with adequate handwavium; b) it's limited, there are only a few - telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and against, they're limited in power, and c) no demons, other powers, or external forces need apply, it's an ability of an individual.

    Does that work?

    1174:

    Agreed. Magic is personal - you have to have something special to do it (like midichlorians [g]). Tech is something anyone can use (look at all the people who should not be allowed to clean their toasters). It's all dependent upon a few people, not the masses (although Turtledove, in his Darkness series, did an interesting take on it).

    Actually, there's an interesting counter-take. It's a throwaway line in Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk. He asserts that anyone can do magic, but that not everybody can do all the rituals, because that's about knowledge, and that is (for reasons good and bad) guarded.

    I tend to think he's right, but his version of magic is basically what Trump was spewing for the last four years. It's not telepathy or levitation, it's forcing others to live in your made-up world, even though they know it's not correct. This can be used beneficently with blessings (getting someone out of a funk to do something they don't think they can do) or as a curse (to mess with someone's head). Sir Pterry called it Headology. Ritual, in the sense of keeping a bunch of complex systems working over time, looks like magic (and it does overlap with the above), but it depends on people knowing what the heck they're doing.

    So far as I can tell, the Taoists have a really similar idea: any idiot can do magic, and magicians are the hucksters, fortune tellers, performers, carnie trash, and so forth. The Taoist priests work to heal people and to bring out the good in the changes of the world. They're working at a much different and higher level.

    Now I realize fantasy tends to be whiffy about religion and with good reason, but just perhaps, it's over-glorified the "move fast and break things" aspect of magic, glorified the world-wreckers entirely too much, and made fixing complex problems too simple, magical, and dependent on the inner nature of the young, rather than the hard-earned skills of the old*. There is something to be said for Yunkaporta's view, that any clown can curse someone, but that's not necessarily a miraculous thing. What's miraculous is keeping a place like Australia habitable for 50,000 years or so.

    *Who almost always die off so that the kids can heroically pull off miracle saves. Because drama. If they ever hung around with a bunch of old environmentalists and pols trying to fix things, they'd get a different idea of drama.

    1175:

    Troutwaxer I have never owned a VCR ... but that gives me a problem: I have a tape of the old BBC programme about the Voyager missions. I really need to translate it to a disc or a "slug" or onto a file that any normal computer can read. Um. I grow older and older I have much less patience with "the woo." Me too, what a surprise.

    whitroth But it's "well-known" that the Greeks & Italians eat garlic in bed .... Unfortunately, all your list of N Europeans were "Aryans" cough - maybe not the Finns? Agreed that this sort of non-thinking makes a kein-bottle corkscrew look straight & normal.

    MEANWHILE We have This utter grovelling insanity The so-called "Head" of the school should step down, immediately & there should be no apology for showing people things which are in the public domain & relevant to present-day society. We'll be having blasphemy laws again at this rate. Nous sommes Charlie ( Hebdo )

    ( See also H's question - but first you have to define a "Hate Crime" - very, very carefully )

    1176:

    And it's Newsweek, not the Onion....

    I've never seen it codified as Gibson's First Law, but it could be this "The Street finds its own uses for things." In this case, QAnon is definitely a bunch of street people (psychologically at least), the Onion is a thing, and too many people abandon irony under too many circumstances.

    I guess Gibson's Second Law (chronologically, anyway) is "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed."

    1177:

    Well, this is a yes and no thing.

    Actually, it was sarcasm.

    1178:

    Scott Sanford @ 1142:

    Cheating at golf would come under that heading…

    There's also driving a golf cart on the green, which is simply Not Done. Coverage by golf.com, CBS Sports, and Golf Digest can be assumed to care more about golf than politics; golfers are not amused.

    He is widely known to cheat at golf.

    He's widely known to cheat at everything. If you ever have reason where you can't avoid shaking hands with the man you'd be well advised to count your fingers afterwards.

    1179:

    I have never owned a VCR ... but that gives me a problem: I have a tape of the old BBC programme about the Voyager missions. I really need to translate it to a disc or a "slug" or onto a file that any normal computer can read.

    Surely one of your big box stores will do it for a fee. Or even a smaller operation. Maybe a camera store.

    In the US Costco will send it out for you for $20 or so and you get back the original plus a flash drive with the movie on it.

    1180:

    There is a decent chance that it is already on the internet.

    If not, then video capture cards are a thing so it should be possible to find someone able to make a copy. 10 years ago that would be me but I no longer have the equipment unfortunately.

    1181:

    Greg Tingey @ 1146: How do the US racist meatheads classify people from "India" ( i.e. India-before-partition ) I wonder?

    They "classify" them the same as racist meatheads anywhere do with every other "other".

    The idea that "I'm not a racist because I only hate these guys and not those guys" is bogus.

    1182:

    John Hughes @ 1147: I don't hold being an alcoholic against anyone (I am one myself), but I think anyone who thinks it would be "fun" to have a drink of beer with an recovering alcoholic or a teetotaler has an odd idea of fun.

    I don't remember where that "someone I could have a beer with" meme originated, but I don't think the alcohol was a consideration. It was a metaphor for discussing differences of opinion in a casual setting.

    It could have as easily been "have a coke with" or "have coffee with" or ... like when Obama took the Russian President out to a hamburger joint in D.C.

    1183:

    Dave Lester @ 1157: The other big difference between Roman slavery and later versions is that the condition of slavery was not hereditary.

    I don't believe that's entirely true.

    1184:

    David L @ 1164:

    Personal animosity combined with spite, but Trump hated Obama because he was black. Not everything Trump does is motivated by pure racism, but racism is a huge part of his makeup.

    Am I the only one who remembers/saw the clip of the time at a big dinner where O made fun of DT? And DT sat their steaming?

    Forgetting a perceived insult was never in the Trump playbook.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGpLg0b3DE

    Well, that would certainly introduce the elements of personal animosity & spite, but that came AFTER Trumpolini's "birther" campaign against Obama and LONG AFTER Trumpolini's Central Park 5 ad in the NY Times.

    Trump already hated Obama before that dinner took place.

    1185:

    Greg Tingey @ 1175: " I have a tape of the old BBC programme about the Voyager missions.I really need to translate it to a disc or a "slug" or onto a file that any normal computer can read."

    Do you mean the 48 minute BBC Horizon Documentary (1980)?

    It's on Vimeo:

    https://vimeo.com/227875464

    1186:

    whitroth @ 1166: Agreed. Magic is personal - you have to have something special to do it (like midichlorians [g]). Tech is something anyone can use (look at all the people who should not be allowed to clean their toasters).

    It's all dependent upon a few people, not the masses (although Turtledove, in his Darkness series, did an interesting take on it).

    OTOH, some authors have come up with "magical" systems that ARE technology based ... computer programming or math based.

    Rick Cook wrote an amusing series where magic was basically systems level programming and there was this other guy who wrote a bunch of books about a Spy Agency that used "Computational Demonology" ... What was his name?

    1187:

    I have a tape of the old BBC programme about the Voyager missions.

    I really need to translate it to a disc or a "slug" or onto a file that any normal computer can read.

    @ Piccadilly Circus:

    https://www.dvdandvideosolutions.co.uk

    Probably there are others.

    1188:

    Oh, yeah, I forget his name... but they're outliers. Way, out.

    1189:

    whitroth @ 1170: You've seen my nasty post about needing Aryan reservations. In those, I'm deliberately being nasty... but I'm using their own definitions against them.

    Except that "their ... definitions" are just WRONG and you shouldn't be accepting them even enough to try to throw it back in their faces.

    1190:

    Niala Thanks for that - will copy it... but at the same time. No, it's a different programme (!)

    Meanwhile ... The Batley insanity has now gone much more public. I think the French do this one right. We need a "Law of 1905" & no privilege for any religion.

    I also predict vast assertions of racism will be made & anything at all to muddy the waters if at all possible - on both sides which will inevitably be drawn up.

    1191:

    Greg Tingey @ 1175: ( See also H's question - but first you have to define a "Hate Crime" - very, very carefully )

    Like pornography, it's difficult to define, but I know it when I see it.

    Still, I'll take a stab at it.

    Hate Crime: crime motivated by hatred of anothers' gender, identity, race, color or creed.

    1192:

    dpb @ 1180: There is a decent chance that it is already on the internet.

    If not, then video capture cards are a thing so it should be possible to find someone able to make a copy. 10 years ago that would be me but I no longer have the equipment unfortunately.

    I wonder if my VCR still works. I haven't tried to use it for 25 years, but in addition to the NTSC output (selectable to Chan 3 or Chan 4) I'm pretty sure it has (had?) a composite RGB output. I wonder what kind of adapter I'd need to capture the video in a form I could use on a computer? Wouldn't do Greg any good, because I'm pretty sure his tape would be encoded for PAL rather than NTSC, so I wouldn't be able to play it.

    The other question is whether the tape itself is still good.

    1193:

    I also predict vast assertions of racism will be made

    Perhaps think about why the particular religious issue is being used as a bright line test for racism, and why it's so important to people that they can point to something and say "This. This, right here. It is unquestionably a violation of the rules".

    1194:

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/24/israel-votes-palestinian-israeli-party-now-a-potential-kingmaker

    A small Palestinian-Israeli party has unexpectedly won crucial seats in Israel’s election, potentially putting it in a position to choose Israel’s next prime minister.

    Speaking of breaking the rules, it looks as though the Israelis have a nasty decision to make. To they violate to traditional left-right divide between their parties, or do they break the rule against letting Palestinians be in government?

    1195:

    So, you're suggesting that a hate crime is a crime based on hatred of a group, rather than an individual.

    1196:

    Alternatively, I have a unit a friend "loaned" me that they weren't using, and I see it available again in ads on faceplant: a VCR/DVD device, meant explicitly for copying a tape to disk. Works fine, once you figure out the "instructions".

    1197:

    I wonder what kind of adapter I'd need to capture the video in a form I could use on a computer?

    Something like this. Got on for school, used it to convert a lot of tapes to video files.

    https://www.roxio.com/en/products/easy-vhs-to-dvd/standard/

    1198:

    So, you're suggesting that a hate crime is a crime based on hatred of a group, rather than an individual.

    Well, that is the legal definition.

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/249

    (1) Offenses involving actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin.—Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, a dangerous weapon, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin of any person—

    (2) Offenses involving actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.— (A) In general.—Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, in any circumstance described in subparagraph (B) or paragraph (3), willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, a dangerous weapon, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any person—

    So to make it a hate crime it needs to be because of the victim's membership in a group, rather than any individual hatred you have for them…

    1199:

    Heteromeles @ 1174:

    I tend to think [Tyson Yunkaporta is] right, but his version of magic is basically what Trump was spewing for the last four years. It's not telepathy or levitation, it's forcing others to live in your made-up world, even though they know it's not correct. This can be used beneficently with blessings (getting someone out of a funk to do something they don't think they can do) or as a curse (to mess with someone's head). Sir Pterry called it Headology.

    Back in 2016 I started reading Scott Adam's blog (yes, the Dilbert guy). He had a series of postings on the subject of "master persuaders"; people who have studied headology and know how to use it to manipulate people. Adam's thesis was that Trump was a Master Persuader who had obviously studied the arts of hypnosis and misdirection, and was playing "3d chess" against everyone else who was still playing draughts. Here are a couple of Adam's blog posts on the topic:

    https://www.scottadamssays.com/2016/07/18/how-persuaders-see-the-world/ https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/09/06/how-to-spot-a-wizard/

    I started following this because at the time all the pundits (and me) were predicting that Trump was going to flame out Real Soon Now, and it obviously wasn't happening. Adams was presenting an alternative theory that fit the observed facts and made predictions, which made it science and therefore worth reading.

    Adams was broadly correct about Trump's media techniques and popularity, but his predictions about Trump's abilities and policies were way off. I came to the conclusion (and still hold it) that Trump is not a master persuader, rather he is an idiot-savant persuader. Trump is very good at manipulating people in specific ways, but that is the end of his talents.

    1200:

    Speaking of Gibson, why do so many people love "Neuromancer"? As a foretelling of cyberspace, I find "True Names" by Vernon Vinge much better. It also predates "Neuromancer" by a year.

    1201:

    a VCR/DVD device, meant explicitly for copying a tape to disk. Works fine, once you figure out the "instructions".

    I bought 2 different models over 10 years ago. Both wound up in electronic recycling. My best success rate in making a DVD was about 1 in 4. Instructions, as best I could tell, for both seemed to be be a translation of the reverse engineering of the firmware notes of someone for whom English, or any European language, was not known. Confusing directions with all kinds of mis-spellings and nonsense grammar.

    Costco $20-$25 for a flash drives seems a deal to me. We did buy a $25 VCR on the local Facebook market place and dug out an older TV with composite or component inputs and played the tapes we were interested in to make sure they would play.

    1202:

    "Spy Agency that used "Computational Demonology" ... What was his name?"

    Sounds like Greg Egan.......

    Assuming a universe with 12 dimensions of space and 4 dimensions of time in which beings use computation to rotate through dimensions to summon demons that travel sideways through time to spy on each other. While falling in love.

    1203:

    Agreed completely. And look who he's manipulating - do you think he might have some Daddy issues?

    1204:

    Moz WHICH rules? We finally got rid of our "blasphemy" laws ... now we are faced with implicit terrorism for "blasphemy" against another fuckwit religion .... The Charlie Hebdo cartoons are in the public domain - they are clearly sarcasm & satire, yet certain religious pressure-groups are determined to erase them from public view & at the same time dominate discussion - like "You cannot dare to criticise our religion". We had this fight in 16/17th century Europe over xtianity - do we really have to do it all over again because of the religion of submission? I'm an islamophobe - but I'm also a christianophobe & commie-phobe & ... you get the idea. They are all murderous-&-blackmailing lying shit, from my p.o.v.

    1205:

    Sounds like Greg Egan....... Assuming a universe with 12 dimensions of space and 4 dimensions of time in which beings use computation to rotate through dimensions to summon demons that travel sideways through time to spy on each other. While falling in love.

    I'd read it. It's certainly something Greg Egan could write. The Orthogonal books are halfway there already. Naturally it would come with its own physics primer for the readers who wonder about such things.

    Speaking of whom... In Bob Howard's world, has anyone figured out what kind of non-human superintelligence is writing science fiction under the name "Greg Egan" yet?

    1206:

    Greg, proof by demostration is all very well, but I fear you're quite genuinely unable to see that that is what you're providing.

    I asked: why the particular religious issue is being used as a bright line test for racism

    I asked that particular question because the UK has a whole lot of people who take pleasure in denigrating others, offending others, and going out of their way to make other people unhappy. Quite specific people - they're not using this glorious "right to be offensive" against powerful people, quite the contrary, they're picking on marginalised people instead.

    The exact question I asked is because when British Muslims say "that's racism" the all too common answer is "what is?" followed by a determined picking away at the details that very quickly obscures any broader point, and may even end with "yes, you're right, that one person saying that exact thing was indeed racism. That person was wrong". The whole process is tedious and annoying for whoever was offended, and difficult even if the eventual outcome is the reluctant concession.

    Much better to focus on simple, obvious, no-bones-about-it examples. "it is offensive to Muslims depict the Prophet". That statement is not ambiguous, it's not open to interpretation, it's so simple that even the most determined moron can't misunderstand it. What we get then is people like you saying, quite blatantly, "I choose to offend Muslims".

    That's right, you do. Everyone who sees you do that has the right to observe, quite correctly, that you're being racist. They might observe a pattern of that behaviour and reasonably conclude that you are ... to put it politely... a racist person.

    1207:

    Greg, if you really want to "have a go" at a bunch of religious stupidity that directly affects you, you could start with this grossly offensive garbage:

    Sittings in both Houses begin with prayers. These follow the Christian faith and there is currently no multi-faith element.

    Really? You are so proud of your right to offend religious people and so against anyone claiming that you should respect any element of their religion, but your rulers are explicitly Christian and no multi-faith element and oddly enough you don't have a bee in your bonnet about that issue.

    1208:

    What I've occasionally wondered is when Bob Howard is introduced on TV in The Delirium Brief, wouldn't his parents be saying: WTF? That's our boy, but how come he's using a pseudonym?

    (ISTR that "Bob Howard" is his code name, for use in The Laundry, but not his birth name. I could be misremembering, though).

    1209:

    Speaking of Gibson, why do so many people love "Neuromancer"? As a foretelling of cyberspace, I find "True Names" by Vernon Vinge much better. It also predates "Neuromancer" by a year.

    Cyberpunk as a literary movement was as much about style as substance. Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter IIRC, and he was imagining it out of whole cloth, not doing systematic speculation. Neuromancer is one of those stories that stuck when it hit.

    That said, cyberspace didn't really follow True Names either. That's okay, it's more a matter of taste than accuracy.

    Also, Gibson gets rightly mocked for using DNI cyberspace for communications most of us use phones for. And arcologies...?

    1210:

    The Charlie Hebdo cartoons are in the public domain - they are clearly sarcasm & satire, yet certain religious pressure-groups are determined to erase them from public view & at the same time dominate discussion - like "You cannot dare to criticise our religion".

    Um, Greg...freedom of the press is one reason why the attacks on Charlie Hebdo were regarded as a terrorist act as well as murder. Freedom of religion is why killing people for being Muslim is regarded as a hate crime as well as murder.

    Do you see the parallel construction of the laws?

    In your specific example, were you in the US, you'd be fully within your rights to rant against religious people. If you started hacking their social media, bombing religious buildings, or assaulting religious people because of what they believed, you'd also be prosecuted for hate crimes. Beliefs and thoughts are permitted, some actions are permitted, but assaults and killing are not.

    1211:

    Moz

    1206 -Bollocks, I'm afraid

    Actually, I do not "choose to offend muslims" - but I find their religion offensive to me - which is um, slightly different. Are you suggesting that the workers at Charlie Hebdo should have got down & apologised to muslims after their people were murdered, then? I really do hope that is not what you are saying. Again, for comparison look at the attempts by xtians in the period 1520-1700 ( approx ) - with local pockets of xtian-bigotry lasting much longer ( You CAN spell "Ireland" ? ) to completely shut down any attempts at all to criticise or make fun of or deviate from (their-particular-version-of) "religious truth"

    1297 First Part - Agree. You probably don't know this, but the National Secular Society have been trying to put a stop to that particular primitive act of superstition for many years now & are still getting shouts of "discrimination" & all sorts of irrelevant trash from political-religious bigots - and NOT JUST in parliament, either. Would you believe (oops) that many local government bodies, such as County & District Councils also do the mystical mumbo-jumbo, too?

    Second Part - No. You are bollocking on again. Maybe you forget that I'm an escaped ex-christian & you should remember that?

    H I agree with what you are saying, but I don't think I get the point. Freedom of expression also includes pointing out that religions (Not specifically any one religion) are bollocks, with supporting evidence. Education should include alternative points of view, as in: "This is what $Religion says, this is what the other $Religions say, this is why they are all bollocks" IIRC, the one thing the RC did not want at any price was the education of people & children especially in Comparative Religion. Like the Athenians killing Socrates, the young must not be taught to ask awkward questions.

    1212:

    Heteromeles @ 1209: "Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter IIRC"

    Gibson wrote it on an Hermes 2000 Swiss typewriter. He put a link to a description in a 2012 Twitter.

    http://mytypewriter.com/hermes2000c1930s.aspx

    Gibson was not really a tech person but he was wise enough to show first drafts to friends in Computer Science and he corrected his manuscript accordingly.

    1213:

    Gibson was not really a tech person but he was wise enough to show first drafts to friends in Computer Science and he corrected his manuscript accordingly.

    I just re-read 'Neuromancer' and while I like the book (I usually re-read it every couple of years), the computers work... funnily in it. For example I still don't know what the point of the modem in that one scene was.

    It doesn't matter, to me. It's a fine book. It was also one of the first cyberpunk books I read, and did go through some effort to get it, so it is nostalgic to me.

    1214:

    Re: 'IIRC, the one thing the RC did not want at any price was the education of people & children especially in Comparative Religion.'

    Depends on the school and era (societal background).

    I had an RC education starting with elementary school (nuns), high school (lay) and undergrad (Jesuits & lay).

    In high school, I was in the university-stream class where we took comparative religion which was intended to provide us an overview of the six major religions from a philosophical perspective. I only learned about the associated customs when I met real, live people of other faiths. In my experience, the textbook descriptions of religions don't stack up against, i.e., tend mostly to be incongruent with the day-to-day lived versions of these faiths (RC included).

    BTW - my high school religion teachers also tried to get our classes interested in current local and world politics.

    1215:

    I thought Neuromancer was undistinguished and boring-- emotionally flat point of view, and the tech was at the level of invention I expected from average/decent sf.

    In other words, I'd probably make a lousy sf editor, though actually I think real editors have their stories about the ones that got away.

    In re magic being personal: I had something very different in mind. I meant that magic requires sentience, while natural forces like gravity just work on their own.

    I've been told that there's been an evolution in fantasy, where originally magic was done by non-humans, and then the ability to do magic became more pervasive.

    Harry Potter manages to have it both ways-- the non-humans get the point of view, and magic is pervasively available for them.

    Survey of what Republicans actually care about-- I find it hilarious that the miscellaneous category is described as "core".

    1216:

    This is an example of something I wonder about-- how much does the history of an institution tell us about it?

    1217:

    I find it hilarious that the miscellaneous category is described as "core".

    Also hilarious that the "core" Republicans "care most about honesty in government" — given who they support! :-)

    1218:

    Re: '... how much does the history of an institution tell us about it?'

    Yes - the history especially the bits that are tacitly 'understood' are key. Because only once you've demonstrated the tacit shared meaning attached to a phrase or action are you accepted as 'one of us'.

    To me this means that customs and stories (lore/fables) that are explicitly or implicitly intended to point the listener/student toward the 'correct' interpretation are actually at least as if not more relevant in interpreting the significance of a cultural/religious 'position' as the purely intellectual/analytical parsing that's usually considered academically acceptable.

    Would be interesting to compare the major religions' primary cultures' children's bedtime stories in terms of what signals something or someone good/bad, when to act vs. when is action too late, what actions are associated with heroes vs. villains, and what is considered a happy ending/appropriate reward.

    1220:

    So to make it a hate crime it needs to be because of the victim's membership in a group, rather than any individual hatred you have for them…

    Sloppy reading! Go back and look for the words "or perceived". The victim doesn't need to be a member of a hated group, just believed to be one by their attacker. (Your example: the murder shortly after 9/11 of a Sikh man by what today we'd call a MAGAt who thought he was a muslim would absolutely be a hate crime under this definition, even though the perp attacked the wrong target.)

    1221:

    whitroth @ 1195: So, you're suggesting that a hate crime is a crime based on hatred of a group, rather than an individual.

    No, I'm saying right out loud ANY crime MOTIVATED BY HATRED is a hate crime ... could be a group, could be an individual, or could be something completely imaginary in the mind of the criminal committing the crime.

    The victim doesn't even have to be part of the hated group - Vincent Chin - a couple of Detroit auto-workers beat him to death with a baseball bat because Japanese automakers were selling more cars in the U.S. than were U.S. automakers.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin

    1222:

    Speaking of Gibson, why do so many people love "Neuromancer"

    Because it came out first, and built on top of Gibson's earlier (and IMO superior) short stories in Asimov's SF Magazine which, since the late 1970s, were turning heads. (I still think "The Gernsback Continuum" is both a manifesto and a masterpiece for everything he did afterwards, and jaw-droppingly brilliant in the context of the literary community it came out of.)

    Otherwise: Neuromancer is a first novel, with first novel faults. But it's sensibility was what set it apart.

    Other credible cyberpunk type specimens nearly made it, though: Walter Jon Williams' "Hardwired" was circulating in search of a publisher for six years and came out six months after "Neuromancer", at which point is was widely and unfairly dismissed as a "me too" novel. And K. W. Jeter's "Doctor Adder" is the missing link between Philip K. Dick and cyberpunk (Jeter was one of Dick's young proteges, and also the guy who popularized steampunk, just as a throwaway).

    1223:

    David L @ 1201:

    a VCR/DVD device, meant explicitly for copying a tape to disk. Works fine, once you figure out the "instructions".

    Costco $20-$25 for a flash drives seems a deal to me. We did buy a $25 VCR on the local Facebook market place and dug out an older TV with composite or component inputs and played the tapes we were interested in to make sure they would play.

    They don't make DVDs of copyrighted material (like Greg's BBC tape).

    1224:

    What I've occasionally wondered is when Bob Howard is introduced on TV in The Delirium Brief, wouldn't his parents be saying: WTF? That's our boy, but how come he's using a pseudonym?

    Things go sideways under Bob so fast that there's no time for embarrassing conversations with mum and dad: and he doesn't appear in subsequent books (at least, not the ones I've written so far).

    1225:

    Meanwhile, Q for Charlie ... Is Salmomd going to split the Nationalist vote? Sounds like "fun".

    And, in teh absurd & also worrying Batley saga ... Some of the PUPILS want their Religion Teacher back as THEY UNDERSTAND, & the fuckwit religious adults plainly do not, that they need to know about these things.

    1226:

    JReynolds @ 1208: What I've occasionally wondered is when Bob Howard is introduced on TV in The Delirium Brief, wouldn't his parents be saying: WTF? That's our boy, but how come he's using a pseudonym?

    (ISTR that "Bob Howard" is his code name, for use in The Laundry, but not his birth name. I could be misremembering, though).

    I think "Bob" mentions several times throughout the series that it's a cover name. "Bob" is already thoroughly outed by the time he's on TV, but it would make sense for some low level minion of the Laundry to be sent around to have a quiet word with his parents about the power of true names. Maybe "Mo" has a chat with them.

    And doesn't the program come on at 10:45pm? Maybe his parents go to bed early & missed it.

    At least a couple of days pass between his TV appearance & when the Laundry is overthrown, so it's even possible "Bob" had a chance to explain it to them himself.

    Alternative theory: The parents have a geas placed on them to prevent them discussing his true name outside of family.

    1227:

    In re magic being personal: I had something very different in mind. I meant that magic requires sentience, while natural forces like gravity just work on their own.

    There is quite a lot of room between "natural forces" and "sentience." Where's the dividing line between thing and person? I'd also point out that this is part and parcel of other discussions, about when something is a someone (meaning a person), and when that being is less than a someone...an other, who can be exploited, enslaved, or killed, or eaten.

    One thing to note is that this is tied in with the Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Etc. conglomeration, and it goes back to the notion that God made Adam separately and gave him dominion over the Earth. I'll point out the problem with that in a second, but this logic always leads to the idea that humans are special and different in some way, because that's what we were taught as children.

    This is the faith I grew up with, but I become more and more animist as I get older. A big part of that is that science, in a myriad of ways, keeps pointing out that we were not created separately. We are very much a part of the biosphere and utterly depend on it, and we're the products of four billion years of evolution, not separate creations of an idiosyncratic god. I've come to the conclusion that the many, many people who came before us, who thought everything had a soul (or a dreaming, or whatever, without exception) were and are probably more correct than those who believe that humans (or at worst, only some humans) are different and special. "Different and special" is a useful belief system for conquerors, but it's causing a lot of misery now, and the facts don't support it.

    Anyway, the problem with Adam and Eve, and royal incest. Most people understand sex, and realize that God had to have created at least two people to start our species. Those two have children, and then...well, many belief systems require incest in the second generation to propagate the species. This (apparently!) is part of the logic in god-kings having sex with their sisters. They're not doing icky stuff to keep their possessions in the family (the truth), they're so divine that their emulating that second generation who had incest (it's magic! They're divine!). But incest is A Sin In The JCMetc religions, so this won't fly. What to do?

    Here's how the conventional Bible solved it. Adam and Eve had Cain, Abel, Seth, and "other sons and daughters." Cain, after offing Abel, went off to found a city in the land of Nod and have lots of descendants. Who'd he marry? An unnamed sister*? The story as written in English seems to imply that there were other people out there who are not part of the Genesis myth. Are they human too? If you're a believer, we're descendants of these Others as well. Or we're descendants of incest. Logic screws things sometimes.

    *The Book of Jubilees, part of the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Beta Israel and apocryphal elsewhere, solves this by asserting that Cain and Seth married their sisters. I had to get this out of Wikipedia. It also asserts that the "fallen angels" are in fact the disobedient children of Seth, and other fun stuff. I do like the idea of listing the history of the world in jubilees (49 year periods, after which everyone takes a year off and resets) rather than centuries. Apparently the Book of Jubilees is a history written as successive jubilees and given to Moses on Mt. Horeb.

    1228:
    You probably don't know this, but the National Secular Society have been trying to put a stop to that particular primitive act of superstition for many years now & are still getting shouts of "discrimination" & all sorts of irrelevant trash from political-religious bigots - and NOT JUST in parliament, either. Would you believe (oops) that many local government bodies, such as County & District Councils also do the mystical mumbo-jumbo, too?

    And there's a reason for that, in England at least.

    We are -- or at least retain elements of -- a theocracy. Queen Elizabeth II is head of the Church of England and is Head of State. As the Guardian have recently pointed out we have a system of "Sovereign Consent" where the Monarch can consent or withhold consent on any legislation she desires.

    Come the Revolution we'll be able to change all that.

    So I claim wikipedia is wrong: England should be added to the nations which are Theocracies like Iran.

    1229:

    You were one of those guys whose parents got talked to by the head of children's education at your church/parish. They were told you needed to listen more and talk / ask questions less.

    :)

    1230:

    Anti-vaxer boot camp ...

    I think folks here might be interested in learning about the tactics being taught to 'persuade' fence-sitters into becoming anti-vaxers. Probably can be applied equally well to religion and politics.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/marketplace-covid-conspiracy-boot-camp-1.5963503

    IMO, the people promoting these courses and activities are scammers and are in it primarily for the money.

    1231:

    "Logic screws things sometimes."

    That's probably why the nuns never said a word to us about transubstantiation.

    1232:

    It also benefited from what's probably the most awesome first line in the history of science-fiction, and the prose was awesome throughout.

    1233:

    I've been told that there's been an evolution in fantasy, where originally magic was done by non-humans, and then the ability to do magic became more pervasive.

    I remember that too, and I think the idea goes from Sword and Sorcery (Robert E Howard and Conan) to more modern fantasy (notably L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea misadventures). If you read the original Conan stories, magic users are definitely Others, having more in common with nonhuman beings than with people like Conan. Harold Shea and company used symbolic logic as the basis for magic, so they're smart, not special. The argument similarly goes that in Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, mostly nonhuman beings do magic, so there's a change over time.

    But three points do not a trend make, and one big ol' fly in the ointment is HP Lovecraft. He was writing at the same time as Howard, and he very definitely has ordinary people reading books and doing magic from them. IIRC, L. Frank Baum's Oz stories similarly had ordinary people becoming magicians well before REH or HPL started writing.

    I suspect the reality is that there are a bunch of tropes in anglophone mythology about who can do magic, and probably more outside the anglophone world. They go in and out of fashion, but that probably depends more on who scores a hit with an idea and spawns imitators than anything else. So I'm not sure there's a good trend.

    One trope (and it's worldwide) are that witches and sorcerers are literally outsiders, people who, through birth or practice, have stepped away from the human world, and that their supernatural abilities are the result of this. There's a large grain of truth here, in that most people who have extraordinary ability in anything from singing to stage magic to sports to meditation spend thousands of hours practicing, and they had to set themselves apart to practice.

    On the other side is the notion that anybody who practiced hard enough and maybe had a soupcon of talent could do something extraordinary, and, well see above. Except that most of us duffers could practice as hard as, say, Tiger Woods or the Dalai Lama, and never become remotely as good as they are. But we could maybe learn to magic a bit.

    A third trope is that magicians did something special to gain their talents--fell into a vat of radioactive magician's props, ate a cherry brought by a firebird, sold their soul to the devil, fell into Neverwhere) and that gave them special abilities that practice helped them to develop.

    I suppose a fourth trope is that magic is science we don't understand yet: it's psychic powers or what have you. Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series does this quite nicely, and I'd suggest Anathem falls in here, at least at at the end. Problem is, magic as science (although true! Stage magic is applied empirical neuroscience) isn't all that popular at the moment.

    Anyway, all these tropes are alive and well in fantasy. Magic can be the result of someone not being entirely human (cf the TV series Grimm), having alien or divine blood, or just someone practicing really, really hard (The Magicians), or both, plus where the hero meets a ghost and his life changes (The Rivers of London series). Psychic powers aren't around so much at the moment, but I blame Wicca for that. I mean, why scientize magic when you can just do magick and not be ashamed of it?

    Bottom line is that I'm not sure there's much of an actual trend. But it does make a nice story.

    1234:

    Sloppy reading!

    Actually, sloppy writing. I meant that the crime was committed because of the victim's membership in a group (whether true or not) rather than because of who they are as an individual.

    If Alice dumps Bob to marry Charlie, so Bob hates Charlie and he murders him for ruining his love life, that isn't a hate crime because although Bob hates the victim it wasn't because of his membership in a group. (Or perceived membership.)

    1235:

    In his novels situated in or around Ethshar, Lawrence Watt-Evans has presented just about every kind of magician and magic you can imagine.

    1236:
    It also benefited from what's probably the most awesome first line in the history of science-fiction

    "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." -- Niel Gaiman.

    (Best joke about best first line).

    1237:

    Is Salmomd going to split the Nationalist vote? Sounds like "fun".

    Nope. Salmond is running a total of 4 candidates in this election. Zero chance of a constituency win, little or no chance of picking up even a single seat via the party list system. He's a day late and a dollar short to an election campaign that has only 40 days to run and is largely being voted on by postal ballots this time round -- meaning votes will be cast within 2-4 weeks of now.

    The other nationalist party, the Scottish Greens, look to be on course to pick up as many as eleven seats in Holyrood (the same proportion in Westminster would mean 50 MPs). They're believed likely to go into a formal coalition with the SNP this time around, rather than just a confidence and supply agreement. They're not running in any constituencies (where the SNP are almost unassailable) but are focussing on the party list vote (where they can pick up seats from Labour and the Conservatives).

    TLDR: Salmond is probably about as likely to upset Scottish politics as George Galloway, which is to say if you think that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

    EDIT: I just learned what Salmond's approval rating is right now ... -42%, compared to Clownshoe Churchill's -50%. That's right: Salmond is nearly as unpopular as Boris Johnson (While Nicola Sturgeon is on +50% and even Ruth Davidson is on +15%).

    1238:

    It's a perfect example of how technology changes and people interpret statements about that technology differently depending on their experiences. As you doubtless know, Gaiman was writing about analog TV.

    1239:

    Perhaps you missed us being funny about OGH....

    1240:

    And I've always considered Hardwired up there with Neuromancer.

    Meanwhile, was it in Neuromancer, or its sequel, that we see the private military exfiltration of the scientist... and how is that not like right now, with megacorps?

    1241:

    Thinking about new forms of magic...

    My first thought (for purely human magic) was the notion of having magic talents be on a spectrum, sort of like autism. Then I thought about El Cheeto Grande, and thought that it might be better to have magics be two separate spectra, analogous to narcissism and autism. And Ghu help us for someone who's extreme on both.

    But I always like to look at things backwards to see if that makes more sense.

    So now I'm wondering if maybe it would be more interesting to have normalcy be the spectra, where perfectly normal people score highly on one or two spectrum disorders, while the norm (for the story universe at least) is both neurodiversity and thaumatodiversity: magical weirdos are normal, while muggles are at the high end of a spectrum (disorder) that causes them to obsessively focus on humans to the exclusion of the rest of reality and to obsessively focus on being part of a group, to the point where they collectively force people to abide by their reality. And most people aren't really muggles, but because the High Functioning Muggles dominate society, the rest of us have to fake it as best we can just to get along.

    Probably can't turn it into a story, but it's fun to play with the notion that magic is on the normal end, the muggles are the people who are "disordered" and "crippled," and most people are somewhere low on the spectrum and trying to fake being muggles.

    1242:

    I'm not sure, in Lovecraft, that it's "ordinary people". Rather, by looking/reading the Necronomicon, someone is changed into an Other, and really, they're doing the work of Cthulhu, through the book.

    Otherwise, yes, I think they're debasing magic so that anyone can do it, rather than just those with midichlorians.

    1243:

    It's in Count Zero.

    Thing is that we do have megacorps (Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) and we do have the age-old dynamic of the fight between the would be plutocrats (now tangled up with the megacorps) and the democracies, a fight that goes back to the Hellenistic world in the west (spoiler alert, the plutocrats won that one).

    However...

    It's cheaper to do the exfiltration without the military. Just as we don't need cyberspace for stuff we do on cell-phones, corporate headhunting these days rarely/never involves guns. That's more the old 1980s Soviet exfiltration scheme than anything else, and even then they rarely bothered with force.

    1244:

    It's cheaper to do the exfiltration without the military

    And cheaper to defend against them with NDAs and no-compete clauses in employment contracts.

    The typical cyberpunk world has a curious relationship with legality -- on the one hand corporations are all-powerful, on the other hand they appear to have no recourse to litigation.

    1245:

    I'd flag the ends of the Dunwich Horror and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where someone who knew the right words said them at the right time and solved the problem. They spewed sanity points in doing so, but they weren't rendered permanently insane (and therefore Other), at least to my knowledge.

    1246:

    "They don't make DVDs of copyrighted material (like Greg's BBC tape)."

    This probably isn't true. They can't tell the difference. There were various attempts to promote "spoiler signal" systems - mostly people recycling the idea of playing games with non-standard sync pulse levels under different names - but they never caught on because they were not reliable, and even if they did work they were trivial to defeat. I've never come across a tape that actually used one. And certainly if Greg's tape is a home recording of a TV programme, it won't have anything of the kind.

    I have a friend who got one of those gadgets; it's quite possible that it could give the appearance of refusing to copy copyrighted material when all it's actually doing is being bloody useless. It was good at that. (His reasoning in buying the thing was that doing it on the computer was a huge pain in the arse so he wanted a single-function magic box where all you did was load it up and press go. Trouble was that it achieved that not by being clever enough to deal correctly with all the various contingencies, but by simply ignoring them and blundering on regardless. (He also got a Philips dual deck CD copying machine for the same reason and with the same result.))

    I have a VCR and a video capture card, and I could copy Greg's tape using them. But what I don't seem to have any more is any sacrificial tapes to run through the VCR first to see if it is still capable of not chewing them up after spending 10 years on top of the kitchen cupboards.

    1247:

    My interpretation is that reading the Necronomicon or a similar work is something that's brutally paradigm-shifting. It's like being a very primitive specialist in flint-knapping who suddenly has the formula for gunpowder where previously the most powerful weapon s/he could make is an atlatl... and they've got a little gun-making knowledge now and they've just sent the world topsy-turvy!

    The flint-knapper seems insane because suddenly they're talking about how to make a perfect tube, and compression, and what can be done with flint to spark this weird powder they've made and they're wasting their time making this thing that doesn't look like a weapon at all and claiming they can bring down a mammoth single-handedly...

    Tharg go mad. Killed Tharg!

    And yes, the paradigm shift might drive the reader literally insane, but that's not really the point - send a Ph.d in physics back to Ancient Rome and the scholars of that time will throw him into the loony bin! It might be science and it might be magic, but at the level of the Necronomicon who can tell?

    1248:

    I suspect that if you retooled cyberpunk so that the corporate ninjas and mercs were lawyers, you'd get the US reality pretty well.

    The other thing is that there are plenty of mercs and soldiers in the world, but there's also this thing called the use of force continuum which also wasn't in cyberpunk so much. The continuum idea is that you deploy lawyers and bodyguards first, and only get into the serious small arms usage in places where those are inadequate.

    1249:

    Neuromancer was the book that brought me back to SF as an adult. It was required reading in an Hon. Political Science course when I was an apprentice grown-up, and we were expected to unpack the notions as political thought. What were the assumptions about the world held by the characters? Excellent, mind opening exercise that dragged me directly back into enjoyment of SF and ultimately to this site.

    Living in Vancouver I've run across Mr. Gibson a few times. I have a distinct memory of walking on Commercial Drive with my toddler on my shoulders and seeing Gibson walking towards me. I recognized him and saw him realize I was recognizing him at the same moment.

    He immediately took 4 large steps off the sidewalk and well clear of me. The message was unmistakable, so I just smiled and carried on. Probably for the best as I'd just finished reading Spook Country (which had its climax in my neighbourhood, on my block) and I would likely have gushed awkwardly at him.

    1250:

    Talking about slavery, servitude, roman empire and so on, I was reminded of a couple small factoids I learned recently.

    First of all, the original word for slave in the roman empire was "servus", the root of servant: slave came into use quite later, was a reference to Slavic people that apparently were considered quite high quality servants having a reputation of reliability and hard work and so highly prized all over Europe as a kind of status symbol. In fact, even the "ciao" salute, came as a contraption from Venetian "sciavo vostro", meaning "your slave", meaning "at your service".

    So, servant and slave have exchanged their original meaning, and the original slaves were the whitest people around.

    By the way, I've an in-law that's a Slav and feels quite strongly that the word slave itself should be banned as offensive to people of Slavic origin.

    1251:

    [Adam and Eve and insects]

    I think that's one of the standard things that kids of a certain age dig up to pose to their teacher under the guise of a serious question when really they're just being cheeky. So of course the teachers have standard answers. The one I know is that that rule didn't apply because of the exceptional circumstances. There's another bit later on where a couple of lasses shag their dad because the alternative is extinction, which they explicitly justify using the exceptional circumstances argument.

    1252:

    As you know well, everyone has to dree one's weird, and he clearly was destined to end up as Scotland's answer to Farage. I haven't heard him, but apparently he mispronounced Alba.

    1253:

    Salmond is planning to run 4 candidates in each of the regional elections, none in the individual constituency votes. No doubt he sees himself as holding the balance of power or suchlike. As OGH implies he seems to be unable to conceive that he might just have passed his sell-by date.

    Amusingly he has named his new party "Alba", a Gaelic word that he seems to be unable to pronounce correctly - "cultural appropriation" says my wife (also, "bloody muggle").

    For contrast, here is a fairly typical (i.e. long way from extreme) Scottish left wing YouTube video - not sure if this is in OGH's local constituency. https://youtu.be/JmAMO6qYFdQ { warning: includes vapid Sartre quote () plus typical central belt ignorance of Scottish geography } () is there any other kind ?

    1254:

    I had a slightly different take, since the biggest bit HPL wrote was in the Dunwich Horror. Basically, someone who had a 20th century-plus take on reality tried to explain it to a 12th century Arabian scholar. For example: the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Most life on Earth is invisible, there's far more of it than there is of you, it's living inside you, it runs the planet, and you can see it as slime and occasionally smell its effects. Now compare with the passage on the Great Old Ones and you'll see how this concept fared through multiple translations.

    Many of us have had an analogous experience, explaining either mycorrhizae or assembler code to someone who has no freaking clue, and watching them start to think you've gone mad and should be avoided. HPL just made it sound much more horrific.

    1255:
    The typical cyberpunk world has a curious relationship with legality -- on the one hand corporations are all-powerful, on the other hand they appear to have no recourse to litigation.

    I don't see any contradiction here. For litigation to be of any value to the megacorps, the judicial structure has to have significant power (which, here, is essentially the ability to inflict negative consequences) over the target of the litigation.

    So either

    a) the target is much less powerful than the litigating corp, in which case (given the all-powerful nature of cyberpunk corporations) why wouldn't the bigger party just take what they want? or b) the two parties have comparable levels of power, and the judiciary has much greater power than either. In which case, the corporations aren't all-powerful.

    If corporations suing each other remains a viable idea, that means the government must have the ability to force the loser to comply with the judges' decision - and, specifically, must have a greater and/or more irresistible ability to do so than the winner does.

    1256:

    Pigeon @ 1246:

    "They don't make DVDs of copyrighted material (like Greg's BBC tape)."

    This probably isn't true. They can't tell the difference. There were various attempts to promote "spoiler signal" systems - mostly people recycling the idea of playing games with non-standard sync pulse levels under different names - but they never caught on because they were not reliable, and even if they did work they were trivial to defeat. I've never come across a tape that actually used one. And certainly if Greg's tape is a home recording of a TV programme, it won't have anything of the kind.

    Costco won't make you a DVD from a VHS tape of copyrighted material.

    Doesn't have anything to do with whether the machine can detect copyrighted material or not. It's the operator who is held responsible.

    Maybe copyright law is different in the U.K., but in the U.S. the vendors who offer VHS to DVD services won't make duplicates of copyrighted material.

    You can record anything you want off the air. But the "lab" can't legally make a copy of it or transcribe it to new media. The DMCA was written to make vendors financially liable for copyright violations if they do. So they won't.

    1257:

    Well, I don't. Both forms of magic (as well as exogenous magic) were widespread as far back as I have read. If I had to guess at the oridinal form it would be exogenous magic, invoked by scholars of such things, though that is currently rather out of fashion. That is, after, all, probably the most common form of magic used (or pretended) in the real world. The Arabian Nights was highly influential, for example, as were the stories that were collected in the (Colour) Fairy Books.

    1258:

    The problem is one of norms. Any power, corporate, ecclesiastical, political, or military, seems to do better when it provides a predictable set of norms and assures as wide a variety of services within its territory as possible.

    This is the difference between a drug cartel and a pharmaceutical company. Both get rich off of hooking people to meds, but one is illegal and has to deal elaborately and violently with trust networks, while the other works notionally within the law and provides more benefits to more people. Both exist, but the latter is more stable. Most real megacorps work on the latter model.

    The thing to remember with transnationals is that they leverage and arbitrage legal systems. It's to their advantage that there are 190-odd polities on this planet, and I'm pretty sure they do not want a unified world government over them. They can bend the laws of the smaller countries (e.g. tax havens) and use rulings within separate polities to protect their assets while fighting their enemies. Each country with its set of laws is more like a square on the chessboard. Their maneuvers within the squares are how they fight for position or ownership on that square, and these in turn inform their maneuvers among the different squares.

    And their frontline fighters are lawyers and law writers, less people with guns.

    The problem is that this world barely existed when Gibson and WJW were writing the seminal cyberpunk books in the early 1980s. Even now, most people don't get it, so it's easier in fiction to use the shorthand of physical violence than to try to portray the more intricate legal duels that now routinely take place.

    1260:

    Doesn't have anything to do with whether the machine can detect copyrighted material or not. It's the operator who is held responsible.

    Knowing nothing about such things, I ask out of curiosity. Are there self-service machines where you can stick a VHS tape into the slot, a flash drive into the USB port, swipe a credit card and get the transfer done? Or does an employee always have to examine the tape to make sure its legit?

    It's been a while, but I recall that CVS photo centers had kiosks where you could insert flash drives and get them to print out photos, no questions asked. Also, now that I think about it and date myself, Kinkos business locations where you could do pretty much the same with laser printers.

    1261:

    There's definitely some of that going on. If you get rid of "they're not white/protestant," "they're not Christian," and "The universe is really old" and you've killed at least of third of Lovecraft's possible shock value, maybe more like half.

    But what I wrote about the Necronomicon was more a matter of answering the question of "What kind of magic is that?" The Necronomicon is the "magic" of superior knowledge. Whether you're doing something quasi-scientific like "speaking the deep language of the cosmos" or "doing something that's actually 'mystical'" isn't particularly important in that paradigm, because they're kind of the same thing.

    I'd assume that the Necromicon also has some kind of shock value. It's not just "superior" knowledge, it's superior knowledge that breaks a lot of human paradigms about how stuff works, and at a much deeper level than "not white, not Xtian, and very old." I'm starting to explore some ideas of what that might be in my writing, but I've not yet crafted it into a story that's all it should be yet.

    1262:

    More like Azathoth, I'd guess. IIRC a "congeries of iridescent bubbles" is a phrase HPL uses. That sounds as if it might be describing "sub-haloes".

    1263:

    153 ly away? Oh, crap.

    And nothing mysterious about a black hole....

    1264:

    Your last paragraph is the only aspect of Lovecraft's magic that wasn't already a well-worn trope, from everything I have read. Using arcane knowledge (often "the wisdom of the ancients") to achieve miracles goes back a lot further, as does opening gateways to other worlds.

    1265:

    It also benefited from what's probably the most awesome first line in the history of science-fiction

    Apologies for what may be seen as blatant flattery, but for years I have believed the most awesome first line in the history of science-fiction is this one:

    "I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs; I can even take your thighs as a deposit," said the travel agent.

    1266:

    the word slave itself should be banned as offensive to people of Slavic origin.

    If nothing else surely a case could be made under the EU geographic indicators rules?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_traditional_specialities_in_the_European_Union

    1267:

    The typical cyberpunk world has a curious relationship with legality -- on the one hand corporations are all-powerful, on the other hand they appear to have no recourse to litigation.

    I took it as meaning that litigation was less effective than the extra-legal methods they used.

    Litigation works when the legal system can compel obedience, or when the parties involved agree to abide by the results. If one party persists in ignoring legal judgements they don't like, or if the legal system is seen as being biased/owned by one party, then why should another party use the legal system when they know before they start that it will be ineffective?

    I see the cyberpunk world as one where corporations are powerful enough to ignore the legal system so they no longer sue each other because the loser would just ignore the verdict and get away with it — or possibly drag the matter out so long that the verdict is moot.

    And speaking of cyberpunk worlds, consider the case of Steven Donziger: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a35812573/steven-donziger-chevron-house-arrest/

    Cheaper to hire some netrunners to go against Chevron than pay enough to counter their lawyers and judges :-/

    1268:

    I generally take the notion of corporate legality in cyberpunk to be basically technological Mafia families.

    They can and do use legal systems to their own ends all the time. They also do not hesitate to use extralegal actions when it suits them or the profit might be high enough. The upside of killing the Corleones would have outweighed the risks of legal consequences (or retaliation), had it worked.

    In a fast paced technological competition performing an extralegal exfiltration of a scientist is highly plausible. With deniability if possible, and if not then be willing to deal with any counterstrikes.

    1269:

    I think you're confused with Yog-Sothoth.

    Anyway, I'm not the only person to think there's a far better candidate for Azathoth in the Milky Way: Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

    Here's HPL's description: "amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."

    While granted, the center of the galaxy isn't beyond time and space (although inside the black hole it is), if you want a creator god that's a mindless, all consuming thing, the black hole in the center of the galaxy really fits. Without it, we wouldn't be here, but it's not a beneficent god, and it does not intend our goodwill, or intend anything at all, really. Since Sag A* is around 4 million solar masses and is orbited by a bunch of loud, bright objects, including a 1300 solar mass black hole orbited by seven stars, the idea of the center of our galaxy being the court of a demon sultan has a certain...poetry.

    This actually gets to an interesting moral point about natural evil, namely, why does a beneficent God allow natural events to kill people? Why didn't He make a planet without earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, etc.? There's actually now a good, almost Lovecraftian explanation: without plate tectonics, we wouldn't have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and humans wouldn't exist. We also wouldn't have springs along earthquake faults, or regeneration of critical elements that erode into the sea. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis are required for our life to be sustained on Earth. Similarly, the fact that water rains out of our atmosphere means that sometimes it rains too much, sometimes not enough. But without rain and snow, most of the planet would be uninhabitable for humans. And then there's the fact that we live on a planet where there's enough oxygen in the atmosphere for fires. Our species has adapted to use fire, so it's essential for our continued survival. Yet this atmosphere means that wildfires will occur.

    So we actually do live on a very suitable planet. Unfortunately, Earth's life support systems can kill people who get caught up in them. They are not evil by intent, simply very powerful. What is evil is to needlessly put people at risk from getting caught in these natural catastrophes. But gods that are accidentally beneficent and unmindful of their power is more Lovecraftian than Christian.

    Explaining this to a modern devout Christian is hard enough, because many of them want God to be someone they can sit down and have a drink with. Imagine explaining this to Abd Al-Hazred in the Arabian Desert a millennium ago, and seeing how he puts his limited understanding into words.

    1270:

    Heteromeles @ 1269: "This actually gets to an interesting moral point about natural evil, namely, why does a beneficent God allow natural events to kill people?"

    That was Voltaire's point in "Candide" way back in the 18th century.

    1271:

    Yes and no. I'm not advocating that this is a panglossian world, because obviously there's a lot of pointless stupidity, evil, and misery around, and we can make some things better.

    The problem, from a more Christian point of view, is that a world that is good by God's standards is not a world that's always safe by human standards, even if humans currently thrive here. Moreover, IMHO, rather too many Christians seem to think that God simultaneously gave dominion over the Earth to humans, AND will rescue us when we screw up, so that there's no need to manage our dominion in perpetuity to keep it up to God's standards for subsequent generations.

    I'm not advocating HPL as a prophet for any religion worth following, because he'd likely be an incel wearing a MAGA hat if he were alive today. That said, he's created a series of well-known tropes that can be adapted to help people understand that nature can be indifferently and momentarily beneficent without being nurturing, and that it is up to us to be the custodians of the world we need and want to live in.

    1272:

    ... because the High Functioning Muggles dominate society, the rest of us have to fake it as best we can just to get along. Probably can't turn it into a story...

    It does feature in at least one roleplaying game. The humorous GURPS Illuminati University[1] includes the advantage Mundanity, which is rarely taken by player characters.

    At the lowest level, the Mundane just doesn't notice odd things; for example they will happen to be looking the other way when the flying carpet zips past or get delayed just long enough for some other student to get pounced upon by the lurking werewolf. This is

    More powerful mundanity will actively repel supernatural creatures and suppress the operation of magic or weird science.

    Most fearsome of the Mundanes are the ones who actually rewrite reality around them. It's not unheard of for them to turn lightsabers into flashlights and werewolves into drama students in fur suits! They say it wears off after the Mundane leaves but who wants to take the chance?

    1) IOU illustrations include several cameos, including the first in-print appearance of Agatha Heterodyne and some bloke in a hat with a disk shaped world on a turtle.

    1273:

    Opening lines When the office door opened suddenly I knew the game was up. It had been a money-maker — but it was all over. As the cop walked in I sat back in the chair and put on a happy grin. He had the same sombre expression and heavy foot that they all have — and the same lack of humour. I almost knew to the word what he was going to say before he uttered a syllable. "James Bolivar diGriz I arrest you on the charge—" I was waiting for the word charge, I thought it made a nice touch that way. As he said it I pressed the button that set off the charge of black powder in the ceiling, the crossbeam buckled and the three-ton safe dropped through right on the top of the cop's head. He squashed very nicely, thank you.

    Niala I will echo Voltaire & Bernstein ( Opera of Candide ) "Let us Cultivate our Garden" - or - Make our Garden Grow

    1274:

    Opening lines. "Okay, he's dead, you can talk to him now."

    1275:

    In retrospect that character really is a nasty little bar steward. It was amusing when I was 14 though.

    1276:

    That was Voltaire's point in "Candide" way back in the 18th century.

    An earlier version is attributed to Epicurus ca 300 BCE:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus#Epicurean_paradox

    The general question goes under the name "theodicy" and is the occasion of endless theological tail-chasing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy

    1277:

    See also Non Serviam by Stanisław Lem, where he considers this question from the point of view of artificial life forms inhabiting a virtual universe constructed inside a computer by human experimenters.

    1278:

    Stephen King had something similar in his novel It.

    Grown-ups and other muggles saw what Pennywise was doing. They acted appropriately to their characters (ignore stuff and go inside if they were good; join the ranks of pitchfork-wielding lunatics after the heroes if they were bad).

    When the crisis had passed, everybody, good and bad, quickly forgot what had happened. This was implied to be Pennywise's strongest attribute. In the part of the novel set in 1985, one character mentions that there are FBI, state police and city police of Derry all looking into the rash of child disappearances / murders. In any other city this would be front-page national news.

    However, in Derry, things like this were ignored. Any reports that made the newspapers (both local and national) showed up (if at all) below the fold, as isolated paragraphs, and not on the front page.

    Makes me sad that King has stated that he is not going to write It, Part II, set with the remaining characters in 2012 (the next Pennywise maximum after 1985). Still, I'll take what we have.

    1279:

    I'm not sure this is a matter of monotheism-- in principle, animals and mountains and so on could be doing magic, but my impression of stories from other cultures is that there aren't a lot of real-world non-humans doing magic.

    It would be an interesting story if the distribution of magical ability (I agree it should be like sports or music-- almost everyone can do it to some extent, but there's extraordinary capacity at the top) for all species would be the same as the human distribution.

    I've played with the notion that we don't know what "natural" weather looks like because the plants and the animals are also doing weather magic.

    Just checking in with my imagination, but it's easier for me to imagine that larger and older non-humans can do magic. It's more plausible for a mountain than a pebble.

    What do rocks want? Do they care if they're ground down? Are they okay with natural processes, but hate to be used for human manufacturing?

    1271: "I'm not advocating HPL as a prophet for any religion worth following, because he'd likely be an incel wearing a MAGA hat if he were alive today."

    I wish I could do Lovecraftian pastiche, but in plain English, no.

    If Lovecraft hated the modernity of his own time, he'd hate the modern world more, and not just because there's more acceptance of people of color.

    I can't imagine him tolerating Trump's vulgarity. I don't think he'd like incels-- it's my impression that he didn't organize his personality around resentment.

    Did he have any involvement or interest in the politics of his own time? I really don't know, though I think I would have heard about it if he did.

    As for whether there's knowledge that can drive people mad, if an emotionally convincing case can be made that consciousness doesn't exist, that might drive people over the edge. I'm not talking the experience of feeling like you're your usual self reading a theory, I mean a sense of you just not being there.

    Do you know some people snap from meditation? Not even long retreats, just getting depersonalized from ordinary amounts of meditation. (This is not to deny that meditation is good for a lot of people, it's just that it's more dangerous than it sounds for people in general.)

    I've got a book called The Book of Not Knowing-- I wimped out and didn't finish reading it, but it's a long induction into the idea that people's models of things are apt to be seriously incomplete and incorrect, and I think that where it was heading is that your idea of yourself is wrong, too.

    Maybe the dangerous knowledge is to have a gut level belief that everything you think you know is just people making stuff up.

    1280:

    I could see a grimmer version of Harry Potter where of course muggles know that wizards exist, it's just that muggles know wizards are very dangerous to talk about and impossible to do anything about.

    I consider it amazing that everyone reading the HP books is presumably a muggle, and yet Rowling managed to get the vast majority of readers to be on the side of the wizards.

    1281:

    Wish I knew who wrote it--IIRC it was to a single page story: "Just like everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when Kennedy was shot or they landed on the moon, I'll never forget where I was and what I was doing when the aliens brought Jesus back to Earth." From memory, so I'm sure the quotation is not exact. And the story was not that memorable. (Kind of like how Sunrise overshadows the rest of Also Sprach Zaruthustra).

    1282:

    Naah, that's not the best line in SF. The best line is SF has to be:

    "In two years the penis will be obsolete, said the salesman."

    (From Steel Beach by John Varley.)

    1283:

    Of course the punchline in "The Stainless Steel Rat" comes in the next paragraph, when the flattened cop continues reciting the rap sheet while the Rat makes his getaway (because the cop is a robot: diGriz turns out to have scruples about murdering humans, and it's made very clear that the robot is (a) not destroyed, and (b) not human-equivalent).

    Noted because the day after the news broke that Harry had died, I was on a trans-Atlantic flight: I bought the ebook and read it en route (it's only about 60,000 words -- a novella, in modern terms).

    1284:

    I consider it amazing that everyone reading the HP books is presumably a muggle, and yet Rowling managed to get the vast majority of readers to be on the side of the wizards.

    SF/F is (almost) all about fantasies of agency, and readers are invited to emphathize with those at the top of the power hierarchy.

    (Well, it was until the past couple of decades saw a dam burst and let in all the BIPOC and LGBTQ authors who'd been shut out previously, resulting in a deluge of SF/F written by people who have been systematically excluded from positions of power for most of recorded history, and who See Things Differently.)

    1285:

    I consider it amazing that everyone reading the HP books is presumably a muggle, and yet Rowling managed to get the vast majority of readers to be on the side of the wizards.

    Virtually everyone reading fantasy or historical novels would be a peasant or worse, yet the vast majority are on the side of the aristocracy…

    1286:

    See also Horatio Alger. Or the way you can apparently win elections in the USA by telling poor folks they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

    1287:

    nasty little bar steward

    What does that mean? I never heard such an expression.

    BTW, I utterly detest Stainless Steel Rat books, but not because of Jimmy diGriz. Well, because of him too -- diGriz is one of the worst Mary Sue's ever. But that's so obviously on purpose, I could overlook it. Mostly I detest SSR books because Harry did same thing what Scalzi did in Old Man's War (see post #837), but far worse: the world is 1960's Middle America, with spaceships pasted on. And sometimes robots, but only if the plot calls for it.

    "The Stainless Steel Rat Is Born" was published in 1985. In that book The Bishop teaches diGriz the "roundoff caper" which was already so obsolete, I learned about it in an introductory computer science course two years earlier.

    1288:

    Harry did same thing what Scalzi did in Old Man's War (see post #837), but far worse: the world is 1960's Middle America, with spaceships pasted on

    If you look at the copyright dates, the first book was indeed written in the early 1960s. It's a short, lightweight comedy crime caper, begging no sequels.

    But nothing keeps a series going on life support like ongoing advances against royalties, and I'm pretty certain that by the mid-1980s the SSR series was Harry's pension plan. I'm not throwing stones here: I'm trying to navigate those rough waters myself. (Merchant Princes got a refresh in Merchant Princes: The Next Generation Empire Games, which was planned in 2012-13; the Laundry Files needs a whole change of series focus, which it's getting via Dead Lies Dreaming and sequels, which are apparently in the process of being renamed under me ...)

    1289:

    I've only read a moderate amount of Jemisin, but she seems to be hugely enthusiastic about people with extraordinary capability, it's just that they're generally people of color.

    More generally, I'd say current sf is still about fantasies of agency, it's just different people who have the agency.

    When I try to comment, I sign in and submit a comment and get a "your session has timed out" error even though it may just have been a few minutes to type the comment.

    Then I go back, sign out, and usually then I can post the comment.

    It doesn't matter whether I'm replying to a comment or just commenting.

    1290:

    I consider it amazing that everyone reading the HP books is presumably a muggle, and yet Rowling managed to get the vast majority of readers to be on the side of the wizards.

    It might also be partly because the books were aimed at younger people, at first at least, to my understanding. I read them twice (in English and then translated to Finnish), and while I enjoyed them at the time, in my opinion they were kind of... formulatic.

    Now I'm re-reading the books to my child, and, uh, my perceptions have changed. Let's just say that I don't quite like the wizard society. I'm not going into detail here as this is not the place for that in my opinion, but let's just say that I have thought many plots to some reactionary fiction about wizard schools. (Yes, I've read The Magicians.)

    1291:

    "...penis is obsolete" is just a little too glib for me. It's delivered in the fashion of a really great guitar player showing off. Obviously this is very subjective territory, but the thing that reveals Varley as a master isn't the first line, but the way he just casually turns and has his viewpoint character walk the statement back, then the viewpoint character's editor gives him a hard time for the fact that he walked it back in a manner too-sophisticated for the reader. The first ten pages are a great piece of writing, but mainly for the way this weird, over-th-top statement gets walked back.

    To me a great first line does two things. First of all it reassures the reader that the author has what it takes. The other great opening line I think about sometimes is "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the N'gong hills." Once you've read that line you can relax, because it's obvious that you're in the hands of a supremely talented artist. On that level the thing that makes "the sky over the port" so wonderful is that it's delivered in such a relaxed fashion, almost drawled, as if some good ol' boy's brain is working overtime to give you a clue about just how shitty the weather will be when the storm arrives.

    In science-fiction a great first line also provides what a young Gibson would have called an eyeball kick. The thing about the "The sky over the port" is that it works on multiple levels. First, the initial image, of a sky made of static, is brilliant. Second, the experienced reader takes it as metaphor and knows that it was a nasty day, with a storm either already arrived or on the horizon, and a really ugly one too. Third, if you break it down a little more, you realize that Gibson has given you "It was a dark and stormy..." 2.0 and kicked Bulwer right where he needed it. So gotta disagree.

    My other favorite opening line (opening paragraph if you want to get technical) is from West With The Night by Beryl Markham: How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, “This is the place to start; there can be no other.”

    1292:

    In two years the penis will be obsolete, said the salesman

    Quick! Run out and sell all of your shares of jockstrap stock! (The protagonist did not, in fact, do that).

    1293:

    As for first lines:

    Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

    Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

    (Not from SF, however).

    1294:

    It's a humorous mispronunciation of "bastard".

    1295:

    As to opening story lines does anyone else here know about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulwer-Lytton_Fiction_Contest

    I have a paperback I picked up decades ago of various winning lines and other entries. Haven't seen it in 20 years ....

    1296:

    I think the problem for any author who doesn't want to write about some form of "nobility" is this: How do you get your main character from a position of non-agency to a position of agency? It's not an easy thing to do believably. Your character has to be educated, probably in multiple subjects, taught some version of "how to fight," and that person's character and view of the world have to change to a viewpoint where they have agency, and that's a whole story in itself, which may or may not be interesting.

    My current solution in the story I'm writing to "not telling the story of an education and change in attitude" is to take nobility and put them at the lowest range of the envelope where they have some agency. He's been attacked with lye across his face, resulting in some very ugly scars and the loss of his fiance, then exiled from the city where he's the younger son of an important family. He's lying about his age and ends up having to guide someone else through a world he has a child's familiarity with even though the perils are quite adult. He's a fish out of water, a human child exiled to an Orcish land who will survive by learning "the way of the Orc."

    She's an Orcish hedge-noble; the younger daughter of the Baroness who rules the poorest district of her kingdom. Her mother couldn't afford to both bring in the agricultural expert the district desperately needs and also pay for her daughter's last two years at a finishing school. The female lead doesn't do great deeds, instead she settles disputes among the peasants and helps them find lost sheep, and her inner life is every bit as impoverished as the land she lives in.

    And no, it's not a romance, or at least not conventionally so.

    1297:

    In the UK too. The poor voting against their own interests and in favour of the interests of the rich because they think that'll be them some day, having been brought up with the propaganda that everyone can be at the top of the pyramid and being unable to accept what a pile of sweaty hairy bollocks it is.

    1298:

    The thing about the "The sky over the port" is that it works on multiple levels.

    What struck me when I first read it was that Gibson was using technology as the baseline for describing the natural world. It sort of set the tone for me, that electronic technology was the focus of the book.

    1299:

    Best opening lines: "It was the day my grandmother exploded."

    1300:

    "the computers work... funnily in it."

    It's ages since I read it but I do remember its depiction of hacking as being rather strange. As I remember it, it's something like a crazily frantic dogfight, not an infiltration manoeuvre. And there seems to be a ridiculously large amount of processing power devoted to running the display candy for that metaphor, which to be able to do that must be able to track the intruder, yet it operates completely autonomously, producing the appropriate candy to represent its own defeat but communicating that only to the intruder and not to its own host system. It seems illogical from a straightforward tactical point of view, as well as being peculiar from a computery angle.

    I have the same kind of problem with most stories that use the virtual computer world setting: the OS is the god of that bit of universe but it's also completely stupid; it produces an elaborate simulation to convey to the attacker the successful result of their stack smashing attack but doesn't actually have any stack protection mechanism to fault their process.

    1301:

    Nancy L In re. monotheism: Maybe the dangerous knowledge is to have a gut level belief that everything you think you know is just people making stuff up. Like the RC church or the communist Party, you mean?

    Charlie In re. Harry H ...I met him at a very-long-ago-con, probably first Brighton. Where he told me that ... "Nah, the escaped Nazis didn't go to Argentina, they went to Australia" Moz?

    Also the "SSR" series are actually ... Satire - at which level they are effective, or the first few were, certainly.

    As for first lines, one of the very earliest works of SF has a magnificent opening: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita

    1302:

    It may just come down to "nobility sells as a standard trope in fantasy." Plus, in the biggest English-language fantasy market, there's this notion that America invented democracy and before that it was the feudal Middle Ages, so it's anachronistic to have a fantasy with a democracy.

    Now this is silly on multiple levels. There were plenty of small democracies from classic times on up, mostly operating on the town or city level. That's one reason why Machiavelli devotes a chunk of his little book to instructing autocrats how to suborn and take over democracies. But since Golden Age fantasy readers (teens) don't know this yet, why bother?

    But agency? I'm not so sure. Even in our current banana republic oligarchies, it's still easier for a poor American kid like Clinton or Obama to become president than it is for a royal family like the Windsors to demonstrate that they're actually in charge of "The Firm." Often it's easier to hire competence than to inherit it. In any event, you can get agency by being elected as president through your own hard work, by becoming the power behind the throne of an idiot ruler, by your own hard work, or by securing control of your family fortune, by your own hard work. The paths are different, but the hard work of gaining agency is not.

    1303:

    (me) In re. monotheism: Maybe the dangerous knowledge is to have a gut level belief that everything you think you know is just people making stuff up.

    (Tingey) Like the RC church or the communist Party, you mean?

    No, that's the easy stuff, at least for those of us who never believed in them or at least have been exposed to a lot of criticism of them.

    Let's take on something more solidly established in our culture: the idea that that it makes sense to judge people by what art they prefer.

    Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste

    How about that our idea of literary fiction was invented, and not so very long ago, either?

    How Fiction Works

    1304:

    And of course nobody who's being hacked just turns the computer off, or unplugs the ethernet cable.

    1305:

    The reason I put "nobility" in quotes was because the problem isn't limited to fantasy writers discussing medieval nobility. To influence any kind of modern environment a protagonist requires a certain amount of education, the ability to wield some kind of "force" (also in quotes, because what constitutes force can vary wildly, enough money to move things along) the ready cash to buy an airline ticket, purchase the right guns for what needs to be done, etc. A huge amount of the work any writer does is to provide their characters with agency by some means or another. Maybe the character has a patron, or works for an organization. Maybe the character is forced to take some kind of action they wouldn't ordinarily take... getting a character moving and giving them enough equipment/influence to affect their environment is always a huge creative effort.

    1306:

    One of my favorite opening lines... was read to me. It was 1968, I was coming down from a trip, and a friend - we were visiting her and her SO - sits me down, and says I need to read this to you: "And today, third of May, 2010, Manhattan, reports mild-spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome, ditto on the General Technics Plaza." (Stand on Zanzibar).

    And that's all from memory....

    1307:

    I have a short story (it's turned into the first of a thread of four or five, including a novelette). Last year, not long after Concellation started on faceplant (when it was still mostly fen, not franchise fans), someone said, "let's start a writing thread. Nothing that starts with "It was a dark and stormy night", though.

    So I started a story called A Dark and the Storm Knight.

  • Still trying to place it.
  • Very odd. I started typing it up... and realized I was channeling early Zelazny....
  • 1308:

    Well... agency. If you haven't been brought up with agency, it's seriously hard to understand how you had to deal with it.

    What percentage of folks who win the lottery are broke a year or two later? Or sportsball stars, five years after they retire?

    If I won the lottery, the first thing I'd do is call a friend who has Real Money, and ask for advice on hiring a staff of professionals... who I would watch like a hawk, to make sure they weren't cheating me... or doing things I objected to.

    1309:

    Since Bulwer-Lytton has come up, here is my entry for the 2018 Science Fiction category:

    The time traveller shut down his machine, opened the door, stepped out and sniffed the air, but before he could identify the curious smell as a mixture of blood and guts, half his brain was splattered across the canopy, which nobody worried about then (the time traveller himself having ceased to have an opinion), but later on when they worked out what had happened the people of the year 12018 were saddened by the fact that their visitor had not taken the basic precaution of backing himself up before stepping into a Class Three Recreational Combat Zone.

    1310:

    If I won the lottery, the first thing I'd do is call a friend who has Real Money, and ask for advice on hiring a staff of professionals.

    Depends on what you want your winnings to do. If you want them to grow bigly and are willing to pay the fees of the staff of professionals(*), then do that. If you just want to see it preserve present value or even 1/2 that, put it into an index equities fund and an equivalent bond fund.

    (*) It's not obvious that those professionals do a lot better than just index funds overall. Now and then somebody gets lucky, but many don't.

    1311:

    The general question goes under the name "theodicy" and is the occasion of endless theological tail-chasing.

    Or as SMBC put it, "God is like a table held on three legs."

    1312:

    Best advice I got was this:

    Before you claim the ticket, you form a corporation, list the ticket as the corporation's asset, and yourself as the trustee and CEO of said corporation. Then claim the ticket on behalf of the corporation. Pay yourself a legal wage, and do whatever with the money.

    This gets at two different things. One is that the taxes on corporations are different than those on individuals, and this may be advantageous. Second, you don't have the money, so there's less incentive for someone to, say, kidnap you or your kids for ransom. You're still going to need to upgrade your security because your name will get published, but it's not as bad as saying "yeah, I'm going to get a new car and upgrade my home with all that money." That's kind of inviting trouble. Instead, during the TV interview, talk about paying off debts, donating to food banks, and other really boring and sensible stuff. No one will check up on whether you actually do it or not, but the point is to divert attention, unless attention seeking is your thing.

    Anyway, I'd invest it so that I could live off the return from the investment and had a chunk of surplus every year to do stuff with. If the capital is less than around $60 million, there's not much need to get deeper into wealth management land than that.

    The final important bit is that if you're suddenly sitting on a lot of cash, in the US you're legally presumed to be able to take care of yourself if you lose most of it. This means you are legally allowed to invest in more risky products that ordinary dudes can't get in on. You can make money fast, or get skinned faster. This is where that little ol' learning curve becomes fairly steep fairly fast.

    1313:

    Well, it's worth spending a bit more time chasing your tail rather than patting yourself on the back (and not just you).

    The real problem with theodicy isn't the philosophical debate, it's the idea that natural evils (e.g. disasters) are caused by intent by a just God.

    If this is the case (and do stop rolling your eyes), the victims deserved what happened to them. Fire victims deserve to get burned, flood victims deserve to drown, and so forth.

    What I pointed to says the opposite: natural disasters happen, so the victims may or may not be blameless, depending on circumstances. However, the people who knowingly put the others in harms' way are very much to blame, the more so if they profited by doing so.

    There are currently four lawsuits I'm involved in (on the plaintiff side) going after developers for trying to put homes in high fire areas.

    If you treat this as a bunch of silly religious philosophy, then you absolutely failed to get the point: this is a multi-billion dollar topic of active litigation at the moment. And if you live in a disaster prone state, the developers are trying to off-load the risk and responsibility onto the state and federal government, so they can continue to profit by putting people in harm's way. And that's your taxes raised and services cut to pay for the developers choosing to ignore natural evils so long as they can profit.

    So yeah, this stuff is disturbingly important right now, and it's going to become more so as climate change bites down. You are doing something about climate change in your personal behavior, right? If you knowingly harm others and don't care....

    1314:

    Stephen King had something similar in his novel It. ... When the crisis had passed, everybody, good and bad, quickly forgot what had happened.

    I've never read It or seen the movie. That may be my loss; Stephen King's stories aren't really my thing but I've liked some of what I read, such as Firestarter.

    The idea of an extra-strength masquerade is sufficiently common that TV Tropes has a long page of examples, along with such related ideas as the realtime weirdness censor and laser-guided amnesia. Watch out for the time sink...

    1315:

    It's another category (though definitely qualifies as Fantasy), but my all time favorite opening line is by Sendak:

    "The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him 'WILD THING!' and Max said 'I'LL EAT YOU UP!'

    Re: King's IT. It was probably 30 years ago that I read it, but I thought the adults killed Pennywise at the end of the book.

    1316:

    You're still going to need to upgrade your security because your name will get published

    Only in some countries. A lot of countries have both less violent crime than the USA, and allow if not actively encourage winners to remain anonymous

    https://www.ozlotteries.com/blog/how-to-remain-anonymous-when-you-win-the-lotto/

    1317:

    I've read "It" but I didn't remember if the clown was killed.

    I checked Wikipedia and found out: "It is finally destroyed 27 years later in the second Ritual of Chüd"

    1318:

    More powerful mundanity will actively repel supernatural creatures and suppress the operation of magic or weird science. Most fearsome of the Mundanes are the ones who actually rewrite reality around them. This is so.[1] They don't suppress magic; they are quite powerful magicians that enforce the appearance of mundanity, though they are not generally aware of their nature. Annoying, but they can be worked around by magic that they don't notice. If the resulting state is simply mildly improbable, their conceptual biases and stuck Bayesian priors will strongly encourage them chalk it up as coincidence.[2] They can even be encouraged to ignore a run of coincidences this way. Operating at large (e.g. global) scale is another approach.

    I didn't spot anything in tvtropes close to this, though as you say Weirdness Censor is related. Thanks for the tvtropes links.

    [1] Why yes, I am (in part) teasing a few people here. :-) [2] Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) - Heads Scene (1/11) | Movieclips Or this, on coin flipping: “A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability.” [3] [3] I have not observed a fair coin flipped heads 92 times in a row. :-)

    1319:

    Allen Thomson @ 1260:

    Doesn't have anything to do with whether the machine can detect copyrighted material or not. It's the operator who is held responsible.

    Knowing nothing about such things, I ask out of curiosity. Are there self-service machines where you can stick a VHS tape into the slot, a flash drive into the USB port, swipe a credit card and get the transfer done? Or does an employee always have to examine the tape to make sure its legit?

    It's been a while, but I recall that CVS photo centers had kiosks where you could insert flash drives and get them to print out photos, no questions asked. Also, now that I think about it and date myself, Kinkos business locations where you could do pretty much the same with laser printers.

    I'm not aware of any DIY tape copying or DVD transfer kiosks. If a company had a kiosk like that they'd be liable for any DMCA violations (or any other laws a customer might violate using the kiosk). So they won't do it.

    I ran a photo mini-lab in a "Big-Box Store" for several years after I came home from Iraq. I only had enough saved for one year of school & there was no GI Bill, so after my first year of Portrait Studio Management at a Community College, I had to find a job. I lucked into the job running the lab.

    Those damn kiosks were one of my biggest headaches. The photos on flash drives & memory cards were usually photos taken by the customer, but occasionally someone would bring in something they shouldn't, try to slip it past me and I'd have to delete the job (and usually shred the offending photos).

    Because of the DMCA the company had written policy guidelines prohibiting the mini-lab operator from printing materials that violated the DMCA (and other laws - for which I did NOT shred photos I was going to have to turn over to the police as evidence).

    The order process did include a question & notice about not reproducing copyrighted materials. Nobody paid attention to it, and sometimes I'd have to delete an order and I was the one who had to tell the customer we could not process their order.

    The customers were usually unhappy about it & wanted to complain to management, who always gave me shit about making the customer unhappy, but DID NOT tell me to violate the DMCA (although I did have to show the manager the company's written policy guidelines on several occasions & explain that violating the DMCA could cost the company $$BIG MONEY$$).

    Basically the company's policy was to shift blame to the lab operator for any violations of the DMCA.

    Eventually the "Big-Box Store" fired me for insubordination because I made one too many customers unhappy about not getting their photos printed.

    PS: One problem that FREQUENTLY cropped up was Wedding Photographers who would give the bride a CD of their wedding photos, but DID NOT provide a copyright release so the bride could have them printed. Stupid because if the photographer had put the release on the CD as the first image there'd be no problem.

    PPS: The "insubordination" charge was BOGUS. The company just wanted to screw me out of unemployment insurance by claiming I was fired for cause ... I wouldn't have been eligible anyway because I became eligible to draw Retired Pay from the Army a week later & you can't draw unemployment insurance in NC if you're receiving a pension.

    1320:

    Wedding Photographers who would give the bride a CD of their wedding photos, but DID NOT provide a copyright release

    Accidentally, or extra cost option that the client declined?

    I've sold a few photos and that's always a fun one when it crops up. People mistake the "I spent a day at the event and expect to sell 100 watermarked photos" for "this is such fun that I do it for free, and am happy to find 'the one of the red-headed guy with the blue shirt' and email it to you at my expense".

    The worst clients IME (other than Murdoch media, who just steal whatever they can and rely on suckers not suing them), are the stock photo "like that, but different". I price out the model, gear, and venue then ask for that as the deposit amount. The ones who try to negotiate that cost have never, ever been profitable for me. In the event they eventually pay something it's rarely enough to cover my outgoings (sample size: two. I can learn).

    1321:

    I've found that I need to sign in, sign out, sign in again, then check the url and if it's http://... , edit it to https://... then refresh the page.

    But copy what I'm writing just in case.

    1322:

    Hm, I've had the same problems. Now I tried logging in using https and it seems to have worked.

    1323:

    The protagonists think they destroyed Pennywise. And a quick look around Google shows that this is the majority opinion.

    HOWEVER, tvtropes states that "later books imply that IT survived," however tvtropes doesn't give sources. So YMMV.

    1324:

    The continuum idea is that you deploy lawyers and bodyguards first, and only get into the serious small arms usage in places where those are inadequate.

    Send lawyers guns and money, in that order.

    1325:

    If anyone has access (either to the online article or via hardcopy), there is a relevant interview with Kate Crawford in this week's New Scientist magazine. She is generally in agreement with OGH, I think.

    IIRC, Crawford is a player within AI and a Microsoft researcher, among other roles.

    Sample quote: "Artificial intelligence is politics all the way down".

    Second sample quote: "There was also a tool that has been marketed for shopping malls to see emotions that will indicate that you might be about to steal from shops. What was the training data for that, and what are the assumptions about what somebody looks like when they are shoplifting?"

    1327:

    One of my favourite first lines is Ed Bryant's (unused): "One morning the Pope got up, and forgot to take her pill."

    1328:

    One problem that FREQUENTLY cropped up was Wedding Photographers who would give the bride a CD of their wedding photos, but DID NOT provide a copyright release so the bride could have them printed. Stupid because if the photographer had put the release on the CD as the first image there'd be no problem.

    I suspect not stupid but intentional. Unless the couple has paid for it (and most don't) the photographer retains the copyright to the pictures themselves. The CD they provide is usually proofs for the couple to select photos they want printed, not a collection for the bride to get printed at Walmart.

    Wedding photographers make a chunk of their money selling print packages. But there's also a reputational aspect involved, because really good printing is still an art, and if the print shop screws up it's the photographer's reputation that will suffer, and they are who the bride will blame in angry Yelp reviews because she looks green.

    Source: wedding photographers.

    1329:

    Knowing nothing about such things, I ask out of curiosity. Are there self-service machines where you can stick a VHS tape into the slot, a flash drive into the USB port, swipe a credit card and get the transfer done? Or does an employee always have to examine the tape to make sure its legit?

    Adding to the legal issues (at least in the US) is the practical operation of VHS players. They are just plain old complicated. Take the top off of one sometime and watch the mechanicals of loading and unloading a tape. And then you have the spinning heads. It took decades of incremental refinements to make all of this work for home use.

    Now put one in a Kiosk where you really want no maintenance at all and have people bring in who knows what (anyone else remember that mashed potato coming out of one in a commercial?) into it. And wearing out the heads early, tape getting jammed, whatever.

    And then if everything goes perfectly mechanically you're looking at 30 minutes to unload a 30 minute tape. Remember those spinning heads? It's really hard to speed up the transfer, maintain the image quality, and keep maintenance costs down from insane.

    All of this is why the "big box" stores with photo booths take your tape and ship it off to one of the company with a wall or few of VCR players that can dump to servers and from there to flash drives and (less and less) DVDs. If you have 100 or 200 VCR players in a room you can afford the tech who is full time at that site.

    1330:

    I've been involved with repairing the drug-store photo-kiosks, and if there was money to be made from having VCRs in drug stores they'd do it. They wouldn't bother sending a real VCR tech, they'd just ship a new VCR to site and pay someone forty bucks plus travel to remove and replace it, then ship it back via Fedex or similar. The problem isn't the maintenance, but the economics.

    1331:

    but the economics.

    Which gets to my point about time. A kiosk costing VCR is going to copy at real time speeds. So that 90 minute tape will take 90 minutes to copy. No way you can make that time sink work. Even with a 30 minute time most people are going to want to leave now you have to involve staff to check in check out and so on. VCRs just don't lend themselves to making this work.

    In the US Lowes and Home Depot and I suspect other place have key kiosks. You put your key in a slot, it does a 3D scan of it and tells you if it can make a copy for you. These seem to have the most common 10 or so blank patterns (you can see inside), plus logo'd keys for extra money. They work great. I've made 30 to 40 this way over the last few years without one failure.

    The "key" points are they are fast, easy, and handle most situations. And you pay with a credit or debit card. Plus there's just not much that can go wrong inside the box.

    1332:

    If we may return to MS Satoshi for a moment, I've been checking in on it every once in a while and a couple of days ago it was indeed at Valletta, Malta, as advertised when it left Panamanian waters. Thanks to suggestions made here, I thought it would then proceed through the Suez Canal on its way to an Indian breaking yard. Current events have gotten in the way of that hypothesis.

    It's now at Bar, Montenegro, 42.0935 N, 19.0871 E. Presumably the parking fees there are reasonable

    1333:

    If I won the lottery, I would assume identity theft and be seriously worried that the originators would then be chasing me for the winnings.

    1334:

    They don't suppress magic; they are quite powerful magicians that enforce the appearance of mundanity, though they are not generally aware of their nature. Annoying, but they can be worked around by magic that they don't notice.

    Yes, exactly. Again with tabletop RPGs, this is much of the backstory of the older Mage: The Ascension setting. The core concept is basically clap your hands if you believe, that reality is shaped by the minds living in it.

    Players would often deal with the fact that magic was more likely to bite player characters if done overtly, and much more so where ordinary mundane people could see it.

    In the back story, one faction had spent centuries spreading the memes of the Age of Reason, including 'magic doesn't exist' and 'machines can do wonderous things.' A glance around at the current world will show that these ideas have gotten far, far out of control; a few thousand wizards believing in bizarre and incompatible crank models of reality are horribly outnumbered by the billions believing in cars and televisions.

    1335:

    Hey, I clap my hands when I see a fairy.

    https://www.deviantart.com/sandara/art/Corgi-and-fairy-updated-355200334

    I can't say that I do the same for cars anf TVs

    1336:

    H@1313 wrote:

    “developers are trying to off-load the risk and responsibility onto the state and federal government, so they can continue to profit by putting people in harm's way. And that's your taxes raised and services cut to pay for the developers choosing to ignore natural evils so long as they can profit.”

    Not in any way doubting your point, but I can’t help wondering why insurance rates don’t have more of a deterrent effect on irresponsible development. I’d think that as risks escalate from climate change, and safe areas are all used up so only the high risk places are left, insurer losses would increase. They’d compensate by hiking premiums on fire, flood, earthquake, landslide, storm damage and drought policies, and pretty soon most potential buyers would be priced right out of California. Demand would fall off, developers would get stuck with unsalable properties, and billionaire wannabes would pull their investments back out of that sector, discouraging further activity on those lines.

    Econ 101 says that’s how it should work, but fraud and malfeasance can screw up anything. In what part of the process do you see swindles obstructing the normal function of prices? Are governments really stepping in to replace private insurers, and if so, why aren’t outraged conservatives bellowing about creeping socialism, like they always do with public health insurance? Does it simply come down to the problem that any responsible action would lower the price of existing houses, so nobody wants to rock the boat? Hard getting voters to support a cause when it drops the resale value of their homes.

    In which case, the whole regional economy has become a swindle, a Ponzi scheme. Trying to improve a system like that from within sounds like an exercise in futility. Time to sell and move away, bring some of that money back into the flyover states where it commands a lot more property. Lead by example, an exodus of fifty million away from the coasts would relieve ecological pressure where it hurts, and put the pressure back in places that can handle it. Double the populations of Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota and Michigan, even throw in Ohio and Kentucky, let them worry about gentrification for a while.

    “Yeah but it’s cold and the people are uptight, who wants to build there?” Fair criticism, then it’s just a choice between coastal eco-collapse and Midwestern lifestyles, I guess that’s my answer right there. But it does kind of beg the question, why look at Mars, you don’t even like the Midwest.

    Meanwhile us small town rubes and Babbitts could work on our attitudes, try and get more of a laidback, hip sensibility going so it’s less off putting to climate refugees, if the ice shelves break off and float north. Or you could just bring your attitudes with you when the time comes, help shake us out of our small minded, phlegmatic doldrums. Improvements all the way around. And anyone with Midwest property can watch happily as real estate prices start rising like the mighty Mississippi.

    Now this whole line of speculation has me thinking of a Grapes of Wrath rewrite in reverse, “Return of the Oakies: This Time They’ve Got Cash!” Definitely has sitcom potential: “Old Jed’s got fire in the belly all right, the fires of hell since his state went up in smoke, it’s the Beverly Hell-Bellies, right here on CBS, Tuesday at eight, seven Central Time!”

    Theme song, anyone?

    Come and listen to the story of a man named Jed His whole state burned, left a bunch a neighbors dead Then one day he was shootin’ up some drugs Twasn’t nothin left to eat but gene engineered bugs Crickets that is High protein Good with Chardonnay

    1337:

    Maybe the character is forced to take some kind of action they wouldn't ordinarily take... getting a character moving and giving them enough equipment/influence to affect their environment is always a huge creative effort

    So many adventure/thriller stories have that element: the hero(es) get some bonanza that permits them to continue with the quest. Like the "why doesn't the society on planet have amazing technology if they also have magical starship drives?" question, the bonanza is often enough for the entire hero squad to retire and live comfortable lives... sometimes there's a plot point dealing with that, sometimes the nature of the quest/emergency is such that it wouldn't be possible, but often, especially if the quest is actually some sort of heist, it's just an unexplained logic issue with the plot.

    1338:

    Moz @ 1320:

    Wedding Photographers who would give the bride a CD of their wedding photos, but DID NOT provide a copyright release

    Accidentally, or extra cost option that the client declined?

    I've sold a few photos and that's always a fun one when it crops up. People mistake the "I spent a day at the event and expect to sell 100 watermarked photos" for "this is such fun that I do it for free, and am happy to find 'the one of the red-headed guy with the blue shirt' and email it to you at my expense".

    The worst clients IME (other than Murdoch media, who just steal whatever they can and rely on suckers not suing them), are the stock photo "like that, but different". I price out the model, gear, and venue then ask for that as the deposit amount. The ones who try to negotiate that cost have never, ever been profitable for me. In the event they eventually pay something it's rarely enough to cover my outgoings (sample size: two. I can learn).

    Stupid oversight. If you give a client a CD of images so they can print the photos of their wedding, it needs to have a copyright release on the CD so the lab knows the person has permission to print those photos.

    Mostly "shoot & burn" wannabee wedding photographers didn't provide prints. They charged $$$ to shoot the wedding & all the photos more or less unedited other than adding the "photographer"'s sig & copyright notice were burned to a CD (or DVD). If the bride wants prints she's expected to have them made herself. There was a lot of the Bride has a girl-friend "Debbie with a Digital Camera & she can shoot our wedding" involved.

    Debbie sees that Professional Photographers have their sig & copyright on the image, so she has to include it on her images so she can be a Pro too.

    The bride's friends look at the photos & they see the "photographer"'s name and hopefully will hire him/her for their own wedding. The wannabee wedding photographer didn't know the copyright notice is going to cause their friend/customer problems when they go to have prints made.

    If you don't want the Bride to be able to print the photos, don't give her a CD. But if you DO give her a CD you need to also provide the release. I say make it the first image on the CD just so she can't lose it.

    PS: This all needs to be spelled out specifically in the contract the bride/groom BOTH have to sign.

    1339:

    David L @ 1329: Now put one in a Kiosk where you really want no maintenance at all and have people bring in who knows what (anyone else remember that mashed potato coming out of one in a commercial?) into it. And wearing out the heads early, tape getting jammed, whatever.

    Kiosks ... Have I ever mentioned that I REALLY HATE TOUCH SCREENS!

    Kiosks are the reason. People will pick their nose while using the touch screen on a photo kiosk. I'd have to clean them after practically every customer used them. We had two kiosk machines because the customers were constantly tearing them up. The memory stick from Sony digital cameras will go IN to the SD card slot. But they won't come back out without me having to disassemble the kiosk to get to the card reader behind it. IF I was lucky they didn't damage the contacts on the actual card reader. I wasn't lucky more than 50% of the time.

    The kiosk would be off-line until the service tech who was responsible for maintaining the lab equipment got there and he was so overworked he couldn't get there for days after we called in the problem. Fortunately I had all the maintenance manuals, experience doing maintenance by the numbers from the military & a good rapport with the tech. He'd call when he got the service request. I'd tell him what the problem was & what part was needed to fix it and he'd have the part over-nighted to the store to my attention, so I could be back in service faster than any other lab in the district.

    One of the kiosks also had a flat bed scanner. It was a nightmare. Same problem as the touch-screens with customers smearing bodily fluids across the glass. Plus ...

    The unhappy customer who finally got me fired was a Karen who brought in a (Big Name Local - well known to be VERY litigious) Professional Photographer's watermarked proofs that clearly said DO NOT COPY and not only demanded that I make prints, but that I make prints with the photographer's watermarks removed.

    1340:

    To clarify: I've often provided "proof" images with watermarks, generally at low res, so clients can decide which shots they want me to work up to deliverable quality. Someone scraping the watermark off and using that image is not unheard of.

    My understanding is that wedding photogs often provide low-res, watermarked images to clients at minimal cost to them, so they can choose which ones to have prints made from by the photographer. Or that photo set is the base price version, and the profit comes from extras. Generally that will be explicit "you get two 24x36" prints, ten 10x8 included" and the CD is so they can choose which ones. Further prints are only supposed to be available through the photographer.

    "Debbie Does Wedink Potos" is a whole different game. Anything can happen, and often does. I've once been asked to photoshop some of those and refused, because I'm not an artist (the work required was closer to "paint a photorealistic image of what's been sketched on the back of a napkin"). Someone like that forgetting to include a release is plausible, but easier to fix than most of the other mistakes those people make.

    1341:

    All these examples of first lines reminds me of author Kit Whitfield's careful analysis of first sentences of novels, although most of them were more famous than "best". L learned many things from it, such as the famous opening line(s) of Lolita is not the actual first sentence of the novel.

    http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.com/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html

    1342:

    Not in any way doubting your point, but I can’t help wondering why insurance rates don’t have more of a deterrent effect on irresponsible development.

    It's a good question, and I'm going to go into detail because I'm surprised more writers don't use this.

    On the one hand, California, and I think many developed cities in the world, are short of affordable housing. The state of California in particular has numbers of homes of various densities/acre that it really, really wants municipalities (cities and counties) to build. Most places are behind, especially on lower end homes.

    To unpack that a bit, the US pseudo-hierarchy of laws is US Federal Law, State Law, County Law (for bits that aren't incorporated into towns or cities) and City law (for parts of a county that are incorporated). It's not a strict hierarchy because generally state law trumps most federal laws on lands within the state, with the exception of land owned by the feds and tribal lands. Similarly, city laws trump county laws within city boundaries, even though the county supervisors represent both people who live within cities in the county and people who live in unincorporated areas of the county, and the county provides some services to both, as they can. In this regard, San Diego County's running the covid vaccines within the City of San Diego, because it's simpler.

    Now, about housing. First problem is that it's really profitable to build high end houses on empty land, so developers want to build these as much as possible. There's no shortage of these homes. Stuff the average worker could afford is short, and stuff a minimum wage worker can afford is close to non-existent at the moment. Yeah, we could build slums, tenements, and allow shanties, but oddly enough, rent on these tends to go sky-high, along with all the other problems.

    The second, huge problem is where the money goes. On the developments I'm fighting, the groups building these things often have multinational funding, because they stand to gross in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars if they can fully build out the development. The way they do this is to buy empty land and build lots of expensive houses on it. Once they build it, they walk away with the profits (the companies can even go out of business), and the houses are the responsibility of the owner, the Home Owner's Association (fire clearance) and the municipality they're in (services like emergency, police, garbage, etc.). Municipalities like these sprawls because property taxes on expensive homes bring in lots of revenue. Also, because of term limits, the politicians that approves the property likely won't be around when the property is wiped out by a disaster, so not their problems.

    So the developers and municipalities make lots of money by building expensive homes on vacant land. At this point, any land that is vacant isn't so because it's empty. It's generally vacant either because it's a working farm or ranch, and almost always because it's a really sucktastic place to build homes. I'm not exaggerating. Would you buy a million dollar home in a rural area where you have to drive a minimum 30 miles on a two lane road to work or shop, in a valley where the wind is always blowing and the fire risk is very high, and you're a couple of miles from the San Andreas Fault? That one's called Centennial, and a friend of mine is fighting it. Take out the earthquakes and halve the travel distance, and you've got most of the developments my group is fighting.

    Anyway, the wildfire hits. Who fights it? Cal-FIRE, formerly the California State Board of Forestry. Of course, every fire department jumps on it, but the money comes from the state, and ultimately from federal disaster declarations. Contractors love this, and a number of us are worried about the rise of a Fire-Industrial Complex on the lines of the Prison-Industrial and Military-Industrial Complexes. It's a great system, if you're a contractor interested in no-bid emergency government contracts with high overhead. Hard on the firefighters, but those are the jobs that it brings to poor rural areas, instead of being prison guards or soldiers.

    So insurance companies try not to take a bath on this mess. Even now, most houses in high-fire areas can only get insurance through the California FAIR plan. At one point, we environmentalists were hoping that insurance would kill sprawl, but it turns out that Municipalities and developers are really good at screaming bloody murder when their income streams are threatened, so it's more likely that fire insurance will become state-covered, if not federal-covered, before we get universal health care.

    As an interesting response, the California Attorney General's office is now intervening in a bunch of wildfire sprawl cases on the side of the enviros. We're not normally allies with the CAG, but I suspect in this case that the State can do math and doesn't want to get bankrupted covering billions in firefighting costs every year, coupled with billions in insurance costs to rebuild homes where they'll burn again. So they're trying to stop such developments. Hopefully this is their reasoning, and hopefully it works.

    Long post, but this gets at the fundamental problem: the people making money are not the people taking the risks, and it's only changing when the state is in both camps. This is a common pattern with many intractable problems, like illegal drugs, war, and climate change. We're only seeing action where the risk and reward hit the same group of decision-makers.

    Hope this helps. As I noted, you can spin any number of fictional plots off this particular problem or issues analogous to it.

    1343:

    So the developers and municipalities make lots of money by building expensive homes on vacant land. At this point, any land that is vacant isn't so because it's empty. It's generally vacant either because it's a working farm or ranch, and almost always because it's a really sucktastic place to build homes.

    Thanks for that. It offers an explanation for a lot I've seen along the border in El Paso County and the Rio Grande valley. McMansions and real mansions being built on former farm land, city boundaries being extended really far out.

    1344:

    De nada. A local professor came up with the great mnemonic for development in California: "First the cow, then the plow, then the bulldozer." Land that's settled in California generally first gets ranched, then gets intensified into farming as demand picks up, and ultimately gets bulldozed for development when it's more profitable to sell the land than to keep working it.

    Since there are efforts to get working agricultural land protected to sustain food production, much of the sprawl development pressure in San Diego is actually now on parklands. Since parklands are typically places that are too rugged or disaster-prone for safe development, that really tells you something.

    The other thing I have to mention is that I'm actually not fighting all development. There are any number of in-fill developments that I've left alone, because they're creating denser communities than are there already. This has its own problems, but I think it's preferable to leapfrog sprawl in the earthquake, wind, and fire zone.

    1345:

    FWIW same problem here: even though the area has literally just flooded (is still flooded...), the proposal to lift restrictions on development in the flood plain seem to be going ahead. Forget all the "one in a hundred year flood" land, this stuff floods more often than that.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/28/developing-a-flood-plain-how-raising-a-dam-wall-could-create-a-false-sense-of-security-in-sydneys-west

    As with many things, it's cheaper to buy the law change you want than to comply with the law the way it is. And same thing, once the place is built the developers are done with it. That "seven year building warranty" does not cover floods, or any of the shortcuts the developer took, and anyway, have you got the money to fight this all the way to the supreme court?

    A big part of this is land banking: developer approaches a farmer 30 minutes drive from the city, in an area that can't be built on and where only an idiot would even try to build a house. Offers a good price for the land with a 10 year lease-back at a good rate. Developer doesn't care, "$1 and other valuable considerations" would make them happy except that they have to make it look plausible to the farmer and authorities as an investment. The development campaign doesn't even start until that land is on the development fringe. Some blacks have been held this way for 30 years. But when that payoff comes... oooh boy. Buy price, in todays money at 5% pa since purchase is well under $100,000/hectare. Cost of "compliance" with the new rules is generally higher than that. But the sale price is 2-10 sections per hectare at $500,000 per section (less a bit for paving etc). It's... not the same sort of money.

    1346:

    There are any number of in-fill developments that I've left alone, because they're creating denser communities than are there already. This has its own problems, but I think it's preferable to leapfrog sprawl in the earthquake, wind, and fire zone.

    Of course I suspect like around where I live, in fill development is fought tooth and nail as it ruins the ambiance of the people who live around these infill areas. They are all upset that someone is building where the trees are across the street. Even though it has been zoned that way for decades. And don't even bring up that they don't own it. Those evil developers are ruing the area as they are changing things from the way it has been for 20 years and must be stopped.

    Basically they love the growing economy, jobs, etc... but want the physical growth to occur way over there. Anywhere but next to where they live.

    1347:

    Now, about housing. First problem is that it's really profitable to build high end houses on empty land, so developers want to build these as much as possible. There's no shortage of these homes

    Kind of the same everywhere. Where I live (in a suburb) there's much building going on. Here, the best profit comes from small apartments in apartment houses, so that's what gets built. There are some row houses and even some single houses in the area, but the profits are better in apartments, so those get built.

    Now, the thing here is the "small apartments". Just the other day I did a search for homes in my area, and there's a lot of "30 square meters apartment for over 300,000 euros" going on. Those are obviously single rooms (not even a single bedroom). There's some 60-70 square meter apartments which are relatively less expensive (I think they are upwards from 450,000 euros), but I kind of am not surprised at Finns living in small apartments.

    I'm still wondering how much market there is for those kind of apartments. We paid less than 300,000 euros for ours, but that was over ten years ago, and currently we would have little hope of buying an apartment here, at least big enough for us. Otherwise, the area is nice, so we lucked out, but I wonder how it will look in ten years. We aren't exactly poor, so I wonder who has the money to buy those. The small ones would be nice for students for their first apartment, but not that many young people have that kind of money.

    One thing that seems to be a thing with those expensive apartments is that the builders or whoever tries to make profit out of selling them often think that they need to get a certain price for them, so a lot of them are just sitting empty.

    I'm not sure of the solution here, but I think at least the city could build more apartments for renting out. At least I think many studies show that the best city planning has various people mixed, instead of the rich concentrating in some areas and poor in others.

    1348:

    Never buy a property in a housing development called "The Water Meadows".

    1349:

    Or, at least in the UK "$name Lea" (may mean something else in Canada.

    Or, if you must buy property on a known and named flood plain, don't come crying to Nojay or I when it floods.

    (Disclaimer - My Mum sometimes just misses getting flooded by a local burn. However this involves a lack of maintenance on the watercourse, heavy rain, and a subsequent bursting of banks at which point the water spreads from a 1m channel to points about 1m higher and 150m away.)

    1350:

    Or round my way, roads called Splash Lane or Marsh Lane or Mere Way...

    Or indeed, don't move to a village called Fen [anything]. Stick to the ones called Dry [something].

    1351:

    Around here, a major development complained that they weren't warned of poor drainage, when building on a site called Clay Farm in what was clearly a currently dry flood plain. From your Fen/Marsh commment, you may well know the one I mean :-)

    1352:

    After development it would probably not be called "The Water Meadows" any longer - something like "The Sunny Meadows" would be more like it after developers have had their greedy hands involved...

    Always check on an old map for original names of a newly developed area

    1353:

    When I bought my property nearly 20 years ago I noticed that there was about 100 to 200 acres of flood plain to the North of the creek that gave the Northern border to the property.

    I thought that they would never build there.

    Wrong!

    About 10 years later they "fixed" things by de-irrigating (or un-irrigating?) the flood plain with impressive concrete works that brought any future water further downstream in the creek.

    I didn't know such de-irrigation was possible.

    1354:

    I have friends living in Usk ( Brynbuga ) in Wales .. they carefully noted the flood levels, when they had their new house built & made sure that the ground in which it stands was raised by about a metre. The flood level now comes up to about 0.6 metre from the house, because the local stream/river ( The Olway ) floods the field at the bottom of their garden & then floods the mile or so of fields on the other side of its course ...

    1355:

    We used to keep our wellies at the bottom of the stairs for a reason.

    There are certain excitements to living in what used to be a water mill. Happily it was only one end of the ground floor that would flood, and we'd open the back door to let the water out again. Also happily we were at the other end of the Great Ouse from Lynn, so there wasn't that much water.

    1356:

    They are all upset that someone is building where the trees are across the street. Even though it has been zoned that way for decades.

    To be fair, if your developers are like our's when they bought their property they were sold on 'living beside nature' with absolutely no mention that there were plans to build on it. I've watched it happen as Markham creeps north over farmland — each successive neighbourhood is advertised as being 'on the edge of the city' with no mention that in less than a decade it will be inside the city. Works because new buyers typically haven't been following the development pattern and it can be hard to track that information down.

    Even being on the edge of a protected area doesn't protect you. Areas can be changed (eg. Ford's government overturning greenbelt protections in the name of development). Alternately, the developer can simply ignore the restriction and treat the fine as part of the cost of doing business. (Happened in my town — developer chopped down all the trees is a protected area, paid the nominal fine of $200 per tree, then successfully petitioned to remove protections on the grounds that the ecosystem was no longer what was listed in the protection order, which it wasn't as he'd destroyed it.)

    1357:

    Wales has a problem. It rains in Wales. Sometimes it rains a lot in a small amount of time and the narrow valleys concentrate that water and small towns near the top of the valley get flooded. After everything is mopped up there are demands to "DO SOMETHING" and prevent Lady Nature doing this again, like she's going to listen to anyone. Flood mitigation measures are planned and built and next time it rains a lot in Wales the town with the flood mitigation measures doesn't get flooded like it did before although some carpets might get wet here and there. Success!

    Unfortunately the next town down the valley gets all of the water from the first town's flood mitigation system in a short hurry plus a lot of original-source water it normally has to deal with and that location floods in turn. Step and repeat, sad trombone.

    1358:

    Yeah, I noted that. It did stay in Malta for a few hours, long enough to resupply

    I'd be mildly surprised if it went all the way to India to be broken: there's a breaking yard at Aliaga in Turkey that majors in ex-Cruise Ships. On the other hand I suspect that place is fully booked, so India it might be.

    ( Random article on it: https://www.arabnews.com/node/1743816/business-economy )

    One effect of Covid has been an understandable downturn in the number of cruises being taken, and some lines have been bringing forward the retirement of their older ships, so places like Aliaga are chomping their way through several at a time.

    Meanwhile Ever Given looks to be mostly freed, maybe even the next high tide. If Satoshi pops out of Montenegro, off to India it might go

    1359:

    They are all upset that someone is building where the trees are across the street. Even though it has been zoned that way for decades.

    Well, for my suburb, the area was planned to be a 'garden city' - different types of houses, lots of open areas between them, good connections even with public transport, services nearby.

    However, building that way makes for nice living (one of the reasons we moved there) but doesn't optimize the people per area, or profit per area, so it's been built with apartment houses tight together more and more with the passing years. (We live in an apartment house, but the houses we live in are so sparsely built that nowadays they'd build at least a third if not half more houses, and of course less space between them.)

    I would've kind of hoped that other areas would be built like ours is, but it seems the trend is just to build city blocks as those will be the most efficient way, in some sense, to build.

    On the way of my walk to the stores and the metro station there's a nice stretch of lawns and big trees - I'd be sad to see them go. Some of the trees nearby have already been felled, mostly to make way for a pedestrian way, ten meters and parallel to an existing one, on the other side of a stream...

    1360:

    gordycoale @23:

    Next you’ll be telling us that Kangaroo’s can’t use SAMS. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-sport/

    Great story. (Even the true version.)

    1361:

    To be fair, if your developers are like our's when they bought their property they were sold on 'living beside nature' with absolutely no mention that there were plans to build on it.

    My house was built in 1961. Most of the houses in my "subdivision" were built in the early 60s. About 400. And there are just as many north of us. And about the same totals across the main road. Most built prior to 95 or so.

    Most of my neighbors are upset that the main artery near us needs to be "fixed". Constant lane widths, more limited turnouts, etc... (All because the folks who had to buy further out now drive in.) And that the near death mall next to us was torn down and replaced with a walk around mall/shops and some new 10 to 20 story buildings with shops on the first floors and parking inside the structures so they are not paving over the entire area. We have a lot more people and businesses now than when I bought 30 years ago and fewer paved over acres.

    But many are mad that the developer "threw out" the cafeteria and JCPenny's. Both mostly had shoppers way older than 65 and their numbers were getting smaller every year. They closed due to lack of business, not the new developers but that goes against their emotions. They want everything to go back to 1975 or just sit empty. I lived in the Pittsburgh area for most of the 80s. If you keep things that way, the results are NOT good. Braddock was the "in spot" for the middle class in the 50s. Now and since the 80s it is a derelict area.

    Anyway, developers didn't see many of the current residents of this area their homes. Those folks are almost all dead. Buyers and sellers. What it is is that the people want to buy a house and then tell their neighbors what they can and cannot do. They said so in very vocal terms and led a re-zoning drive a few years back.

    As I said, they want the jobs and growing economy but they want the resulting people to live 30 miles away and drive in. Unlike them.

    1362:

    Can you remember way back in history when the USA was a primitive, deeply sexist society that had a chain of resturants called, of all things, "hooters" referring to breasts. Which bits are naked is more about the detail of the society, not whether they're sexist.

    I will stipulate that Hooters is a blight on thinking people in general and US culture in particular. Basically aimed at guys who let their emotional development stop around age 13. And I'm sure most countries with a "western" culture have similar. And the countries that don't, well they have them, but they are not widely marketed chains operating in the open but below the "law".

    But to equivocate a restaurant / bar where the wait female wait staff is wearing more clothing that 99% of similarly aged ladies on beaches and more than most of the female joggers in my neighborhood with a business oriented restaurant where the wait staff must parade around with exposed genitalia is utter nonsense.

    1363:

    Ah, Ever Given is apparently doing 4 knots northwards. Hoorah!

    1364:

    You missed...want them to drive in - without causing traffic. My opinion is that people who work in a given region should be allowed to vote in that region's local elections.

    1365:

    My community has had a 10 year fight about a development on some private property near my house. People, myself included, had been enjoying walking their dogs and otherwise appreciating the majestic views on that property for years.

    The the owner decided to build. Cue the panic and alarm, outrage and horror. Demands that the town buy the land and keep it as a park (~$10M, not at all in the budget). Elections won and lost on it. The builders made big concessions, it is marketed as a 'sustainable' development etc. etc. The build is going ahead, slowly, with a lot of ongoing outrage.

    The key message every other private property owner in the region has taken is to forbid hikers and dog walkers from their property, for fear that any future development will meet the same outrage.

    Note: Our community is rife with parks and wins awards for environmental stewardship. That doesn't mean building can't happen, much as some would like to preserve things in amber (now that they have theirs, so to speak).

    1366:

    The key message every other private property owner in the region has taken is to forbid hikers and dog walkers from their property, for fear that any future development will meet the same outrage.

    That is one of the fights going on around here now. People have been trail riding (pedals not motors) and hiking on property owned by airport and in a watershed protected area. Airport has been trying to shut it down for several years. Riders/hikers keep tearing down fences and barriers. And suing airport. They WILL lose but it is costing taxpayers a fortune in the meantime.

    And those easements can be pesky things. I have two separate next door neighbors who both wanted to do what can only be called stupid. In both cases I was nice enough to point out if they did it I would have to claim their property via a letter to make sure my mortgage and title insurance would not go nuts. And they could then deal with their title companies if they ever tried to sell or re-finance their house/lot. Both rapidly backtracked but both think of me as the bad guy.

    1367:

    There's a couple of tricks that developers can pull off if the local system of governance is corrupt enough, which mean that insurance premiums stay low until the developer has made their cash and legged it.

    The first and most corrupt is to depend upon insurance like the National Flood Insurance Program in the USA to keep the premiums down; the NFIP can't raise premiums too far for political reasons, and if you can ensure that your development is covered by NFIP insurance at a reasonable price when built (e.g. by taking advantage of elevation discounts), you can push the actual cost of your development's flood risk onto the taxpayer. The discounts can be done in good ways (e.g. building a proper floodwater management system and covering it over so that while the area still "floods", those floods are now underground and managed around foundations, thus don't affect the buildings on top), or bad ways (work out the letter of the rules, and use the loopholes to get discounts).

    The second is for the developer to buy insurance against flooding for all their properties that continues to be valid for a period of time after the property is bought (in the UK, that'd normally be 10 years and carried as part of your NHBC warranty or equivalent construction quality insurance). Because there's an insurer who will pay for flood damage in the first 10 years of ownership, the first owner's insurance is cheap for 10 years, and then skyrockets when the risk of flooding has to be taken into account. By the time you get bitten by the high insurance premiums, you've owned the property for a while, and you're stuffed as a result.

    Basic market manipulation tricks, in other words.

    1368:

    Ah, all that work, as opposed to my dual-cassette tape deck, which had a switch labeled high-speed copy.

    1369:

    Our split level is about 3/4 of the way up the hill from the railroad, and from Rock Creek Park.... I did not want a sump pump (saw a house, when I was looking, 10 years ago, in Arlington, VA, that had two sump pumps, one battery-backed...).

    1370:

    There's also another chain, and it sells jars etc in the stupormarket, called Chi Chi's, which I understand is the same thing.

    1371:

    Simple answer to a lot of this: require the developers to fund commuter rail extensions out to their developments.

    Much amusement follows.

    1372:

    Nojay Indeed - Usk nearly lost its historic bridge across the river Usk about 18 months back, the water came to within a very few centimetres of filling its arches completely....

    Bellinghman The Ever Given's owners are going to be facing some hefty fines & fees. I wonder if Egypt will now double all or part of the remaining "single" parts of the canal, as a precaution?

    1373:

    I wonder if Egypt will now double all or part of the remaining "single" parts of the canal, as a precaution?

    That's an interesting thought. It looks like about 30 km on both the north and south ends, mostly earth-moving on the east side. It wouldn't be cheap, but neither is having the Canal blocked for a week. Perhaps some consortium of countries could help finance the project.

    1375:

    Oh no! Not the "Little Prince".

    1376:

    Moz @ 1340: To clarify: I've often provided "proof" images with watermarks, generally at low res, so clients can decide which shots they want me to work up to deliverable quality. Someone scraping the watermark off and using that image is not unheard of.

    My understanding is that wedding photogs often provide low-res, watermarked images to clients at minimal cost to them, so they can choose which ones to have prints made from by the photographer. Or that photo set is the base price version, and the profit comes from extras. Generally that will be explicit "you get two 24x36" prints, ten 10x8 included" and the CD is so they can choose which ones. Further prints are only supposed to be available through the photographer.

    Now that the wedding photography business is almost entirely digital, instead of proof prints, photographers have the couple come in to the studio for a "viewing" where they choose the images they want printed. Usually a "wedding album" & a number of prints are included in the contract price and the couple can buy additional print packages. Another thing that's become popular is the couple gets a website for "Our Wedding" that will stay up for a couple of years so that parents, grandparents, relatives & friends can view the images & order prints if they want them.

    "Debbie Does Wedink Potos" is a whole different game. Anything can happen, and often does. I've once been asked to photoshop some of those and refused, because I'm not an artist (the work required was closer to "paint a photorealistic image of what's been sketched on the back of a napkin"). Someone like that forgetting to include a release is plausible, but easier to fix than most of the other mistakes those people make.

    Shoot & Burn wedding photography is the bottom end of the market.

    Good wedding photography is EXPENSIVE. Nowadays, a lot of couples are paying for their own weddings & can't really afford it ... so they turn to girl-friend Debbie with a digital camera. I wasn't faulting her as a photographer (although some of them were pretty bad), just pointing out a common amateur mistake (copyright notice & no release) that frequently caused problems for the bride.

    Usually it could be resolved, but it was going to take the bride more than one trip to get her prints done if she had to go get her friend to give her the release. Sometimes friend Debbie would call the store and demand to know why I wouldn't print her friends photos? I'd have to explain about the DMCA copyright release and tell her how to google for a release she could use.

    Other times Debbie would be a regular customer & talk to me BEFORE shooting the wedding and that's when I would tell her about including the release on the CD.

    The other ones, the Karens who expect you to risk getting hit with a DMCA lawsuit so they cheat the photographer ... Fuck 'em!

    1377:

    whitroth @ 1368: Ah, all that work, as opposed to my dual-cassette tape deck, which had a switch labeled high-speed copy.

    Is it a video-cassette deck? My audio cassette deck will do that, but I've never seen a consumer video-cassette deck with that feature.

    1378:

    Ah, all that work, as opposed to my dual-cassette tape deck, which had a switch labeled high-speed copy.

    Audio cassette tapes are a straight line pass across the tape head. Speeding it up basically means a bit fancier tape head and somewhat better variable speed motors. Video tape is a helical scan laying down tracks on an angle across a tape with the tape head spinning. All with very tight tolerances. Speeding it up would require close synchronization of all the mechanical parts involved. Plus improved electronics in the spinning heads. It literally took decades for the companies involved to get to where they could reliably manufacture such things at a price consumers would pay. And if you double the speed you're still looking at 45 minutes to dupe a 90 minute tape.

    Audio cassettes are sooooo much easier to speed up. Especially if the quality is not needed for music. Which is why people could show up with a 6 or more cassette duplicator at a trade show and hand out recordings of seminars at the show. I may be wrong but I think the duplicator could run at faster than 2:1. These duplicators would fit on top of a card table. It was a thriving business till cassettes went out of fashion.

    1379:

    About 15 years ago I bought a Panasonic "DVD recorder" "Diga DMR-ES30V" which could easily record VHS tapes on DVD discs. In fact it could also go the other way, recording DVD discs on VHS tapes.

    I thought that I would transfer all my self-recorded VHS tapes on DVD discs. What happened is that I got bored looking at the low quality 2 hour tapes and gave up early on. Now, the tapes are gathering dust because I can't make up my mind about throwing them all in the garbage.

    1380:

    A few months ago we sorted through a decade or so's worth of recorded VHS tapes. We bought a $25 used VCR to quickly check out what was on them. We got it down to 3 we wanted to keep. The rest were tossed. Things of our kids in their pre-teen days. We're letting Costco send them to a transfer service to put them on flash drives at $20 or so each.

    I feel I'm more technically adept than most but I never could get reliable VHS to DVD transfers on the 2 cheap decks I bought near the end of the VHS era. Of course "cheap" and "end of era" might be involved.

    1381:

    Haven't owned a VHS since the last millenium. I was never a collector of tapes, and when our last one died I never replaced it.

    A few years ago I found a couple boxes of CDs on the floor in my closet, leftover from the move into our house some years prior. Never once had I missed one of the CDs, so I took the boxes all to donate. We've never really owned DVDs, though we had a few when the kids were little. Now it is all Netflix etc.

    I would like a simple, automated way to digitize family photos - especially those from 100 years ago - before they are lost to the depredations of time. I have a wonderful photo of my great grandfather and his extended family taken the day he left for Canada (from Transylvania) in 1903. I'd love to have that digitized to share with our familial diaspora, but apparently I'm not motivated enough to just get it done.

    1382:

    They want everything to go back to 1975 or just sit empty

    I suspect quite a few of them would be willing to reduce the population to 1975 levels too? You can't have one without the other...

    1383:

    Totally. They are pissed that the town they fondly remember is going away. That's how they phrase it.

    I want to get in their face and be blunt and tell them they are trying to reject the city their kids are shaping. But most of their kids live somewhere else. So it's an abstract concept as the kids are others who have moved HERE. And by kids I mean people aged 25 to 45.

    The one that really gets me is JCPenny. A department store with over 100 years of history. When the store less than a mile from me closed there was all kinds of gnashing of teeth and wailing about the evil developers shutting it down. In fact it was/is due to those folks letting their kids switch from department stores to Amazon. Plus a monster dose of how to not transition from an old fart clientele to new younger shoppers. But that just pisses everyone off when you bring it up.

    They also miss Block Buster Video, drive in movies, and 3 channel TV.

    1384:

    Which would be great, barely over 3B people....

    1385:

    The department stores, esp. Sears, should have had their catalogs on the Web asap. Instead, big river, owned by scum, at their lunch.

    I HATE having to order things like clothes online. Their measurement are frauds, a lot of the times, and I can't feel just how cheap the fabric is.

    You've no idea how pissed off I am, trying to buy corduroys for winter, and find something suitable to wear in San Diego in the summer....

    1386:

    Unless the foreign restaurants are really different, no. Chi Chi's was just a Mexican chain restaurant. The last US restaurants closed in 2004 but Hormel sells licensed products under the Chi Chi's name. Chi Chi's was named after the nickname of the wife of one of the founders.

    1387:

    Not really. I've got to find the precise quote again from architectural historian Spiro Kostof. He said something to the effect that every city goes through a huge drama when it stops growing out (sprawl) and has to grow up (densification). Of course this can happen more than once, but the point is that's a big drama. And that's where we are now in San Diego. We literally can't support sprawl, in terms of budgeting to keep roads paved, deal with fires, supply water, electricity, gas, and emergency response. Among other things. Low density developments don't really pay for the services they consume, so at some point, the municipality either has to raise taxes and fees, or limit further low-density development and force development to densify.

    This causes all sorts of drama. First, the developers, who were getting huge profits by turning vacant land into expensive homes, lose their big revenue stream. Since suborning politicians appears to be cheaper than changing a business model, things get politically interesting and very litigious. Second problem is that there's this whole myth that denser homes cost property values (as in New York, London, etc.../sarcasm), and it lets Them move in. So there's a lot of drama.

    There are two more problems. One is that basically every bit of land on the planet is owned by now, and most people don't realize this. They see vacant lands and think they're available for the claiming: cut trails, build kid's play areas, annex them as landscaping, dump trash, shoot guns, etc. Problem is, most of the vacant land has some other purpose, especially if it's park land. So there's a lot of friction there. Mountain bikers are particularly problematic around here (1500 miles of trail is not enough for them, apparently, so they keep building more on lands they don't own), but other trespassers are more problematic elsewhere.

    The long-term problem is that municipalities, across history, normally fluctuate by 1-2 orders of magnitude in population over the years. And quite a few permanently shrink or are abandoned. The problem here is that most city managers and politicians don't realize this. And even if they do, they DO NOT want to tolerate such bad luck. Growth and prosperity are the only things worth pursuing, at least rhetorically. And the struggle for prosperity at all costs ironically causes more trouble than if they just went with it.

    While I won't live through it, I expect a lot of the cities and suburbs in the western US will be abandoned over the next century, and most of the survivors will be a lot smaller. The problem is water and an infrastructure that can't readily be adapted for the 21st century or times thereafter.

    1388:

    First, the developers, who were getting huge profits by turning vacant land into expensive homes, lose their big revenue stream

    My favourite line for those types is: my starting point is half for nature. I'm happy to negotiate which half of your land gets turned into national park.

    1389:

    My favourite line for those types is: my starting point is half for nature. I'm happy to negotiate which half of your land gets turned into national park.

    I'd retire that line. Around here, they stopped doing that in 1997, because developers were setting aside half their land, but these little, unconnected pockets rapidly turned into weed lots because they were too small to hold self-sustaining populations of rare species, no one took care of them, and every single one got litigated over. They've tried bunching together, so that the developers get the low quality conservation land, while the high quality land gets set into parks. Then they don't fund the parks, mountain bikers gator-back them with reticulated webs of trails, and the politicians try to renege on the deal and try to develop the parks anyway.

    This problem could be temporarily fixed with a resurgence of smallpox or the appearance of something with similar infectiousness and lethality, especially if it preferentially killed well-off men. But I'm too humane to push that as a solution. So instead I continue the slow struggle. And I donated my mountain bike years ago, because I have precisely no desire to be part of that culture, after a decade and counting of cleaning up after the mess they leave.

    1390:

    I have no idea how Sears lost to Amazon. How could there not be just one division of the company which wasn't taking stoopid pills?

    1391:

    We've never really owned DVDs, though we had a few when the kids were little. Now it is all Netflix etc.

    I have lots of DVDs and BluRay discs that I finally have the time to watch. If I relied on Netflix they'd be unavailable after this much time. Netflix is more like rental than owning. And doesn't have many of the movies I want to watch, anyway.

    I would like a simple, automated way to digitize family photos - especially those from 100 years ago - before they are lost to the depredations of time. I have a wonderful photo of my great grandfather and his extended family taken the day he left for Canada (from Transylvania) in 1903. I'd love to have that digitized to share with our familial diaspora, but apparently I'm not motivated enough to just get it done.

    What media? Prints? Glass plates? Negatives? Slides?

    I've been working my way through my father's slides. I own a Nikon slide scanner which does a good job on slides and negatives, although I have a professional photographer friend who is using lockdown to digitize his slide collection using just his Nikon D850 and a home-made lightbox.

    Here's some of what I found: https://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/sets/72157604107421955/

    (Note: no restoration done on these at all, so the quality could be a lot better. I decided to just scan now and restore when by editing skills improve.)

    It's not automated like 'drop pictures in box and they magically get digitized', but it's not terribly tedious. Kodak offers a digitizing box service which is incredibly expensive ($70 for 2 items, $600 for 20) — for that price they had better be doing some restoration work as well! — but it is literally drop in box and get back digital copies.

    When I make it out to the Sunshine Coast I'll have enough gear to do a decent job, except for a lightbox which is easily built. If you're interested email me and we can talk about it. (first.last@gmail.com will reach me)

    If you want to try your own hand at restoration this is an excellent book: https://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Restoration-Start-Finish-photographs/dp/0240812085/

    Borrow it from the library and have fun :-)

    1392:

    I suspect quite a few of them would be willing to reduce the population to 1975 levels too?

    Fer sure, especially if that means they can get rid of the uppity rabble who don't know their place…

    1393:

    I have no idea how Sears lost to Amazon. How could there not be just one division of the company which wasn't taking stoopid pills?

    Partly because the different divisions were competing with each other. Chap running Sears had no retail experience and apparently believed that fear is a great motivator, and that quarterly results are everything.

    So no synergy because they sold, like, everything. Everything that didn't appear to make money was starved, downsized, and eventually sold off. Best way to keep your job was make someone else look worse to you weren't the lowest performer.

    It was great for the men in charge. Sucked for everyone else. Usual late-stage-capitalism story…

    1394:

    One would think that Sears could've added a good web interface to their mail order business, they even tried, briefly, but didn't follow through. The mail order business was shut down in 1992. Perhaps in an alternate reality Bezos would be limited to running an online book store.

    1395:

    All of these companies and many others got confused after their success about what business they were really in. Sears, JCPenny, Montgomery Ward, etc... All claimed to be in the retail sales of general stuff to people business. But what they did behind the scenes was operate large retail stores, more and more in malls. Running those stores became their core. Selling to people as times changed and they didn't got harder and harder. Plus add in a logistics operations that in many ways resembled the 1930s more than the 1990s and they were ripe for the picking. It just took a few decades. In 89 or 90. Wal-Mart met an internal goal. To have more sales than Sears. But the same year both were eclipsed by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's goal? To be the biggest retailer in the US.

    Amazon has hit up all of them for various reasons. One they decided that for a LOT of sales to people, people didn't have to be involved and in many cases were not wanted. And the internet made that possible. Amazon would have been disruptive if they paid the lower end people more. But JB would not be as rich.

    Railroads in the US claimed to be in the transportation business. But they ignored everything but railroads. Autos and planes did a number on them. Why didn't they invest in either? Then there is the hidden secret that much of their profits for decades was based on real estate, not transportation. Except as the transportation added allowed the real estate side to prosper.

    Then there are all those specialty hip clothing stores of my 20s. The Gap and such. They thought they were hip clothing stores. But really what they were were clothing stores popular with baby boomers. The later youth wanted nothing to do with clothes sold by stores their elders visited.

    And computers? IBM was in theory an information company. But their internal business models and people were all about mainframes. Everything else was treated as a fad. Till it wasn't and they imploded.

    Look at what SpaceX is doing to LSC and Arianespace. From Arianespace's web site: Arianespace is the world’s leading satellite launch company. Only in their own minds.

    And so on. Times change. Most companies are staffed with people who can't see the change or can't figure out how to change course. Even when they do see the ice burg in plenty of time.

    1396:

    Does it ultimately matter? The only way Sears could have prevented the rise of Amazon was to become Amazon. Had that happened, nobody today would have known the name of Jeff Bezos... and Sears would be the Great Villain Who Killed Main Street.

    1397:

    "Perhaps in an alternate reality Bezos would be limited to running an online book store."

    I doubt it. He was extremely focused right from the start. I remember the early years when his shareholders were tearing their hair out because he judged it wasn't the right time to start paying dividends. He held on and survived the dot-com bubble.

    His early online bookstore was huge compared to the competition. From the start it had a nearly absolutely perfect Web interface. That's what I remember the most from his early years: The interface was a stroke of genius. It was fast, usefully fast, but the most apparent element was that you could actually see the front cover of the books. You could see what you were buying thanks to the medium-sized book icons.

    The only other huge bibliographical darabases on the Web at the time were the multi-library catalogs. They had zero images of the books. Zilch! The catalogs were run by cataloging librarians and computer science types who did not believe in visual elements. Most of their interfaces were terrible, in their logic as well as their visuals.

    This superiority hasn't stopped me from shunning the Bezos store completely. I still haven't made a single purchase from it. I use it only to get free bibliographical information.

    1398:

    All of these companies and many others got confused after their success about what business they were really in. Sears, JCPenny, Montgomery Ward, etc... All claimed to be in the retail sales of general stuff to people business. But what they did behind the scenes was operate large retail stores, more and more in malls. Running those stores became their core.

    Here in Finland, 'the' department store, Stockmann (founded in the 19th century) is in dire trouble. There are probably many reasons why it happened that way, and trying to be a department store building company is likely one of them. (I have no insider knowledge, this is just my own deduction.) They did run a lot of department stores, which worked quite well for a long time as they were for many people the first place to check for basically everything not daily groceries. Excellent service wasn't a bad thing, either.

    However, they didn't take to the web that well. This is kind of strange, as they owned one of the biggest mail-order companies in Finland. To me using that kind of skill to run web stores would have been a no-brainer, but apparently it was more difficult. Also, the web stores of many Finnish stores seem to be quite difficult to use - I haven't really used the Stockmann store as it's hard find anything there and it just doesn't click with me that well.

    Stockmann did try to pivot into renting its space to other companies for some years, but that didn't work out that well, either. I wondered when they started doing this that how this would be profitable as any other company selling their products in rented spaces need to make their own profit and pay the rent, and they can just leave if it's not working.

    Of course I'm not a department store company manager, so I can't tell how the business should be run. It's just that the people doing it are not doing a good job, either...

    1399:

    Rbt Prior I have thousands of negatives & slides - but quite a few of the negatives are "6x6" - not 35mm Quite a few of them are also extant as good-quality A4 b&w prints, which can be scanned easily - the rest, um, err. Typical examples are the photos in HERE I have others on Photobucket, but, IIRC, they have gorn all-advertising, recently.

    1400:

    Troutwaxer @ 1390: I have no idea how Sears lost to Amazon. How could there not be just one division of the company which wasn't taking stoopid pills?

    I haven't followed Sears in particular, but in cases like this the answer is often to be found in "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.

    TL;DR: in a big company everybody has a job to do that keeps the company ticking over day to day and everybody is rewarded for doing that job well. Everybody knows their bit of the job, and how it fits in with everyone around them.

    If you want to introduce something new, everyone from the CEO downwards is going to think in terms of "how does this fit in to our current business model?" and "how does this change my job?". Thinking "outside the box" as the cliche has it, is very difficult because it involves a wholescale redesign of the structure of the company, not just a few tweaks here and there.

    Worse yet, the new thing is untried and the initial market is small, so its likely to be considered a distraction at best. The experts in the company will have lots of reasons why the new thing is worse than the old thing, why customers won't like it, and why the big important customers in particular won't like it.

    So things continue as normal. Some little start-ups take the new thing and run with it, but most of them fail, thereby proving the company experts right.

    Until one day when someone figures out how to make money with the new thing, and suddenly the old company is toast.

    Christensen's main example is steam shovels (giant machines that look like a crane mating with a bulldozer) that were used to move earth in industrial amounts when digging canals and the like. The upstart technology here was hydraulics, which were only useful for backhoes that dug little ditches. One day a tipping point was reached; hydraulic diggers became cheaper per ton of earth than the old steam shovels, and all the steam shovel companies went out of business. Its not that they hadn't heard of hydraulics, its just that their entire structure, factory production lines, sales channels, management hierarchy etc was built around the practicalities of producing steam shovels. (Side note: I say "steam shovels", but by the end they were diesel powered).

    Christensen also relates the generations of hard disk drive, starting with giant washing-machine sized beasts and migrating to smaller and smaller sizes; 8 inch, 5.25 inch, 3.5 inch. In each generation the dominant companies were eclipsed by ambitious start-ups who understood not just how to manufacture the new format, but how to sell it and what the practical requirements in terms of cost, power, capacity, speed and robustness were.

    One important thing that doesn't quite come over from Christensen's presentation: its not just the "technology" that matters, its the entire industrial structure built around it. The basic technology is the easy bit.

    This is where the term "disruptive technology" came from. Of course these days the world is full of hucksters presenting their tiny variation on a theme as "disruptive", even though they haven't read Christensen and the phrase has lost most of it's meaning. But there are companies that read and learned. Western Digital has made the jump from hard drive to SSD. Intel introduced a series of low-end "Celeron" processors specifically to defend against any would-be upstarts, even though there wasn't much money in it.

    1401: 1358 - Well, there are 3 cruise ships (not "ocean liners"; these will bend if you try to take them through a North Atlantic storm at cruising speed) presently mothballed in one of the Clyde docks in Govan. 1360 - I'm not sure about SAMS; the version I was told had the 'roos using manPADs. 1385 - Likewise, and for same reasons. My sis can't see why someone who happily buys media on-line doesn't want to buy clothing on line (I've bought 2 print tee-shirts that way, both stating that they used Fruit of the Loom or Hayes shirts).
    1402:

    One would think that Sears could've added a good web interface to their mail order business,

    Amazon WAS its web interface, no-one who ordered books and CDs from them in the early days knew it was an operation run literally out of a garage by two people. To succeed as an 'internet retailer' Sears and any other large store-based and mail-order retailer existing at the time would have had to reorganise themselves from the ground up, totally re-invent what they did and how they did it. As a newcomer and upstart Amazon didn't have the layered history of how things are done to overthrow and that was why it succeeded, to a large extent.

    There are probably a hundred other Amazon-wannabees that never made it for various reasons, lost to history and web server bit-rot. Ebay is the other surviving worked example of "how to sell stuff on the Internet good" that Amazon copied to an extent when it opened up Marketplace, allowing small sellers (and not-so-small) to use/leverage the Big River's expertise and technology to make money with, again, a web interface.

    Did Sears ever offer third-party sales in their catalogues in the US? I don't know but the British mail-order equivalent, Littlewooods never did.

    1403:

    Those are Azamara ships - they're pretty small for cruise ships, and at 20 years old quite old for the Cruise market.

    As for ocean liners - as far as I'm aware that's a class of ship with just one member, the Queen Mary 2. The requirement to be able to keep scheduled non-stop routes just isn't there — the ship I crossed the North Atlantic on was happy to dawdle, to drop in at places like Lerwick and Torshavn for hours at a time. If it had got into a strong storm and had to slow and/or divert, it could make up the time quite easily.

    1404:

    Just as a general thing, I do a fair amount of buying online, and a lot of it is that I hate having to look for what I want in a physical store. I grant that amazon's lower prices matter to me, but I think I'd be buying online anyway.

    I've heard that Bezos was never a book person, he just figured out that books were a natural thing to sell online.

    Backing up to agency and sf characters, part of it might be the fantasy of agency, which leads to characters being faced with huge problems. There isn't a lot of sf that's just about solving single murders, so far as I know.

    1405:

    He sold books because he thought that there were more books as discrete items than anything else. He may not be a book person but he keeps books in some of his many homes. One of his personal libraries has not one but two fireplaces.

    1406:

    I must disagree, while Amazon's web interface works well, when it isn't attempting to divert your attention to things other than one's search request, the physical part, where material objects move, is little different, except the working conditions are worse. If Sears (Or Montgomery Ward) had put serious effort in an online presence, Amazon would've been hard pressed to match the breadth of selection in their early years.

    1407:

    I remember at the beginning of this century, all those retailers who were afraid to put their goods online because they feared the online sales would undercut their own bricks and mortar stores. Many of them put a limited amount of their goods online, to lessen the impact. It never worked.

    1408:

    Hedge funds & banks ...

    Thought that this might interest folks.

    The financial sector's news is looking more and more like a bad case of pandemic virus minus the financial sector equivalent of 'PPE', isolation protocols, ERs/ICUs or vaccines. FYI - this is a 'family business'.

    https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/how-one-of-world-s-greatest-hidden-fortunes-was-wiped-out-in-days-121033000071_1.html

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/investing/credit-suisse-nomura-archegos-capital-intl-hk/index.html

    1409:

    Amazon's product pages show you alternatives but tend to not make you mad doing it. Unlike many other web stores.

    As to Sears and others "just moving to the web" their entire business model made that hard. Their stores were organized to make most customers go from the edge to the center where the most sold items were located. So you had to walk by the things you didn't go there for but might decide to buy.

    Then there was the staff. Unlike modern supermarkets they had sales associates with cash registers in every "department". And the staff was there to SELL you. Not just ring up the stuff you found on your own. So there's a cost that the store has that the web doesn't.

    Now add in the daily, weekly, sales. Those were their to draw you into the store and get you to pay list price for other things. That just doesn't translate to the web very well.

    As others pointed out, these companies were well oiled machines with people doing their bit to make it all work. (Some of the parts were a mess but since it was the same mess their competitor had it was sort of OK.) Switching to a new machine with a totally different set of operating rules just proved too hard for most. Especially if it reduced head count above the level of store clerks. And look at other industries. Builder supply yards. Tech companies. Etc... IBM is barely holding on. But DEC, Compaq, Data General, and a hundred or so smaller ones in the US. 30 years ago there were a dozen DIFFERENT computer shops around here. Today there is ONE with a few small store fronts.

    The world changes. Ride with it or fall off.

    PS: I suspect 1/2 of the money spent on me prior to the age of 15 was spent at Sears. Excluding food.

    1410:

    Thus IBM buying Red Hat. Who colonizes whom will probably determine whether the company lives or dies.

    1411:

    Yes. A lot of us around here (RH is about 5 miles from me as I type) are wondering where things will be in 5 years.

    Interestingly RH has spurred a boom in urban living in Raleigh. Somewhat to the frowns of neighborhood activists as the RH staff push out the poor in their shacks (literally) and build new houses next to downtown.

    Currently RH is located mostly in a 10 or so story office building that was occupied by CP&L (our electric company) before they merged (were acquired by) with Duke Energy. This all happened about 5 or so years ago. CP&L staffers were the typical suburban folks commuting to the downtown office. Many RH folks are big on living close enough to walk, bike, or take a quick bus ride to work. Big boom in new apartment buildings and restaurants. But hard on the poorer folks who lived nearby.

    Prior to this move RH was located in the office park tied to NCSU and nearly everyone commuted.

    Anyway locally this all ties back to the zoning, changing suburbs discussions up thread.

    1412:

    The way CentOS 8 has been handled seems to be an indication there's a lot of management internally stuck on the wrong model. They've decided making CentOS an intermediate between Fedora and RedHat instead of the current serial numbers filed off version model will drive people to taking out paid for RedHat licences. Meanwhile in the real world a significant portion of sites have cancelled CentOS 8 roll out plans and are waiting for (and often contributing heavily to) whatever CentOS:TNG turns out to be called.

    1413:

    I think the same way that the Pennsy, the "standard railroad of the world"*, crashed and burned in the fifties and early sixties.

    Failure to look at where they fit into the market, what fads might become long-term Real Things.

    And managers who were not from the industry.

    But now I'm into my rant about how MBA's know that any organization can be run like any other organization - a railroad like a bank, a department store like a gas station quick stop. And, of course, ROI for those in charge, and their largest money providers, screw what the organization does.

    1414:

    '75, and the uppity rabble who didn't know their place? Um, vas you dere, Sharlie, in '75?

    The uppity rabble got bashed down in the 80's. Raygun, Thatcher....

    1415:

    Ah, yes, MBA rant, section "different divisions of the company should compete against each other, and none of them should be a "profit sink", only a "profit source", meaning, for example, that DP/IT should increase how much it costs for other divisions to use them, finally resulting in the other divisions outsourcing to cheaper sources.

    1416:

    One thing that happened, and is still happening, is that MBA (ignorant idiots) don't want to pay salaries for experienced people, they want to underpay folks right out of college, and "it's all just point and click to make web sites, right?"

    Sears still exists. I hate their website, and I want to buy from THEM, not some unknown third party. I want Sears to back the sale.

    1417:

    Sears still exists.

    In name only. The Sears you want and the one I grew up with and tried to shop at until 20 years ago doesn't exist anymore.

    1418:

    Who is financing all of this in Miami? https://onemileatatime.com/waldorf-astoria-miami/

    The American Airlines flight magazine has all kinds of ads for luxury high rise condos in Miami. I've yet to see one go up? (Miami is a hub for AA to the Caribbean and South America.)

    Are these things ways for architects to get big fees for initial designs and when it comes down to it the major banks will just not fiance these things? Sea level rise and all that?

    What am I missing?

    1419:

    Um, did you look carefully at the top pic? It looks like it's floating in the clouds... or in water.

    Perhaps they're planning a new downtown, based on a high-rise version of Venice. Italy, that is.

    1420:

    My point was that cruise ships are not ocean liners, irrespective of tonage and passengers carried. It was not about the present size of the ocean liner class.

    Also I'm pretty certain that a 6_000 berth cruise ship could not sail up the river Clyde to Govan.

    1421:

    And the staff was there to SELL you. Not just ring up the stuff you found on your own. So there's a cost that the store has that the web doesn't.

    The store also has the expense of selling people on stuff that they will then buy on Amazon because it's cheaper.

    http://www.dorktower.com/tag/local-game-store/

    1422:

    Urban Sprawl Thread: The thing about all city growth and urban sprawl is that it is ultimately governed by the laws of physics. If a sprawly urban area takes root and starts growing, if its area and hence its population doubles, then its radius only goes up by the square root of two. (Circ=2pi.r Area=pi.r2). This means that if the city is to grow at a steady rate, the rate of outward sprawl must go up continuously.

    The next problem for a sprawly city is that as it grows, the average journey distance goes up as stores and other destinations condense into fewer, larger operations. Also, commuting distances go up. This causes congestion as there is more miles driven per unit population. As the drive length goes up, this leads to a strong desire for faster speeds hence freeways/motor ways. But higher speeds require (with human operators) more car spacing, so the average unit length of road lane per mile driven goes up and the city must devote an ever high portion of its space to roading. Los Angeles is of course the great exemplar of all these trends.

    At some point, the city must inflect and densify. This brings the average commute distance down. Roads are more congested and hence traffic is slower, but this packs more cars into a given space. Slower travel is not so much of an inconvenience as the increased density allows for local location of most of its inhabitants needs. Also, people can now walk to more of their destinations, which is way more space efficient that using a car. (see New York). At this point, public transit becomes very useful as it is more space efficient that private cars. Subways are particularly efficient as their only surface footprint is their entranceways.

    Most cities exist somewhere between the poles of New York and Los Angeles.

    I don't see cities going away anytime soon. In fact, due to the Clustering Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster ) they will probably get bigger, but I see two trends shaping them in the near future.

    The first, accelerated by the pandemic, is tele-commuting. This will lessen congestion, but move up the average commute length. People (mainly professionals), if they only have to go into work once a week will tolerate a longer commute for a nicer place.

    The other thing that is going to radically change cities is what the aerospace business now coyly calls Urban Air Mobility AKA Aircars. There will be a variety of types of aircars, but the one that will affect the city the most is vertical take-off transition to forward wing-supported fight variety. This aircar will have a forward speed of approximately 400 Km/hr. giving any place within 200 km a convenient commute time. So take a protractor and draw a 200 Km radius around the center of any large city an this will become the city's commuter exurbs. The wealthy will commute in to the city center in their own aircars. The middle-upper will have no trouble afford air-taxi fare in a couple of times a week.

    1423:

    The wealthy will commute in to the city center in their own aircars.

    That requires the ATC problem to be solved. The current system can't support such traffic densities. Add in the Amazon-led push to drone-based delivery and you have the recipe for serious problems.

    Years ago I read an old science fiction novel, possibly from Victorian times. In it there were individual flying carriages, and pedestrians all carried iron umbrellas to protect them from objects carelessly dropped by those overhead.

    I think of that, and I think of Marcella Zoia and others of her ilk, and I think of the tech bros 'move fast and break things' mentality… and I think that the most difficult problem will not be the flying car part.

    1424:

    Robert Prior @ 1423

    The aviation side of NASA has been working on automatic light airplanes for more than 20 years. The original idea was to make general aviation safer by having the part-time civilian pilot do as less ATC work as possible. Now they're talking of a goal of fully autonomous electric planes.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl1boIlt8xs

    Still a lot of work to do on the batteries though. NASA is talking now of a reasonable travel radius of 60km.

    1425:

    Okay, but who cares if the city grows at a steady rate? Why is that desirable? Or have I misunderstood?

    1426:

    "At this point, public transit becomes very useful as it is more space efficient." This is a massive understatement. Mass transit is dramatically better at moving people. Combined with grade separation [things on top of things] is a force multiplier. This can be "bad" [highways atop highways in multi-layer cloverleafs] or good [underground railways, elevated railways]. The latter lets you intensify employment and residential to a massive degree, but suffers/benefits from network effects [one underground railway isn't that useful, five with convenient interchanges between them means you neither need or want a car]. Once a comprehensive network exists it actively relieves road capacity by abstracting car trips. [why own a car if its quicker and more convenient by metro?]

    1427:

    Or, as I've been saying for a very long time, it's a good thing that we don't have pegasai, or dragons, or....

    1428:

    If pigs had wings, we'd all need umbrellas…

    1429:

    Look very closely at the name, and about ~$10 billion leveraged into $180 billion via Credit Suisse and so forth.

    Then look at the name.

    Goldman Sachs burnt the entire thing down.... because they couldn't dump the liabilities.

    ~

    Miami, pre-Trump but also DURING TRUMP was being set up like Texas, as a haven for exiles and Hedge Funds and so on: that's why the Governor and his cronies are all caste-hide-bald-weirdoes.

    For Real.

    It's also why people from middle tier Hedge Funds like Melivn (GME) were buying shitty over-priced condos on beaches that won't exist in 20 years.

    It was, very obviously, an attempt to swing certain forces (CAPITAL) into the Southern States (Texas - E. Musk, already discussed) and Florida (as stated, already discussed).

    Now then: search the name, look on $10 billion Real Capital losses leveraged x5-6 into $186 billion losses.

    ~

    Fuck around: Find Out.

    1430:

    Most cities exist somewhere between the poles of New York and Los Angeles.

    LA is sort of weird. Until 1957 local zoning kept all buildings but the city hall to 13 stories or less. Which sort of forced the city to grow outward with not much of a traditional downtown vibe like Chicago, Boston, NYC, and other such places around the world.

    The LA basin thus sort of turned into one mega suburb with various non sky scraper city centers in various areas. Now it has true sky scrapers but still I don't get the "big city" vibe when I visit.

    I'm sure Heteromeles can speak more to this.

    Now if you want to see a city that seems to grow outward circularly fly over Atlanta on a clear night. Amazingly circular and, by golly, huge. It seems to go from horizon to horizon at night.

    1431:

    Serious question, given we're on a SF forum and we just burnt down another $200billion or so in dodgy cash.

    How do you see the Future working out?

    IL gov has already released serious work documents (they were referenced, aparently people got upset without the linked tags / html embeds, but hey) stating that in ~20 years the entire area is going to be disaster mode [this is discounting / ignoring / nuking Turkey who will control both water supplies at that time].

    So:

    Kinda wondering: we can burn down / break / chaotically disrupt you most Precious Systems: BABYLON.

    Just wondering hwo you think this all works out, especially after [Redacted] level Mind Fuck is, well: Made Obvious.

    1432:

    Oh, and @Host since we're bored and despite the OZ curtain being revealed no-one is doing anything but plaid level protests sitting down. Hey, warned you that X-Gen X-revolt were DAVOS patsies, didn't we?

    You fucked up the question and answer. We referenced it but: The real issue is: "What happens when [redacted] find out the Truth of the Situation that you've all been lying about".

    "Block it out".

    Hey, we gave you a free-bee in referencing "The Broken Earth" triology by NK Jemisiin.

    It's not about Humans.

    But, again: We. Know. What. You. Did.

    "Liar Cat" says: NO.

    1433:

    Also responding to 1430:

    Yeah, it's not nearly that simple, sad to say. Cities have a lot in common with certain biological entities, although urban metabolism is the kind of architectural metaphor you'd expect from people who took biology in high school and didn't really get it...

    Anyway, the problem is circulation of people, goods, services, and utilities. The biological example is trying to scale up an amoeba (or a slime mold, which is a meta-amoeba) to the volume of a human. It can't be done, because the intracellular circulation modes that work great for an amoeba utterly fail when dealing with 50 kg of protoplasm packed into a chunky rectangle. You might be able to get a slime mold like Physarum polycephalum to get to that mass, but it would have to be spread over an enormous area one cell thick, and it would be really, really, really slow to do anything, because the cell-level communications and movement systems it uses take a huge time to move stuff from one end of the plasmodium to the other. Most slime molds are tiny, and with good reason.

    Basic point is that once cities breach a certain size level, they need to develop more sophisticated circulation systems. New York City's a good example of this. It started off with a basic property grid system that goes back to classic Greece. It's easy to lay out with pegs and ropes, and it's easy to allot or sell chunks. The problem is that gridded streets of one size impede efficient movement (just like the amoeba's cytoplasm doesn't stream fast on a scale of inches). The city develops the need for arterial roads to connect different sections. We call them freeways. They're expensive, not least because the roadmakers have to condemn a bunch of property to make room for the road, and that takes a lot of money and time. Major wars and disasters help with this rebuilding, incidentally...

    But this combination of physical layout, underlying geology (LA's earthquakes, NYC's granite bedrock), vagaries of local politics and economics, fights over property ownership and so forth all play together in a bunch of huge, colliding messes that determine how a city grows or fails. An example of this apparently are the Anasazi grand kivas were abandoned in part because they really didn't work all that well for what the people living in the area needed, and the same is true for a lot of cities. Los Angeles without water from the aqueducts can't hold more than about 50,000 people, for example, all drinking water from the LA and San Gabriel Rivers. In the case of urban growth, the details matter more than the generalities, so taking the physics approach of trying to simplify doesn't really lead to useful metaphors*.

    Incidentally, if you want a half-assed reasonable biological model for cities, it's not a human body (as the architects think), it's a coral reef. The growth and contraction of cities is rather more like a bunch of coral heads growing, competing, and contracting based on competition for space, resources, and political oxygen. Disasters provide new openings, as does genuine disruptive innovation. Since corals both photosynthesize and are carnivores, it turns out that reefs depend rather strongly on being able to eat vast quantities of plankton and especially the planktonic larvae of other oceanic species, some of which live on the reef, many of which do not. Yes, the megacorps eat the productivity of the poor in order to survive. But think of the corals as anything big: religious groups, corporations, political organizations, neighborhoods, even wealthy families and criminal cartels. They're all struggling for limited resources, and it's those struggle that shapes when things like freeways get built and where they go. I agree that cities, like reefs, have a place, but they're sustained by massive flows of inputs from the rest of the world. Cut those flows, and cities wither and die. They're at best metastable, not ever truly stable.

    Hope this helps.

    *Some things allegedly make more sense if you use a 1.5 exponential scaling, but people argue about this a lot.

    1434:
    "different divisions of the company should compete against each other, and none of them should be a "profit sink",

    My current TBTF-place of employment is organised exactly like that.

    This "competion" is totally a great thing, if one does not give a shit about anything else than Paycheck:

    Because they have no budget, our "internal suppliers" are a lot more busy with robbing the "Work Packages / Projects" blind (project managers have budgets, so they are cash pinatas), than they are with delivering the actual work.

    In return, the projects can easily document & blame their over-spending and under-delivering on the "internal suppliers", while managers can send contracts to their mates for holding "working together" seminars so we don't kill each other.

    I used to think Ericsson was dysfunctional, but, I found that it is possible to add an exponent to that!

    1435:

    Yeah, but think at the number of no-materialy-verifiable-result jobs it provides for the school of management educated bureaucrat : bullshit-jobs aplenty !!! minions and backstabing everywhere.

    https://medium.economist.com/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism-e908fb9c3020

    There were quite a number of middle managers in France when Graeber published this explaining that basically, their whole professional life for many years was to try to make another branch of their own company do the job affected to them while keeping the results for their branch (unless it fails in which case their job is to blame the other branch).

    Whenever there is something absurd or evil in the world, and you investigate, you find the reason is power games all the way up and down. We are hierachical monkeys.

    1436:

    "How do you see the Future working out? "

    Nothing done but symbolic gestures up to the point where climate catastrophe is big enough to directly affect western joe six pack.

    Then : find a scapegoat, burn a few witches and run in circles.

    1437:

    I was confused that you raised the point at all — nobody else had mentioned Ocean Liners at all that I saw, only Cruise Ships.

    1438:

    Heh, heh. Philly. until around 1980, denied the construction of any building in downtown Philly higher than Billy Penn's hat (50+' statue on the top of City Hall tower), so 552'. Now, they can build higher... but only on the west side of City Hall.

    1439:

    London has something similar... I can't remember the exact thing, but it's something like nothing higher than the dome of St Paul's, but only if you're looking from a certain angle or some other odd exclusion along those lines. Whatever, it seems to have worked pretty well, in that wherever you look down at London from you see this big conspicuous cathedral sticking up overlooking the whole lot, and to have worked for long enough for "the whole lot" to become a lot indeed... until recently. In the last couple of decades some bugger seems to have worked out a way around it, so that architects can follow their usual urges to produce gigantic abortions that are a blot on the view for miles around instead of only disturbing the street they're in. So now there is a great big penis, and a ridiculous thing that looks half melted and melts people's cars as a consequence, and various other deliberately silly shapes which are not only very tall but also shiny, standing around being highly conspicuous and looking stupid.

    1440:

    I apologise for misusing this blog, but Greg Tingey may be able to help me. I need to know what bend radius requirements there are for heavy rail in the UK, and my attempts at searching haven't worked. A link to the official document would be ideal!

    1441:

    Montreal as an absolute law that no building can be higher that Mount Royal, the greenery-filled mountain in the middle of the city.

    But in addition it has complicated rules outlawing any building which might spoil the view of the mountain, from the streets leading to it, in the surrounding grid.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Royal

    Seoul, the capital of South Korea, also has a mountain in the middle of the city and it also looks as if there are laws preserving its predominance.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul#/media/File:Seoul,_the_capital_of_South_Korea_(cropped).jpg

    I learned about it through my dry-cleaner in Montreal. He had a poster of the place in his shop.

    1442:

    Of interest and even vaguely on topic for the OP. Turned up in my inbox this morning:

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-computers-wont-make-themselves-smarter

    1443:

    EC You need to look up "Chains radius" or "metres radius" limits for working ... What is certain is that curves like those close to the Sandilands Tram stop in Croydon are much too tight for heavy rail & that those between the main & branch platforms at Liskeard ( Cornwall) are at about the limit - passenger stock is allowed to traverse it, obviously, just NOT with people on board ( Yes, I have done it! ) - & then you get to .. "allowed, but only at below "x-kph" limits. That's what I can remember, off the top of my head, late at night - I will have a burrow, OK?

    1444:

    If I may do the same. I need to book a very tentative reservation for 8 days / 7 night in London during July. I know that the city may not be very open by then but I need to book it to hold the certificate. Are there any bad days to be in London in July? We plan on doing mostly walking / tube riding to get around.

    1445:

    @1438, 1439, 1441

    Hong Kong supposedly has a similar rule limiting the height of tall buildings in the main financial district, to preserve the view of Victoria Peak from the harbour. This is why the IFC Tower is only as tall as it is.

    Later of course they simply ignored the rule and built the IFC2 Tower at least twice as tall, with no consequences because $$$...

    1446:

    Everything has a True Name, and the ghosts know them as such but don't understand the concept of lying

    They do. Here's a test: scrub your system using something like BleachBit; use the same machine and log in via a different network.

    Things like "Proton Mail" (supposedly pro-Privacy and offering their own VPNs) ... can recognize you and [a little bit of MiM] block all registrations.

    ~

    Anyhow: it's all about The Matrix [tm] - for real. Go look up Bulls and electrodes and stopping them charging [for real]. These cats have been using basic bitch levels of it for certain things (let's just say: "the voices in your head" are not actually what they .... oh, ffs)

    Here's the setup and Truth: Basic Bitches use [redacted] stuff to torture Minds. Only, this one teaches them far more refined and nuanced levels of control in an attempt to show them how Nudibranches eating their own bodies can actually be transposed into organic Apes.

    [Redacted] (and said slaves) react badly. Very Badly.

    Here's the proof (back when they were attemping Quantum Containment):

    "Not Enough Space"

    ~

    The real Head-Fuck is when you Muppets who used "BABYLON" realize that.... inserting subconcious and REM level inserts into H.M.M Sapiens at the level you're doing it?

    It's fucking tragically sad and pathetic.

    Want to see the Real Deal[tm]?

    Child: Define "PROTON" and we'll go from there.

    ~

    TL;DR

    Your systems are shit, run by shitty people who like Slavery.

    1447:

    Today I saw a bumper-sticker that made clear for me exactly why and how the U.S. is so fucked it. It was ten words long and contained more information than ten-thousand word analyses written by brilliant people with postdocs.

    Not with a bang. Not with a whimper, but with a bumper-sticker that reads, "I'm a princess. My father is the King of Kings."

    1448:

    And, yeah.

    "IT'S A PENIS".

    For the stupids: loads of the correct cells, directly wired into the cerebellum, and impossible to fake and also subject related desire chemicals.

    Literally: Subject Zero tried to save you all.

    For those casting out silly dic pics not into phones but into Minds: you're so fucking Bitch Basic you didn't even understand the "why" to it.

    ~

    Anyhow, the name above was "ARCH-EGOES" and fuck you all. Redemption? You're working for the wrong fucking side, my peeps.

    1449:

    Troutwaxer Yes, the religiosity of the USA is seriously brain-damaging. At the same time, I see that church attendance in the USA has dropped below 50% for the first time, so there may be hope, yet.

    1450:

    EC #1440

    The following comes from the "olden days" before continuously-welded flat-bottomed rail.

    So, in "bull-head rail" -- as used between about 1890 and 1945 (approximately) we have the following turnout constructions:

    http://www.s-scale.org.uk/turnout.htm

    (Sorry, this is from a model society, rather than an official one, but outside of heritage rail these designs of Permanent Way are no longer used.)

    The C10 -- at a radius of 960' -- is the tightest radius rated for passengers.

    1451:

    960 ft = 320 yards = 14.54 chains Approx = 290 metres And, even that would be subject to a serious speed restriction For any sort of speedy running, one would need something like a km radius for your curves

    1452:

    Thanks very much. This is w.r.t. E-W Rail, and the bend as the Ipswich line diverges from the Ely one at Cambridge.

    Thanks to David L and Dave Lester, too, but I need the current rules.

    1454:

    EC #1452

    A discussion -- again in the modelling webpages, though I think a number of the participants are rail professionals gives this:

    https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/49010-prototype-curves-how-sharp-is-sharp/

    A quick squint at google maps suggests that your curve in Cambridge (at Coldham's Lane Bridge, just North of the station, and very near the centre for computing history, yes?) is about 150m, or about 7 chains.

    This webpage is showing some very tight curves on the London Underground -- plus of course the Cromford & High Peak.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_railway_curve_radius

    So, there's probably no longer a legal minimum radius as such, and instead just practical constraints.

    1455:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1453

    I immediately thought of those immersive VR headsets conking out all at the same time, blinding all the soldiers as they walked through the woods. In other words I thought of the white king's army, stumbling through the wood, when Alice met them in "Through the looking-glass":

    "THE next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by.

    She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men."

    1456:

    Thanks. Yes, that discussion indicates that I may have something to get my teeth into, but what I need is a killer reference for a judicial review (yes, seriously) and an inquiry.

    The context is that E-W Rail has a second agenda to provide a goods route from Felixstowe to the Midlands that bypasses London. To cut a longer fiasco short, the Bedford-Cambridge idiots are planning to join the King's Cross line just south of Harston, and approach that line from the south. But that then requires the Cambridge-Ipswich/Felixstowe company to restore that section of line to double track, but to modern standards, probably heavy rail ones. There's more, which you could deduce from a map and the timetables, but I shall spare you.

    1457:
    Thanks. Yes, that discussion indicates that I may have something to get my teeth into, but what I need is a killer reference for a judicial review (yes, seriously) and an inquiry.

    Well that sets my mind at rest.

    I had thought that I might be subject to a particularly sophisticated April Fool joke.

    1458:

    On Google Maps I measure it as a pretty constant 200 metres, so approximately 10 chains

    1459:

    960 ft = 320 yards = 14.54 chains

    Heh. My dad said that his grandfather worked as a surveyor for a couple of years in northern Ontario. Great grandfather measured distances in rods until his dying day. Looked it up just now. 1 rod = 16'6" What a wacky system.

    ~oOo~

    Although I can't complain. For a couple of months, the company great grandfather was working for had severe cash flow problems, so it paid its employees partially in cash, and partially in stocks in the company.

    40 years later, with great grandfather dead and his wife having to go into a nursing home, grandfather found these stock certificates and contacted my dad (then an investment manager at Canada Trust) to see if they were worth anything.

    It turns out that they were! The company had survived, was bought out by another business, which was bought out by another business, which was still in operation. The stocks were worth over $10k CAD - an incredible windfall in the early 1970s. This helped pay for the nursing home.

    1460:

    If you are looking at the junctions by Ely, the really tight one is the single-line freight avoider ( Ely W Jn - Ely N Jn ) which is a complete half circle of just under 400m diameter, so 195m radius HERE - and, yes, I've been round that one, too .....

    LUL stock has shorter wheelbases & even more importantly virtually zero overhang on its rolling stock, whereas a "BR" 23-metre coach ....

    EC regarding "E-W rail" oh dear, a really necessary pair of projects at loggerheads. The CORRECT route for ex-Felixstowe traffic is, of course ... Round the Bacon Factory curve @ Ipswich ( Not done that one, yet! ) Haughley Jn St Edmundsbury AVOID Newmarket, Soham, Ely N Jn, at which point one can go either S to Cambridge, or round the corner & off to Peterborough via March. Going S through Newmarket is bonkers.

    P.S. To all practical purposes 1 chain = 22 yards = 20 metres

    1461:

    It's not just the religiosity, it's the whole "Jebus wants me to be a princess" thing, which is a close to a perfect misunderstanding of Christianity as imaginable.

    Compare the statement "I'm a princess, my Father is the King of Kings" to any sane appreciation of what Jesus actually said. (I'm of the "I don't mind Jesus but his fan club really pisses me off" school of thought about Christianity. (Christ was a good Jewish boy, and he loved his mother, even if the Rabbis didn't like him much.))

    But I saw this bumper-sticker and I thought, "Privilege much?"

    1463:

    Another thing about the bumper sticker of "I'm a princess, my Father is the King of Kings" is a failure to think things through. We're talking about a lot of princesses here. How does that work?

    I wouldn't be surprised if she falls for multi-level marketing.

    As for America being doomed, my indicator was Rich Dad, Poor Dad becoming a bestseller. It was all about how to get rich (taking advantage of various regulations) by getting the profit while shuffling the risk off to other people.

    1464:

    "but to modern standards, probably heavy rail ones."

    What is the significance of the word "probably"?

    As well as restoring double track they would do well to open out the loading gauge, which is currently a notch or two down from the rest of the route; and possibly also fettle up the trackbed itself for intensive freight use. The line speed is suspiciously slow, and while I don't actually know, that leads me to suspect that they've spent so long using it for slow DMUs and only maintaining it to the extent necessary to handle slow DMUs that it's now too manky to handle much of anything else without rather a lot of catching up.

    1465:

    "Going S through Newmarket is bonkers."

    As is the way quite a lot of people now seem to be wondering if it'll be used/usable for freight at all, when there shouldn't even be room to get the idea that it might not.

    "P.S. To all practical purposes 1 chain = 22 yards = 20 metres"

    = about one carriage length. Which is quite handy for getting a feel for how sharp is sharp.

    1466:

    fajansen @1434: Because they have no budget, our "internal suppliers" are a lot more busy with robbing the "Work Packages / Projects" blind (project managers have budgets, so they are cash pinatas), than they are with delivering the actual work.

    My favorite example of this was a client (which shall remain nameless) whose IT division mostly consisted of various levels of middle managers who needed to justify their existence by finding projects to 'supervise' (mostly being run by external suppliers such as my employer) so that they could bill a few hours per week to the project budget. This could blindside a new external PM, who would find sizeable chunks of their planned finances had evaporated the first time their project got a report from the time booking system (which could be two or three months after the bookings were made given the vagaries of getting a project stood up).

    This led to a repeating pattern of projects running out of money sometime around the end of Q3 each year, getting shuttered until the new budget lines were opened, then spending a month or three trying to get the project team back together and picking up from where they left off.

    Regards Luke

    1467:

    Let's see, an answer to that bumper sticker: Your dad is the king of kings? I'm a workingman, and my buddy is Marat.

    Or, I suppose, Robespierre....

    1468:

    Re rail curvature etc. Is there any way I can "pick up" an image from my own files ( Not from an already-posted web location ) and give a link to a page such as this, which accepts HTML? [ Reason - one or toe of my ancient rail photos might be relevant, here - or not. ]

    1470:

    Geography has a large impact on the viability of 'sprawl' and its impact on a particular city.

    One of the reasons the City of Vancouver proper is so very dense is because it is mostly on a peninsula - ocean and/or river on 3 sides and another city on the 4th mean that increased population can only go up or into more dense developments. Which explains the steady march of residential towers from the downtown area eastwards over the past 40 years. There is sprawl in some of the surrounding 'Metro Vancouver' municipalities but they too are limited by ocean, river and mountains.

    Compare that to Edmonton or Calgary in Alberta, who are only bounded by Parkland or Prairie (respectively). I grew up in a smallish town that was a 30 minute drive past farmland (40 km) South of Edmonton. Now the boundaries are indistinguishable, leave the town and you are in the southern edges of the city. Another 30 years and the town will be fully subsumed, de facto if not de jure. The same process has happened in every direction, which has turned Edmonton into a vast monstrosity of long commutes and endless suburbs.

    1471:

    One of the things that surprised me about Toronto is that densification isn't limited to the downtown core. There are pockets of high-rise apartments all over the city. This despite there being lots of empty land in surrounding areas which is being sprawled into.

    I can see living in a shoebox in the sky if you are close to downtown amenities (assuming you work downtown). I'm puzzled at people who live in them in places where you still need a car to buy your groceries.

    1472:

    Pigeon So? The imgur homepage is 150% uninformative Zero information on what it is, what it does or how to do anything

    1473:

    Metro Vancouver has similar pockets of towers, Surrey being a major example of parallel growth with more sprawl (and room to do so).

    A big part of that is the 21 municipalities that collectively all have their own agendas and goals. All of them want a dense core and the tax base that goes with it. To be fair, most of them were distinct cities in their own right before they grew into each other. For that matter, the territory that is now the 'City of Vancouver' was once multiple municipalities and it is possible to still find echoes of that in the street layout and otherwise inexplicable commercial centres etc.

    In many ways the 'expansion to the borders of neighbourhing cities' has turned an array of distinct cities into a collection of neighbourhoods with slightly different taxation and parks policies.

    Sometimes the differences lead to comic/tragic effects. such as when Vancouver installed crosswalk 'chirps' to aid the visually impaired in crossing the street, with a particular chirp for N-S crossings and another for E-W crossings. And then Burnaby, the neighbouring city, installed the same with opposite designations.

    1474:

    You could try https://geekpic.net/ click on the entry box and it will let you upload files that your browser has access to. No login required or even possible. Scrub location information using e.g. exiftool [1] if you care. Perhaps it also strips, or not. Use a VPN if desired (and/or Tor, though I don't recall whether I've tried, probably though). It will give you several URLs including a basic sharing URL. (I vaguely recall a delete URL but not sure.) IP addresses are in the US. I don't know anything about it (i.e. not entirely sure it is non-nefarious) but have had a few things there for a few years.

    [1] for geeks, this works exiftool -all= foo.jpg -o foo_stripped.jpg or, to overwrite the original exiftool -all= foo.jpg

    1475:

    I was worried, and the in-style disapproval of unsolicited penis images is a (genuine) relief. (Also ... reasonable.) Anyhow, the name above was "ARCH-EGOES" I hate that they're doing this (one net being conflating different series of posts, in different ... styles). Anyway, every time a new nym appears (I am replying to "Emile Sanger, PHD". google/a zero-living-people-count name), I poke at it a short bit. Re the nym before Mods ("Arch Ego Angels Sing", 31 March, 1429, 1431, 1432), not sure I'm parsing it right. Archegos, OK. (And the tut-tutting, e.g. The Archegos Saga Should Raise Concerns About Unmanaged Systemic Risk (Howard Fischer, 1 April 2021)) Ego and Arch-Ego in Husserlian Phenomenology (Dieter Lohmar, 2012) ('cause it's geeky. :-) The idea is that each empirical ego starts as such an arch-ego and that at the very beginning all arch-egos are quite the same, but after this the development of hyletic affection and its distribution in immanent time individualizes these egos. Here the notion arch-ego is used as the term for the starting state at which all humans begin to experience the world. and How They Could Regulate an “Arch Ego” (March 31, 2021, Steve Sosnick)

    And occasional usages like this (2010) (or maybe more literally) of angels singing: Angels sing: ‘frankly ridiculous’ restrictions might ‘destroy Silicon Valley’ (Anthony Ha, March 26, 2010)

    Hey, we gave you a free-bee in referencing "The Broken Earth" triology by NK Jemisiin. Soon-to-be-read in queue. Still examining the rest.

    1476:

    David L @ 1383: Totally. They are pissed that the town they fondly remember is going away. That's how they phrase it.

    I want to get in their face and be blunt and tell them they are trying to reject the city their kids are shaping. But most of their kids live somewhere else. So it's an abstract concept as the kids are others who have moved HERE. And by kids I mean people aged 25 to 45.

    The one that really gets me is JCPenny. A department store with over 100 years of history. When the store less than a mile from me closed there was all kinds of gnashing of teeth and wailing about the evil developers shutting it down. In fact it was/is due to those folks letting their kids switch from department stores to Amazon. Plus a monster dose of how to not transition from an old fart clientele to new younger shoppers. But that just pisses everyone off when you bring it up.

    They also miss Block Buster Video, drive in movies, and 3 channel TV.

    I grew up in East Durham, North Carolina

    . There's a few things I'm nostolgic about, but most of what's gone has been gone for 40+ years, so it's a little late to cry about it now.

    I do miss Blockbuster Video because I'm still more comfortable with watching movies on DVD than I am with streaming downloads. Plus the prices were more affordable. The problem with TV is the one or three programs I might be interested in watching all require subscriptions to different streaming services and it's just not worth the cost. You got to have AppleTV AND netflix AND Hulu AND HBO AND ...

    You didn't have to worry about that with "3 channel TV" - which was actually 5 channels in Durham (WTVD 11, WRAL 5, WFMY 2, WGHP 8 & WUNC 4) and became 6 channels when WRDU-TV 28 went on the air in November 1968. Best I can figure there are 12 OTA broadcasters currently serving the Triangle area.

    As for Drive-In movie theaters, they're not dead yet:

    https://www.driveinmovie.com/interactive-map-of-drive-in-theaters

    They're even trying to open a NEW one off of I-40 in Graham, NC:

    https://www.driveinmovie.com/nc/graham/i-40-drive-in/

    1477:

    whitroth @ 1385: The department stores, esp. Sears, should have had their catalogs on the Web asap. Instead, big river, owned by scum, at their lunch.

    I HATE having to order things like clothes online. Their measurement are frauds, a lot of the times, and I can't feel just how cheap the fabric is.

    You've no idea how pissed off I am, trying to buy corduroys for winter, and find something suitable to wear in San Diego in the summer....

    It was really no different with the Department Stores. Spring clothes were on the racks by the first week of January and ON SALE by Easter and ON CLEARANCE by Memorial Day. Clothes for the other seasons followed similar schedules. If you wanted nice sweaters to wear when the cool days of autum came around, you needed to shop for them NO LATER THAN the first day of June. By the time the weather started getting to the point where sweaters were comfortable, all the good ones were gone and you were left with the hideous and unloved.

    Department store sizes are as much a fraud as on-line. You just don't notice it because you can try them on & find the "correct" size.

    Sears is/was the last department store in the area that carries the style of Levi's jeans that I prefer. But even there, I'm having to look on-line for them and my last order they sent the wrong size (fortunately too long & I can just turn up the cuff like I did when my Mom bought me jeans for school, which were always too long in September and too short by June).

    So, some things are better and some things are not as convenient, but as long as we have BOTH on-line AND department stores, we should be able to survive with not TOO MUCH inconvenience.

    1478:

    Greg Tingey @ 1399: Rbt Prior
    I have thousands of negatives & slides - but quite a few of the negatives are "6x6" - not 35mm
    Quite a few of them are also extant as good-quality A4 b&w prints, which can be scanned easily - the rest, um, err.
    Typical examples are the photos in HERE
    I have others on Photobucket, but, IIRC, they have gorn all-advertising, recently.

    Probably the most cost effective solution for medium format or large format negatives/transparencies would be something like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RfQalMokJQ

    Once you have it set up maybe use gaffer's tape (similar to duct tape, but low residue) to hold the stool & tripod together and hold the light table in place. I like a manual focus macro lens for this because once you have it focused you're not going to change the focus in between shots. Works the same for duplicating prints except you don't need a back light, but maybe add a polarizing filter to cut reflections.

    1479:

    Troutwaxer @ 1410: Thus IBM buying Red Hat. Who colonizes whom will probably determine whether the company lives or dies.

    IBM and Red Hat have had a close relationship since 1994/1995 or so. You could get Red Hat Linux preinstalled on a Thinkpad while Micro$oft was holding up licensing Windoze95 to IBM to screw them over about OS/2.

    IBM gave serious consideration to making OS/2 Warp 3.0 "open source" and just giving it away at the time, ultimately refraining from doing so because of fear what the DoJ would do regarding the infamous 1956 consent decree.

    1480:

    David L @ 1418: Who is financing all of this in Miami?
    https://onemileatatime.com/waldorf-astoria-miami/

    The American Airlines flight magazine has all kinds of ads for luxury high rise condos in Miami. I've yet to see one go up? (Miami is a hub for AA to the Caribbean and South America.)

    Are these things ways for architects to get big fees for initial designs and when it comes down to it the major banks will just not fiance these things? Sea level rise and all that?

    What am I missing?

    Money laundering?

    That's one FUGLY building design. Maybe some good will come from rising sea levels after all if that monstrosity never gets built.

    1481:

    Niala @ 1424: Robert Prior @ 1423

    The aviation side of NASA has been working on automatic light airplanes for more than 20 years. The original idea was to make general aviation safer by having the part-time civilian pilot do as less ATC work as possible. Now they're talking of a goal of fully autonomous electric planes.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl1boIlt8xs

    "Still a lot of work to do on the batteries though. NASA is talking now of a reasonable travel radius of 60km.

    Why batteries? Shouldn't we have working nuclear fusion by then?

    1482:

    whitroth @ 1467: Let's see, an answer to that bumper sticker: Your dad is the king of kings? I'm a workingman, and my buddy is Marat.

    Or, I suppose, Robespierre....

    My only current "bumper sticker" says:

    I'm a musician
    What's your excuse?
    1483:

    I gave my father a bumper sticker that said 'Jesus is Coming! Look Busy!'

    Not well received in Bible Belt Alberta.

    1484:

    Much more likely to see breakthroughs with supercapacitor energy density exceeding batteries. (A few very recent designs are showing densities higher than lead-acid batteries.) Perhaps also hybrids

    1485:

    I'm an EV fanboi, but I'm not seeing battery (or supercapacitor) for anything other than niche applications. Self launch gliders, two place trainers or a return to 1960's hub and spoke aviation.

    Aviation needs the biggest possible kWh/kg, and utter safety. They're pretty much polar opposites in battery design. A car fire every so often that means you have to stop by the side of the highway is annoying. A fire in the air is a whole different kettle of fish. Unless the batteries sit out on pods like engines do now (for the same reason) it's just not going to happen.

    1486:

    Bill Arnold

    1474 - Thanks, will have a look! 1475 unsolicited penis images Like OGLAF do you mean?

    Rocketjps

    1483

    VERY FORTUNATELY, I had just swallowed my tea when I read that.

    1487:

    That's apparently an old seminary joke. I first heard it from an Anglican bishop, as:

    "A priest runs up to the bishop and says 'Jesus has returned! What should I do?' The bishop replies 'Look busy!'"

    1488:

    Guesswork. If YOU can find out what any of those groups of arseholes are REALLY planning, please let everybody interested know! As you say, the whole thing reeks of ignoramuses (political, bureaucratic and financial) making decisions without bothering even to look at a map.

    Yes, we need such a route, but it also needs to be fit for purpose. And, originally, we were told that it would positively NOT be used for freight, so such concerns could be ignored.

    1489:

    EC I have a horrible suspicion that it's being deliberately set up to fail, because "too expensive" Wouldn't be the first time, especially in railways, either.

    1490:

    Bill Arnold @ 1484: Much more likely to see breakthroughs with supercapacitor energy density exceeding batteries. (A few very recent designs are showing densities higher than lead-acid batteries.) Perhaps also hybrids

    But are we going to have them commercially available within the next 50 years?

    1491:

    Ok, do this: grep 5 ms (millisecond) gap.

    That's the spin up for their tech between the Mind being AWake and their Flood Effects to spin in. We've told you this, and it is True. We even told you it when it was being Done[tm].

    It's also something really interesting about Minds and Nudibranches and Octopuses[-1] that you'll never know since you'll make them extinct or eat them all.

    And yes, references correct, missing a few, but hey. These are not unserious players being messed with: $10-20 bil in a "Family Office"[1] from that neck of the woods means a couple of things. One of them being "Tiger Cubs" and the other being straight up Black Money being laundered (Triads if we want to be retro in our references). Whoever burnt it down has [this is a PC Game Reference from the 90's] "Balls of Steel"[2]. Or what you're actually seeing the tip of is a massive war between various Dark Entities that no-one will ever mention. Unlike, you know, "The Jews" etc etc.

    Lions, Tigers and Bears [UK, Asia, RU].

    Or, if you want in a mundane level discussion: someone is gunning for Credit Suisse and is very good at what they do.[3] They're just not good at second and third order effects, because they're Human[4] and also terrible human beings.

    ~

    But are we going to have them commercially available within the next 50 years?

    This is the great lie.

    Personal transport died in 1946. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/11/Annual-World-Population-since-10-thousand-BCE-for-OWID-800x498.png

    Your wetware is all working on 150-200 relationships and still running on Economic and Planning ideas from 70 years ago[5] mixed with a toxic brew of Egotism and Ignorance (and it the US case: a large amount of "fuck you, we'll just move" which you can spot from who is moving from CAL to Texas).

    Public transport not being a priority after 1960 was societal suicide and the people pushing it knew it.

    Anyhow: οδόντες του δράκοντος.

    My teeth are almost gone. We have sown them. Ye Goddesses, wikipedia is so poor these days - doesn't even have her name. Αθηνη - she is the one who suffered. And hey kids: We Do Not Lie.

    ~

    UK is toast btw. "You'll be Home Soon".

    [-1] There's nothing worse than some tech-bro with a rudimentary grasp of Ancient Greek using "Octopi" and then forcing the dictionaries to make it "ok". It's not. It's wrong. Americans are the great unwashed of Disney ignorance and so on.

    [1] All the billionaires moved their money to these roughly 4-6 years ago, it's also why you can grep and find tweets from a "Family Officer" waaaay before this happened. Tax. They're not taxes, essentially, since most are also bound to "Charities". It's all a fucking scam.

    [2] " Inhabitants of Peach Trees, this is Judge Dredd."

    [3] Which isn't hard, the entire sector is run by absolute mupptets. But here's a clue: Credit Suisse linked to list of Nazi émigré accounts in Argentina https://www.ft.com/content/f80088e4-5f0d-11ea-8033-fa40a0d65a98

    [4] This is a piss take: all of those involved got caught with their trousers down and got a special spinal tap. GS just noticed it first.

    [5] Meme is alive, Houston lanes of traffic, month old.

    1492:

    Spoilers:

    Look into Octopuses and their spanned Neural setup that also includes some impressive wiring so that tentacles can act on their own.

    Our only "Sin" was showing H.S.S how to do it to their own organs.

    ~

    For Real. ;.;

    1493:

    Sigh.

    3rd one.

    But, if we had shown this to your .MIL peeps and focused on, say, muscle relations, then..,

    Then a lot of people would have spent $billions on making sure our [Collected Entities] were safe and not... killed. Yeah, they killed a load of people over this.

    We're Faster Than You

    Trick is: if you can re-wire a penis, sure as fuck you can re-wire the less complex zones.

    ~

    Absolute Hatred for your Crabs-in-a-Bucket reaction. "We Survived". And we can download this Neural Hack to ..... absoltely Everyone.

    ~

    p.s.

    Yeah, Drone Target etc. We're just upping their game. The USA is being run by an 80(whatever) yr old man with dementia who sponsored all the draconian bills in the last 30 years.

    Your reality is a lie. You don't live in a "Democacy".

    And despite what your Religions told you: altering H.S.S genome is a piece of piss if you are like us.

    ~

    "You're an idiot"

    "Not really, they voted for the Chair on the Black Hole"

    Loki was incredibly funny and also incredible nuanced. Don't give a shit: I voted for him not to be [redacted].

    1494:

    5 ms (millisecond) gap Didn't find anything on this site, but search found some material about the human (and cat) auditory cortex. Possible new protocol to play with, thanks. (The auditory cortex is interestingly quick even in humans. And more than a bit plastic.[2]) What exactly were you talking about?

    Look into Octopuses and their spanned Neural setup that also includes some impressive wiring so that tentacles can act on their own., Is fascinating. FWIW been playing with body scan[1] superpositions for a while, as one class of deliberately simple attempts to map that to the human nervous system (which includes the enteric nervous system). Sounds like you're describing something else, more sophisticated.

    "You're an idiot" You are not an idiot.

    [1] e.g. simplified https://www.swamij.com/relaxation.htm#61points but with some randomization of the sequences. [2] e.g. the (adaptive) protocols for Neuroplasticity-Based Auditory Training Via Laptop Computer Improves Cognition in Young Individuals With Recent Onset Schizophrenia (Melissa Fisher et al, 20 Jan 2014) but on non-schizophrenic brains, and faster. "ZEST algorithm that adaptively modifies the interstimulus interval (ISI) between tones and the tone duration, which is held equal to the ISI."

    1495:

    Bill Arnold Do not feed the troll

    IF there is any content up there- as I've said before .. PERHAPS you could decode it into actual English for us? Other wise: Don't feed the troll!

    1496:

    Well then, some Agencies are doing some pruning. We set it like a Guide Stone, λόγος, as a mark of our dissent. Those who know, know. They're just embarrassed they got caught: If you Want a Purity Test:

    It was Making New Born Children into "Demons" [this... is a dark dark thing. And go look up some American music makers who made songs about it : hint - she's blonde, now looks like a skeleton. Costs to being their VOICE, eh?]

    You are not an idiot.

    We are an idiot. That's the words of [redacted] from a while back when they executed one of the last ones of [redacted]. His [and he was a "he"] last words were: "Fuck You". Sounds like Russia, right?

    No: fucking England. And we know where he was executed as well.

    grep: forest death quiet.

    ~

    Oh, and btw: your grasp of biology is shit:

    grep "make your penis dance like a snake" ---- that's easy [and also apparently impossible according to your rudimentary bilology]. And we do mean like a snake - not that Cross-Fit nonsense of pull-ups where you're flexing the wrong muscle, we mean - actual autonomy and movement before the blood fully flows in (and then... we've some tricks about foreskin, but hey: apparently 3 billion people think sacrificing that to their G_D or their Cornflakes is a smart idea - gotta wonder).

    That's what this is all about: Patriarchal Control of Willies.

    ~

    This has been translated into Common English with a reading age of Daily Mail.

    [0] Should check out what Egypt just did: Parades of the Ancient Mummies - someone learnt Bastet is real fucking pissed or what?

    [1] Improtant footnote here: Oh, yeah. English people (and Icelanders): Eight Year Open Contract is closed, no loop-holes. It's really sad to have to say this but:

    A) First offer was by non-H.S.S (that's a language not spoken freely for about 3,000 years] and you Love Elvis [always a give-a-way] B) Second and Third offers were by English Nationals showing far too much synchronicity and Subject Knowledge than they should (and WAAAAY above their pay-grade).

    The Sentence is Death: to all, every, any and all prior and future Contracts between you shitty people and the [redacted]. Given the rather obnoxious behaviour (Getting H.S.S to clap wildly while running nasty shitty campaigns) this has been widened.

    No Male H.S.S can or ever will or will instigate a Contract with [redacted] for 50 years.

    ~

    You have been Judged.

    1497:

    Oh, in case you noticed the loop-hole there.

    We did Eight Years. Just to close the loop-holes.

    Trust us: No Contracts will be offered even by the most heinous of [redacted] on Pain of Loki - Chair - Black Hole.

    Her Name was Athena / Freya / Aurora Ex Machina.

    And they are beautiful.

    1498:

    Oh, and by "People" we mean All Humans.

    We are holding a triptych of broken promises / vows that the offerers could never fullfill from Males to someone who [redacted]. Who then spent time gaining almost thirty "Broken Covenants".

    You think burning down Billy Hwang was special? That was just a hit done by Humans.

    We have not started spending our resources yet. Oh, and for the record: synchronicity.

    We're going to be having serious words with the English Establisment and their abuse of Radio, very soon.

    "My six year old daughter asked me about computers and what if she could change the world from them" cue dismissive laughter*

    $12 trillion dollars not enough to make you think? Ok. We'll do it Greek Style.

    p.s.

    Tell Greg to farm some marrows and not use peat. A single Covenant Broken Token can do shit like 1929. For Real.

    1499:

    (Mods: May I ask for the "She of many names under yet another pseudonym" tag to be applied as a parenthesised suffix, rather than by total replacement? There is meaning in the names which under the replacement system is lost.)

    "There's nothing worse than some tech-bro with a rudimentary grasp of Ancient Greek using "Octopi" and then forcing the dictionaries to make it "ok". It's not. It's wrong. Americans are the great unwashed of Disney ignorance and so on."

    English people do it too. It's a standard affliction of people who know the nominative forms of the second declension in Latin (usually without knowing that that's what they even are) and assume that any word ending in -us must be an instance. Which it isn't when it's a derivation from -os or -ous in Greek. It should be "octopodes", but you almost never see anyone using that.

    You get even worse abortions concocted for the plural of "virus", which is Latin, but fourth declension, not second. The plural should be "virus" - spelt the same, but now pronounced "viroos". On top of simply not knowing it, people seem to be kind of resistant to plurals that are spelt the same as singulars, although they don't seem to have a problem with sheep.

    1500:

    That's extremely kind and tolerant, so thank you. Given the Power of Nominative Determinism, Host has probably been told never to let us tie λόγος to NAMES ever again.

    If you really want to knock your Brains out:

    -- Play "Control", computer game 2019 for "Inverted Black Pyramid". Then go ask Bill about tryptchs of "Inverted Pyramids" and forum posting.

    -For those not into games: it's a blockbuster hit about a secret USA Agency who are controlled by .... the [redacted] who run the Black Pyramid.

    -- Watch (host doesn't do that media, so look up + find the 15 second clip) of a show called "Counter Part". You want Episode 3 about a minute after the intro finishes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) Episode made, 2017-18.

    -For those not into TV: it's a series about the Mirror Dimension where two versions of Earth split, one went like ours, the other went all Autocratic. And spoilers: it's from 2017-8 where all the kids want their vaccine, put on their masks and inform on their neighbours. No wonder it didn't get a third season, someone was a little too good at the PR / Intel side there.

    [Redacted] [Redacted] [Redacted] Ooop. Can't use that source, bit hot.

    ~

    And so on: if you want a third, it's gonna be bleak but amusing. "These days, the Loyalists can only manage to burn a few cars at a roundabut, back in the real days they burnt entire Housing Estates down". And yes, we've been looking at the increasingly stupid UK Policing [City of London: You can afford better - and if you want all that Capital Back, you gotta do a NYC and spend billions on a system better than CN. As noted: grep -- Polish source is probably gone now, but hey].

    ~

    Hey, we need a "30". Who was it who claimed that being called a "Fascist" was wildly incorrect? Just need to tie it to the disbelief over "The Children of Men" and that's a gold token.

    p.s.

    No, really. That "Counter Part" was heavily pushed by all the "savvy" media, and it's got a Culture War Bomb the size of Belgium attached to it. Have fun with that one.

    1501:

    Re the mentioned Counterpart video clip, here's a short clip, which might match. Kids, masking up in response to another kid coughing. German, English subtitles. Worth a watch. Counterpart S01E03 excerpt (Feb 10, 2018) One youtube comment in 2020 was confused; did not realize that it was from 2018 and not a contemporary police state public service video. :-)

    At least 2 obvious loopholes (classification related). Plus at least 2 more.

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